

Why Silverlight was rigged to fail and my time leading it - iwwr
http://www.riagenic.com/archives/722

======
pkteison
You know, that's a lot of words to ask everybody to read, with precious little
pay off. I just finished reading the whole thing, and I'm going to recommend
that you skip it.

It boils down to an egotistical hypocritical jerk uses fights over the
Silverlight marketing website and strategic plan to try to illustrate problems
with the Silverlight project, but fails to make any useful points other than
that there was some corporate infighting.

This simply isn't a good article, please don't vote it up, and I recommend you
don't waste your time.

~~~
grammaton
Yes. This is basically one person's personal bitching. How is this
informative? Unless you're interested in the nitty-gritty details of corporate
politics at Microsoft....

~~~
rwolf
The nitty-gritty details of corporate politics at Microsoft is of interest to
me.

Given the recent barrage of positive tech articles about the upcoming Windows
8, I enjoyed a look from the inside at what looked from outside like a
remarkably successful product (at least on the marketing side).

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alttag
The lack of any proof reading drove me batty. I struggled get through it.

Something this long shouldn't be written in a single draft. If it's worth
nearly 10,000 words, it's worth doing properly.

TL,DR: Guy realizes he was a jerk at the start of Silverlight. Continues to be
a jerk, but doesn't notice. Oh, and Silverlight is dead.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I read it yesterday, and decided not to post it here for that very reason. I
can live with a typo or two, but the error rate on this was so high as to make
it difficult to recommend.

~~~
jhermsmeyer
I agree. If you feel what you have to say is important enough for other people
to read, put some time into shining it up, and making it readable.

Otherwise you leave yourself open to criticisms like: "If he can't execute on
the small things in a blog post, then no wonder Silverlight is dead" etc.

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nswanberg
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v3NEt3R...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v3NEt3Rrr4MJ:www.riagenic.com/archives/722+www.riagenic.com/archives/722&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

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kenjackson
The guy who wrote this story should go back and reread it. He comes off as a
jerk who will self-admittedly manipulate (in a bad way) in an effort to get
what he wants. Seems exactly like the type of guy I'd hate to work with.

And on content, it's stuff like this that shows where he's at:

"A guy I worked with Joe Marini, tweeted about Nokia phone he was excited to
hold in his hands. I like Joe, he was a nice guy and I have a lot of time for
him and to see him get fired over a bullshit tweet about Windows Phone 7 and
Nokia?

They should be firing Brandon Watson down, for failing to market the stupid
phone not firing the guy who spent most of his days highlighting the positives
associated with the product?"

Joe Marini did an ill-advised tweet about Microsoft's most important partner.
I'm sure Joe is a great guy, but if you ever want to stop leaks, this is what
you have to do. I get the feeling that he likes Joe and would keep him. When
you're running the show you have to fire people you like.

And fire Brandon Watson? Last I saw he was not head of consumer marketing, he
was head of developer marketing. And while Windows Phone hasn't caught on at
retail, it's doing a really good job with developers. Again, it sounds like he
has a personal beef with Brandon and would fire him based on that. The
marketing problem with WP isn't developer facing, it's consumer facing.

~~~
sriramk
I have interacted with both Scott and Brandon a bit in my time at MSFT.

I found the bit on Brandon particularly jarring - Brandon runs developer
marketing and is doing a really good job of getting developers onto a phone
that people aren't buying much. Just look at his activity here on HN or him
getting Scott Adams to try out WP or how responsive he is on Twitter/email to
any developer out there.

I empathize with a lot of what Scott said (though I'm not sure terrible
marketing sites were the core problem Silverlight had) but he's off the mark
with this one.

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spenrose
What a wonderful sense of values are on display here. Let's all be like this.

"Now I just had to figure out how I was going to tell me wife that we are
about to move to Seattle as I should point out, at this point I hadn’t told
her I was interviewing for the gig. Pack up your life and move to Seattle.

I eventually wore my wife down who just gave birth to our second child Emily,
so there I was organizing my entire family to move from Australia to Seattle.
My wife had never set foot in the US in her entire life, and here I was
dragging her away from a promising career at Ernst & Young to work for $20k
USD less than we were earning in Australia (Not including her wage either)."

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runjake
Clarification: Silverlight may be dead as a web-based runtime, which would be
great, in my opinion. Take Flash and Java applets with you.

However, Silverlight's underlying technologies are still alive and well. Not
much consolation to MSNBC programmers or whoever, who develop interactive
Silverlight websites, but hey at least their skills directly translate into
Windows/Windows Phone.

~~~
zacharypinter
I'm actually a little sad to see the demise of web plugins. Unity, multi-file
uploads, webcams, voip, decent video, sockets, and many other web technologies
first appeared in browsers via plugins. Then, once they're popular enough, the
major browsers might incorporate them.

Will browsers be able to keep the innovation up without plugins as a
playground for testing new ideas?

