Tag Archives: microsoft

Opinion

Smart and Gets Things Done

I like Joel. Well, I’ve never actually met him, of course. I mean I like his writing. I’ve read much of his website, I subscribe to his RSS feed so that I can see his new pieces as soon as they’re “published” and I’ve bought his other books even though they’re just rehashes of stuff that’s already on the net. That may seem a little crazy, as though I have more money than sense, but some things are much easier to read on paper than on LCD. And his writing is easy, humorous and engaging, making it worth dipping into occasionally.

So, cutting a long story short, I bought “Smart and Gets Things Done.” So what’s it all about? Well, one suspect is that it’s an advertisement for Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek. But, in fact, it’s a book about attracting, recruiting and keeping super-star programmers. Indeed, chapter one is why you even want to hire top developers when you can hire a decent developer for rather less money and effort.

He covers the whole process, right from where to find your next recruit; how to sifting through the large number of CVs (resumes) that you’ll probably receive; how to interview people; and how to keep them once they do join. It covers a lot of ground in a couple of hundred pages and he almost makes it sound easy.

Joel is very much against the Google and Microsoft approach to interviewing. He (rightly I think) points out that asking brainteaser questions only finds out whether people can do… brainteaser questions and tells you little about whether they are decent software people or whether, as the title of the book suggests, are smart and gets things done. He spends some time discussing the title, and this is something that jells with my experience. For example, you don’t necessarily want PhD’s, as they are often smart but spend a lot of time thinking about theoretical problems rather than doing anything about it — clearly not the kind of person you want when deadlines are looming. In another chapter he notes that you really don’t want to be forming opinions of people before you meet them. Or, put another way, suggesting that PhD’s might not “get things done,” is not a brilliant idea.

In summary there’s plenty of good stuff to see. But, as I mentioned earlier, much of the content has come straight from his website. That was also the case for his previous book, “Joel on Software,” and isn’t necessarily a criticism in and of itself. However, that previous book was intended as a collection of short, separate essays tied together by a common, fairly broad theme — software engineering. In the sense that each chapter was distinct you could reasonably dip into it, reading one section but randomly skipping over another.

This book, on the other hand, is supposed to be on recruitment — a much narrower subject — and the chapters follow a kind of trajectory. Unfortunately the essays on the website generally work as stand-alone pieces, so when you bunch them all together in a single book and read them back-to-back you find that there is quite a lot of repetition. If it was all a thousand pages long and a recap was in order then that might make sense, but “Smart and Gets things Done” is only a couple of hundred pages long.

So overall it’s a nice book. It has a lot of good advice, even if some of the suggestions are not achievable by the typical employee. As is generally the case with Spolsky it is entertainingly written and is engaging, witty even. However, given the length of it and the fact that there is a considerable amount of overlap you may be better served by reading it all on his website.

Opinion

Is MySpace really the future of email?

Am I getting old? Perhaps. I’ve been using email since 1992 when I first went to university so I just find it second nature now. It’s got to the point where I organise my whole life using it and I get quite frustrated when I actually have to call someone to get something done that could more easily be done asynchronously ((That’s to say, when I send an email you don’t have to be there to answer it. Unlike a phone call or an instant message where you do.)). But that’s not how many people think according to ZDNet.co.uk.

The gist is that many people are now using websites such as Facebook and MySpace instead of email. In fact, they claim, teenagers only use email to talk to adults.

Is this the way of the future? Is it only old-age and inertia that’s stopping people like me from using MySpace exclusively?

I don’t think so. It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I do use instant messenger and I use my mobile phone more for text messaging than for voice calls, but there are a few issues that we need to work through first.

The first and most obvious is that of convenience. With email I can use one program (or check one website) to see all the messages that I am interested in reading. With FaceBook I have to check there, and then again on MySpace for my messages there and, finally, still my email just in case someone has mailed me directly or I have a notification from sites that don’t have internal messaging. That’s just a pain! History tells us that these closed systems do not last. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples.

