
Microsoft Has PMS - astrec
http://www.cringely.com/2009/02/microsoft-has-pms/
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mlinsey
Cringley's argument rests upon the idea that Microsoft is driven too much by
technology and not enough by usability. He says this is because features are
owned by PM's who are technical, but I'm not going to engage that particular
claim because I disagree with the first idea.

Windows' usability isn't bad. It isn't quite OSX, but if anything it is still
easier for the majority of the population to stay with Windows because
everyone knows it and is used to its quirks. The only "usability" problem in
Vista I can think of that's big enough to be a game-changer is UAC. That's a
combination of a legacy problem and an engineering problem (namely, previous
versions of Windows weren't well engineered to be secure, and moving to a
stricter model while maintaining backwards compatibility with apps accustomed
to the looser model was bound to cause user experience headaches, unless they
went a pure sandbox/VM route).

Look elsewhere in the company. Live search has fine usability but just isn't
on par with Google technically. The XBox has excellent usability (and in
particular was miles ahead of the competition in terms of an easy online
gaming experience), but an engineering problem with the heatsink cost the
company billions.

I'm not saying that technical issues are the root cause of Microsoft's
problems either. There are many different problems but if I had to pick one to
call the biggest, I would say a simple lack of innovation, both on the product
and technical side of things. This lack of innovation is a contributing factor
to two big problems: 1- Big customers are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to
buy new versions of Windows and Office. 2- Microsoft is unable to execute on
its traditional "fast follow" strategy where they do not create a market but
are eventually able to build a product as good or better than the original
innovators and then use their muscle to control the new market. Compare
Microsoft vs. Netscape to Microsoft vs. Google.

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endtime
tl;dr: Microsoft lets Product Managers own features, and their PMs are just
engineers with different hats, so as a result MS products are badly designed.

I find this entirely unconvincing. The crux of the author's argument is that
because PMs have engineering backgrounds, when development goes up against
usability (whatever that means) usability loses.

Well, I doubt MS makes a practice of hiring PMs incapable of doing their jobs.
I also don't see why a technical person should be considered incapable of
assessing usability. In my (admittedly limited) experience, non-technical HCI
people are sometimes worse at designing interfaces than programmers, whatever
the oh so amusing stereotype might be. As a counterexample: While MSFT has
about double the PM:Dev ratio of Google, Google PMs nearly always come from CS
backgrounds too...and I don't think the author would make the same accusations
about Google that he makes about MS.

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TrevorJ
I agree in principle with his overall point, however his assertion that people
don't change doesn't ring true to me. Maybe I'm naive, but I think smart
people DO change. Change is also called learning from our mistakes, and It's a
trait I see a lot of in entrepreneurial-types. The real issue is that large
companies rarely allow for the sort of 1:1 ratio of actions and consequence
that are necessary for real personal change. If I'm running my own startup and
I'm a jerk, I will feel the consequences of that. If I'm midlevel management
at a big corp, the fact that I'm otherwise competent will protect me from the
chance to see how my behavior impacts my situation poorly.

