To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Note: this entry has moved.

During last week I had a couple of different meetings (online and in person) with a bunch of Microsoft employees and we touched a big range of topics. One thing I’ve told them all is that if they were willing to destroy their credibility in a snap all they have to do is to try to defend the obsolete Internet Explorer or the non-working GDN Worskpaces. Any of these two positions will have the same instant effect: zero credibility for you.

Published Friday, July 09, 2004 2:50 AM by vga
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Comments

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Friday, July 09, 2004 12:53 AM by Daniel Cazzulino
Amen!

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Friday, July 09, 2004 2:51 AM by Lorenzo Barbieri
+1!!!

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Friday, July 09, 2004 4:33 AM by Scott Galloway
Agreed!

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Friday, July 09, 2004 4:50 AM by Anon

Well done. It's good that someone is given a chance to tell them like it is.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Friday, July 09, 2004 7:49 AM by Ron Green
Exactly.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Friday, July 09, 2004 10:24 PM by Scott Mitchell
While I agree that those are two of Microsoft's weaker offerings (I use FireFox rather than IE, for example), it's hard to bitch too loudly seeing as the cost for said products is $0.00.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Sunday, July 11, 2004 4:41 AM by VGA
Scott,

I don't think that the $0.00 cost is an issue here, some facts:

a) AFAIK, Microsoft never charged for IE. Back in the browser war days, the IE team was spitting out releases like crazy, the price tag was not an issue at that moment?. Then NN was defeated and after that the motivation to keep IE a competitive product just disappeared. The price was always $0.00 but the motivation to make a good product went from lets-make-the-best-browser-ever to we-dont-really-care-anymore.

b) Microsoft has $0.00 products that are great and has people working on it, as the C# compiler, ;-)

So, its a fact that Microsoft didn't care anymore about IE the moment they let it die years ago. And regarding GDN... its really hard to understand for me how in the world they're keeping that thing online, 'better-than-nothing' may be applicable with this.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Sunday, July 11, 2004 12:59 PM by Peter Wu
100% agreed.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Saturday, July 31, 2004 12:54 PM by Ezequiel Espíndola
What is the problem with the GDN Workspaces? I see a lot of use for this site from various projects from Microsoft and others. I've been using it myself as a user and seems useful to me. What is it that makes it so useless to you?

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Saturday, July 31, 2004 7:42 PM by VGA

Well for a start, most of the time I try to access its down. When its not down its performance is really bad. Navigating through it its a big pain also. Try sourceforge instead, you should feel the difference.

For example the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset released by Microsoft has been released to SourceForge and not GotDotNet.

Other notorious projects like RssBandit (ok not from MS, but from an MS employee) has moved from GDN to SF.

Besides PAG-sponsored ones I'm not sure really which 'large' MS projects are you talking about being hosted in GDN.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Monday, August 02, 2004 1:59 AM by Ezequiel Espíndola
I have to disagree with you about the 'big pain' and I've never found GDN down either. As a fact, I really don't like the navigation of SourceForge.

Also, I never talked about 'large' projects.

Here are some good ones on GDN that seem to have found good use of it:

FlexWiki
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=6bdff8a9-294f-442e-a81f-3b2b664bc344

BuildIt
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=ed15cee0-b51e-4172-9115-5c6f4d5d92d8

EDRA
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=9c29a963-594e-4e7a-9c45-576198df8058

FABRIQ
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=b4fcf02f-3e71-4a15-a305-f0511240eec1

.Text
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=e99fccb3-1a8c-42b5-90ee-348f6b77c407


And about WiX:

"I thought GotDotNet was the place. However, at that time, none of the existing Shared Source licenses were flexible enough to accept contributions from the community."
http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2004/04/05/107709.aspx

"Because WiX isn't a .Net project, per se, Microsoft decided against releasing the WiX code on its own SourceForge alternative, called GotDotNet Workspaces."
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/mswatch.dart/;sz=160x600;ord=7595788837?

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Monday, August 02, 2004 3:39 AM by VGA
If you've never found GDN down then you're a *really* lucky man. You may also get a free XBox for that :-) I had a very different experience for sure.

Re: MS hosted projects -- what I meant here is that I didn't knew of any 'major' MS projects hosted @ GDN besides EDRA which is a PAG-sponsored one.

Sorry but I don't buy any of the two arguments about WiX being hosted @ SF:

>>>However, at that time, none of the existing Shared Source...

So it was a GDN missing feature at that time. It does have such a license now? If yes, why is it not moved to GDN? If not, what exactly are they waiting for?

>>>Because WiX isn't a .Net project, per se, Microsoft decided
>>>against releasing the WiX code ... on GDN

This sounds like a really lame excuse. Based on this, SF should start to only allow projects targetting Unix which sounds non-sense to me. Luckily SF doesn't impose such a restriction and WiX could found a home there. I could not read the article because you linked to an AD :-( -- let me know the working URL and I'll read it.

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Monday, August 02, 2004 2:38 PM by Ezequiel Espíndola
I am a lucky man, no XBox has come to my plate yet, though.

I don't know of many MS projects hosted on shared source sites like GDN or SourceForge besides the PAG-sponsored ones. Could you point out others that aren't using GDN?

My Opera browser does some strange things with the Address bar sometimes, sorry for that. Here's the correct URL:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1561861,00.asp

# re: To All MS Employees: How To Destroy Your Credibility in One Second, Guaranteed

Tuesday, August 03, 2004 3:45 AM by VGA
Thanks for the updated link.

@ 4:45AM I can't remember much, but I do remember that shortly after WiX was released to SF, WTL followed, lets see who is next :-) Then you've a couple of MS employees that prefer to host their pet projects in SF rather than GDN (and of course you will find others that prefer the other way around).

Also, hosting @ GDN doesn't necessarily mean one is happy with it, If I remember correctly ScottW did considered moving .Text away from GDN more than once in the past.

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