
Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve Ballmer To Melt Down - peter123
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/google-loses-engineering-director-who-once-caused-steve-ballmer-to-melt-down/
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brown9-2
This article is filled with some ... interesting statements:

 _Lucovsky has been an integral part of Google’s APIs, including the all-
important Search APIs._

Would anyone characterize them as all-important? Also, this:

 _Lucovsky was also the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm project to port
older Microsoft products into .NET. It’s a project that’s be named as a
precursor to the current open web movement._

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aarongough
It's possible that they were referring to the Search APIs for internal use,
which I would assume could be called "all-important".

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adharmad
So that's the source of all those Ballmer+chair jokes on slashdot.

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philwelch
_"Just tell me it’s not Google," Ballmer reportedly said according to court
documents (for a case surrounding another Google ex-Microsoft hire). When
Lucovsky said it was Google, Ballmer allegedly picked up a chair and threw it
across the room._

 _What he apparently said next, will live on forever in Internet history._

 _"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that
guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill
Google."_

Anyone else remember the old TNT made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley?
This kind of melodrama always reminds me of it.

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andeka
That movie is great. I own it and show it to friends who do not know the epic
saga.

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edw519
“I wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API,..."

A quote like this gives hope to all of us.

No matter how complex or massive the software, it's surprising to find out it
was written by one or two people.

I see this all the time. I once implemented an ERP package in a $100 million
company. I called customer support and got one of the 2 guys who wrote the
package! I couldn't believe it.

Believing that one or two people can code something large and awesome is often
the first step to doing it yourself.

~~~
felipe
I don't want to minimize their achievements, but it never takes one or two
people to build something that large. There is an entire organization to
support their efforts -- sales, customer support, QA, etc... There is a
tendency to "hero"-ize developers in big companies, but at the end of the day
it is an organization-wide effort.

~~~
edw519
I was referring to the actual programming only. Sorry if I inferred otherwise.

~~~
nostrademons
Even so, that usually applies only up to a certain point in time. Once the
company is big enough, they'll hire an army of maintenance programmers to
continue improving the software.

For example, Tom Proulx wrote the first version of Quicken basically
singlehandedly, but it's probably a whole department inside Intuit working on
it now. Paul Buchheit is normally associated with GMail, but the GMail team is
_huge_. Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of Linux, but hundreds if not
thousands of people have contributed patches.

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jonursenbach
Well at least he didn't leave for Twitter like everyone else has been, I'm
sure that would have caused Eric Schmidt to pull a Ballmer.

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balding_n_tired
I thought Dave Cutler was the principle architect on NT?

~~~
zandorg
Chicago (Win95) came after NT.

