OK, so Bill had really modern thinking. I mean if you apply what he said to modern software design, it still stands mostly true.
So here's a question - given his understanding of team management, product design etc, how the hell did Microsoft go so wrong and end up today with constantly-rebranded products that does not appear to have one unified direction, but rather feel like it's been split to a billion different directions?
Did teams in MS get bigger? He did mention that it was important that in a team there were a few people that truly and fully understand the codebase. I wonder if that is even possible in any of MS products nowadays
Edit:
Some really great choice quotes:
>I like to think the whole program through at a design level before I sit down and write any of the code. And once I write the code, I like to go back and rewrite it entirely one time.The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down. Until you really get in there and write it out, you don’t have the keenest sense of what the common subroutines should be.
The really great programs I’ve written have all been ones that I have thought about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them
Bill is One of Us! I don't think I've ever read about him hacking before
> That refers to a program that molds itself to the user’s needs and the user’s interests over time. There are going to be more great word processors and spreadsheets, and we’ll use networking and graphics and new architectures
> Programmers just starting out today never had to squeeze, so it’s a little harder for them to get the right religion because they always think of resources as being immediately available. Ten years ago every programmer ran into resource limitations, so the older programmers are always thinking about those things.
I think we're still saying that today.
The interview was done in 1986, and he was talking about CDROMs which took off roughly 8 to 10 years after this interview (end of 3.1 and beginning of win95). They really did pursue the multimedia strategy well
> how the hell did Microsoft go so wrong and end up today with constantly-rebranded products that does not appear to have one unified direction, but rather feel like it's been split to a billion different directions?
He left before all that started to happen
> Bill is One of Us! I don't think I've ever read about him hacking before
I believe Gates even "made fun" of Jobs saying that Steve Jobs didn't know how to program.
Well, at some point the software becomes too big for one person to understand, or even a small team of wicked smart architects to understand.
Think about how complex Windows 8 is compared to MS-DOS. How much more it does, how much more hardware it supports. It's many orders of magnitude more complicated.
When a high-quality software program gets beyond a certain size, you by necessity start to lose the uniformly high quality that marked its earlier days.
So here's a question - given his understanding of team management, product design etc, how the hell did Microsoft go so wrong and end up today with constantly-rebranded products that does not appear to have one unified direction, but rather feel like it's been split to a billion different directions?
Did teams in MS get bigger? He did mention that it was important that in a team there were a few people that truly and fully understand the codebase. I wonder if that is even possible in any of MS products nowadays
Edit:
Some really great choice quotes:
>I like to think the whole program through at a design level before I sit down and write any of the code. And once I write the code, I like to go back and rewrite it entirely one time.The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down. Until you really get in there and write it out, you don’t have the keenest sense of what the common subroutines should be. The really great programs I’ve written have all been ones that I have thought about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them
Bill is One of Us! I don't think I've ever read about him hacking before
> That refers to a program that molds itself to the user’s needs and the user’s interests over time. There are going to be more great word processors and spreadsheets, and we’ll use networking and graphics and new architectures
> Programmers just starting out today never had to squeeze, so it’s a little harder for them to get the right religion because they always think of resources as being immediately available. Ten years ago every programmer ran into resource limitations, so the older programmers are always thinking about those things.
I think we're still saying that today.
The interview was done in 1986, and he was talking about CDROMs which took off roughly 8 to 10 years after this interview (end of 3.1 and beginning of win95). They really did pursue the multimedia strategy well