Aaron Huslage

I’m getting sick and tired of everyone knowing how to “fix” Twitter. There is little use for this speculation. They don’t need help, but they do need time and space to do what they need to do. The general health of a service has little, if anything, to do with input from users. The fact is that no one knows what the problems are outside of the company and no one will know them unless they get a job there. The site goes down and the world blogs about it, tweets about it, screams about it in podcasts and no one cares. Even Techmeme put a one-word post from the intrepid Michael Arrington that said “Twitter!” on their front page.

The latest of these “thought leaders” happens to be someone named Nick Halsted. On his blog, he outlines an overly complex, ill advised strategy to fix Twitter. Please note that if your “system” involves a graph that looks like this, you are probably doing something wrong:

People who live in glass houses…

Stop talking about it and go do some work, for heaven’s sake.

This is a great day for homosexual couples in California. The rule of law has prevailed and freedom for homosexuals is now guaranteed in that state as the Supreme Court overturned laws against Gay Marriage. But this is not why I want to write tonight.

The argument against the ruling by groups like the Family Research Council and others mindlessly twist the facts and take advantage of people who only partially pay attention to this issue. They assume that if you are prone to disagree with Gay Marriage that you will agree with them and don’t really give people all of the right information, or even allow them to intelligently consider the issue. In their press release, the FRC’s President Tony Perkins said the following:

“The California Supreme Court has taken a jackhammer to the democratic process, and the right of the people to affect change in public policy. Four judges discarded the votes of 4,618,673 Californians who approved the state’s ‘Defense of Marriage Act.’ Voters understand that children should not be deprived of a mother or a father.”

This is patently absurd on the face of it. The Supreme Courts of this country exist not to forward the will of the people. They are meant to be independent of the opinions of the populace. In this instance the court in California decided to overturn laws voted on by the people as unconstitutional. They did not say “the people were wrong”, but they said “the people are not lawyers”. This does not constitute a “change in public policy” as Mr Perkins says, but is an enforcement of existing public policy. The courts rarely, if ever, take an activist stance for the sole purpose of activism.

Law is difficult and nuanced. There is a reason that people go to school for many years and study as much as doctors to get Law degrees. These judges are some of the most seasoned lawyers in our country. To dismiss them out of hand demeans their status and their knowledge of the law in the favor of cynicism and sound-bites. This is irresponsible at best and reprehensible at worst.

I’m in no way saying that the opponents of this ruling don’t have a right to complain. They do. They should, however, take into account the institutions of this country and the intelligence of those that would hear them. Groups like the FRC claim to support families, but this sort of action only teaches children to blindly absorb what they hear and not think for themselves. Instead they should form an argument based on the facts as they see them instead of mindlessly attacking the court.

Firstly, Microsoft is not evil. Microsoft is not organized enough to be evil, in and of themselves. They don’t really have the capability of being evil at this point even if they wanted to be what with the constant audits by legal entities and governments. This company has a monopoly on desktop operating systems and office suites, but that monopoly does not extend any further. There is no hegemony in servers or enterprise systems. There is certainly no monopoly in Internet properties. Microsoft might have had some evil tendencies in the past, but that was then and this is now.

Secondly, Microsoft has proven that outside of the areas within which it dominates they cannot execute at all. Even leaving the humble Internet offerings aside, there is not one single shining star where Microsoft has competed in an overwhelming fashion. Windows Mobile is a modest success, built on the back of other modest successes in the server business. Exchange server might be the de-facto corporate email standard, but it doesn’t hold a candle to other high-volume email servers out there that service consumers’ billions of email accounts. Office Communications Server is a failure in the VOIP arena even with the new version’s great improvements. I could go on, but you get the point. Microsoft follows the market in every instance.

Thirdly, Microsoft is consumed by process. There are myriad processes for doing anything at Microsoft. Some days I’m surprised I don’t need a hall pass to go to the bathroom. Certainly any company that has 80,000+ employees needs processes to survive, but this level of process fetishism is absurd by any measure. Everything has checks and re-checks, code gets reviewed sometimes 4 or 5 times before it can be checked in to main branches. Network changes require two or three triage processes to get done. There are these daily scrum meetings all over the company to triage bugs and tickets and assign the work. There are meetings about meetings. There are documents and forms to be filled. I want someone to come ask me where my TPS report is, or if my 27B/6 in triplicate has been submitted. I understand that taken singularly, any of these processes can be justified by many people and I’m not suggesting that everything go away, but process in this respect kills creativity and stifles the work that people are here to do.

Finally, Microsoft is risk averse. All of the previous points culminate in this one statement. When a company becomes afraid of change, it dies. When Microsoft decided that it would follow the market instead of create the market, it started to die. Some would say that started with Windows, but I disagree. Windows was not a “me-too” product, like so many of the company’s current lineup today - it was the natural evolution of computer interface and as such was bound to happen. I think the company tipped over after it acquired its monopoly in the desktop space. As soon as that happened, the world became much smaller for Microsoft as it attempted to duplicate enterprise applications and become dominant there. Microsoft decided that it would survey the market and make “me-too” platforms upon which it could expand in the future. The problem with this approach is that they are just modifying existing markets and no longer working on innovation. Microsoft became insular and not forward thinking. Sure there were parts of the company that continued to expand on these bases, but true innovation was left to ISVs and startup companies which were then purchased by Microsoft in order to fuel its expansion. Leave the risk outside of the company and you assume little of it yourself. If you have no risk to take, the employees become cogs in the wheel, ready to do service but not listened to when their ideas might help.

Microsoft will continue to fail in the markets that it competes in. It will struggle to regain relevance in the technology world as long as it continues to make the decisions it makes. I have no answers for these problems only suggestions, and those often fall on deaf ears. The Powers That Be say I couldn’t possibly understand what goes on here, since I’ve only spent 6 months looking at the problem. They become defensive when I suggest that we have these problems, and even more reticent to talk when I try to suggest solutions. Microsoft is dying a slow, painful death. In 20 years, this company will cease to be and one of its competitor will rule the roost. To make the same mistakes again.

http://www.finslippy.com/finslippy/2008/01/down-the-rabbit.html

This is me to a tee. I am currently in the Microsoft wait-it-out rut…preparing for a U-Turn into something else sooner or later.