Let’s look at email and how it evolved. In fact, it seems to have evolved in the same direction twice, first as technology allowed and second due to commercial “lock-in.” It started out as a way to communicate between users on a single machine. This doesn’t make much sense if you’re thinking about personal computers, but in the sixties and early seventies the concept of having your own machine just wasn’t a reality. As machines started to be linked together, so did the email systems. This wasn’t always easy as the different operating systems often had their own “standards” and some, such as Unix, often came with several incompatible implementations. After local networks were installed, people starting thinking globally and started plugging their networks together, creating the Internet ((Okay, so I edited out a few details. I’m trying to show the general trajectory rather than every last twist in the story.)).

Many of the PC vendors that had not been involved in earlier eras and the bulletin boards that catered for them ((I’m including systems like AOL and Compuserve here.)) went straight for the second tier, a proprietary system barely capable of talking to the outside world.? There were a variety of reasons for this. It was by design — not wanting people to exchange messages without buying their software — or laziness but either way the result was the same. To a certain extent that’s where we are still in the Microsoft world. Exchange will talk to the rest of the SMTP world, albeit reluctantly and, even then, it’s not one hundred percent standards compliant ((Ever wondered what the winmail.dat files are when you open a message in an application other than Outlook?)). Meanwhile, the rest of the world, even companies famous for shunning technologies Not Invented There, are using industry standards to communicate.

And if we then step forward to the last decade and the progress of instant messenger software we see the same thing in the process of happening. We start with completely separate islands, where I can talk to other people on, say, AIM but friends on MSN are off limits. I either have to push my “buddies” onto the same network or use applications like Adium so I can connect to multiple networks from the same software. And then a couple of years ago we saw the first signs of interoperability, with a pact between Yahoo and Microsoft. And, increasingly, we see the uptake of open standards like Jabber which is used as the foundation for Google Talk.

So, in the case of both IM and email we started with competing, incompatible technologies that eventually merged into one unified, interoperable version. Is that going to happen with FaceBook and MySpace? I’m not so sure. After all, we already have “messaging” applications outside these social networking sites. I see both as more of a layer on top of traditional email services, acting as an intermediary when communication is first initiated.

I’m not anti-social networking (I am a member on LinkedIn) but I am keen than we don’t take a step back into the “dark days” of the Internet when we had AOL and MSN competing to keep their users separate from the outside world. Walled gardens are not what the Internet is all about; this kind of system only benefits the companies that own the various properties. Let MySpace do the social bit, introducing people, but let the experts, the proven IM and email systems, keep the communication going.

Photography

Double Standards?

Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications ((It amuses me that with all the money that Microsoft has, the best their marketing people can come up with to describe this is “squirting.” At best that sounds comic, at worst somewhat rude. What were they thinking?)). But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.

If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days ((Even this, it turns out, is a simplification. At least one of the major record labels has forbidden wireless sharing of their music entirely. Unfortunately they don’t tell you about this until you actually try to transfer the file yourself. Is this legal? Is it not a case of adding restrictions after the sale?)) but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.

What about movies? Sorry, bad news here. You can’t transmit them at all.

Zune can also store pictures. What limits have Microsoft provided to protect photographers?

The answer, it turns out, is none. You can transfer as many pictures as you like to as many people as you like. Once transferred, they are visible indefinitely and can even be copied to further Zunes.

Er, hello? Double standards?

I imagine that the main argument is that most people don’t have a bunch of professional photographs on their computers but do have commercial music. How far can we get with that line of thinking? Well, in fact, there is a certain logic in that. Most people don’t write their own music, even with relatively simple to use applications like Garageband, but they do have large collections of holiday snaps.