~~~
hnhg
Perhaps mobile apps will fulfil that role?

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vessenes
This guy is a world-class asshole, and takes 10,000 words to explain it to us
in great detail.

His actual complaints about the Microsoft group he was in can be succinctly
summarized:

. Politics

. Lack of Strategic planning

. Difficulty executing

All reasonable points for nearly any Microsoft group, but I have to wonder why
it is he feels such a determination to burn any possible bridges he may have
left behind.

My own read on Silverlight is actually all strategic problems -- unfortunately
a group that could have been working on something like V8 with awesome UI
enhancements for metro three years ago spent their time competing with,
essentially a dead platform.

The major break in architecture with Metro is a gamble, but not a bad one.
It's an aggressive, fairly fast gamble from a company that's gotten way too
slow over the past five years. I think we'll see better product coming out of
MS over the next three years if they can keep this up.

------
cletus
This seems to be another example of where Microsoft has lost its way and
simply become a battleground for management turf wars. I've read numerous
stories of how the Windows and Office divisions (in particular) have thrown
their weight around.

Frankly I blame Steve Ballmer. The buck stops at the top. He's not a
technology guy. He's just a middle-manager who happened to be in the right
place at the right time.

Compare this to Google, where I work. I'm just a software engineer with no
reportees but there are precisely four people between me and _Larry_.

Take any software engineer at MSFT and find out how many people are between
them and Steve. Frankly, I think that'll be a telling (damning) statistic.

I refer you to the (excellent) _My first BillG review_ [1]:

> In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or
> 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who
> reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike
> Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun
> of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or
> whatever it was.

[1]: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>

~~~
amcintyre
_Take any software engineer at MSFT and find out how many people are between
them and Steve. Frankly, I think that'll be a telling (damning) statistic._

I'm a software engineer with no reports at MSFT; there are 5 people between me
and Steve. YMMV.

~~~
ejames
I was a software engineer with no reports at MSFT, and at the time had 5
people between myself and Steve. Since leaving, I've heard from former
coworkers that the team was reorganized... to make it flatter.

The problem with Microsoft's org chart is its width, not its height. The best
metaphor is "warring city-states", with a large helping of "the left hand does
not know what the right hand is doing". Each Microsoft product team or
department has the ambition and manpower to believe that they can build a
world-changing product - after all, this is Microsoft! We can make a new,
better standard for web content if we want to do that! Go big! At the same
time, no individual product team has the official authority to quash other
projects that might duplicate, negate, interfere with, render obsolete, or
drain resources from its own project.

The key word is "official". When a decision has to be made about a troubled or
behind-schedule project, the more-important divisions will typically get their
way. Software development being what it is, there will always be several
troubled or behind-schedule projects in a company the size of Microsoft. Then
you have to sit down, compare future plans and bug lists to
schedules/budgets/available developers, and decide what to do about it. It's
in those meetings that Microsofties discover some product teams are more equal
than others.

This is what the original article sounds like. There's an ambitious product,
yet it suffers for lack of attention and resources. Some developers are
overworked (their project is too large) while others are bored by inaction
(their project is too small). It suddenly comes to the attention of Team Foo
that Team Bar has built a system which does not use Foo, even though Foo is
supposed to be Microsoft's all-purpose framework for your Bar needs (Team Bar
did not know about Team Foo and vice-versa). The problem is recognized, yet
nobody actually seems to be in charge of deciding what to do. Finally there is
a come-to-Jesus moment in a "corporate realignment". Foo: Yes or no? Microsoft
retroactively discovers that actually, it's OK with Foo not taking over the
world. The project ends, often with the notable developer/evangelist/whatever
in charge saying that they were very excited about the Foo technology but it
seems Microsoft didn't agree. Some level of bitterness is expressed at the
fact that Microsoft never said so up front.

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iam
Great story, it really highlights the lack of strategical thought in a
product, and how the non-engineering "decision making" teams can just spin
their heads around not getting anything real accomplished.

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alanh
Can’t disagree with the consensus that the piece is poorly written, not
proofread† and has little moral high ground _but_ :

1\. It’s entertaining if you are curious about turf wars in Microsoft

2\. He mentions a boss he detested launched <http://thetirefire.com/> – timing
out for anyone else?

† "Leaking IE9 secrets?" Posted just now, sept. 2011, with IE 10 in public
beta.

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jimworm
Question marks sprinkled liberally... reading this guy's writing is like
listening to an Aussie speak.

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politician
Wow, just, wow.

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tmitchel2
Ooooh this is good