However the argument starts to fall down when you start to think about movies. Do people have only commercial movies and nothing personal? I don’t think so. While it is possible to rip a DVD and put it on your iPod it’s legally dubious, non-trivial (because of the CSS scrambling scheme) and time consuming (transcoding to MP4 takes a long time even on quick machines). Even if you use P2P software to download an illegal copy it’s likely to be is DivX format which cannot be used directly by the Zune, so that time-consuming transcoding step returns. My guess is that people are, in fact, much more likely to have home movies. Of course, if you made the movie you’ll also own the copyright for and are quite likely to want to send to friends and family. Certainly my wedding video has done the rounds and my attempts on a Segway has been distributed fairly widely.

That being the case, then why are the limitations on distributing movies even more severe than that for music? There’s a definite mismatch between desired usage patterns and the programmed restrictions.

So where have the restrictions come from and why do they vary so widely? Maybe a clue can be found in the fact that Microsoft are paying the RIAA $1 for each Zune sold.

Why would Microsoft do that? Clearly, in the US, the RIAA, for music, and the MPAA, for movies, hold a lot of sway. But for photographers? I’m not aware of a single organisation that has the same level of influence.

I’m sure Reuters and PA protect the copyright of their own images, but who protects everyone else? Perhaps this is because while movies and music require large teams, photography is more often a solo activity but certainly it has no relation to the value of the medium.

Ultimately I think this is another strike against the draconian DRM measures that are currently being applied to movies and music. I have nothing against digital rights management in the abstract, but implementations that restrict or remove rights that you already have by law just make the music labels and movie distributors look like money-grabbing opportunists.

Opinion

The end of WMA?

The sky is falling! EMI have announced that they are to allow distribution of their content without DRM. From next month, you’ll be able to buy albums from iTunes without the digital rights management chains of Apple’s FairPlay and in higher quality (twice the bit-rate). This is clearly good news, and EMIs move can’t help but encourage the other major labels to follow.

But one thing missing from the articles is that this also pretty much spells the end of Microsoft’s WMA.

Right now, when you buy a song from iTunes you get a file with AAC encoding. AAC is the follow-up to MP3 and is both higher quality and, unlike the latter, requires no payment for distributing a player. [ Update 2007/04/10: Okay, I got this bit wrong. There are royalties for selling a player or encoder. However, distributing content is free. For a low margin service such as the iTunes Store this makes perfect sense. Plus, the fact that AAC is not controlled by a single organisation makes it more desirable overall. ] That is, it’s an industry standard. What is non-standard about iTunes is the FairPlay DRM system.

WMA is Microsoft’s attempt to tie music playing to Windows. Both the file format and the DRM scheme they use is proprietary, tying you to Windows Media Player (only now getting usable with version 11) and one of the few PlaysForSure devices you see, dusty and unloved, next to the latest iPods. Even Microsoft’s Zune uses a different scheme.

Previously there was an advantage, if more potential than actual, in that the WMA gave you a greater choice of on-line music store and music player. But the new EMI songs will be in AAC format that it playable on most recent portable music players, including the Zune.

Why would Creative licence WMA in the future given that AAC is free?

And those stores that compete with iTunes? They can also use AAC, which doesn’t require payment to Microsoft for its use and can be used on an iPod (which WMA can’t).

Why would Yahoo licence WMA in the future given that AAC is free?

Microsoft have spent the last five years chasing the iPod and Apple’s “closed” system. With Zune they finally have achieved parity. Only now they find that the landscape has changed again. How will they respond?

Links

Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249

I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.

However this article caught my eye:

AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249

What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.

Links

Apple Envy

Most people that know me are aware that I tend to favour the Macintosh over Microsoft Windows. One of the problems with maintaining such a position is that people are always saying how much more expensive Apple products are. While I realise that a single example is not likely to change that, maybe people should look at this Windows XP Media Center PC before throwing stones. A snip at ?5,980,000.00.

If anyone wants to buy me a Mac Pro and a 30″ monitor with their change I won’t argue.