I'm not sure how this makes any sense for Microsoft. If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.
There's a lot more to replicating something like Xobni in a megacorporation like MSFT than just the programming. In a lot of cases it's easier to get an acquisition signed off on than a new department to make a new product.
And they get more than just code, and people who write code. They get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup. They get people who have vision, which MSFT appears to be in need of these days. It could be the beginning of a new era for them.
Also, Xobni has had a number of high quality engineers (probably much better than what you'd typically find slaving away in the trenches at MSFT) working on their plugin for a lot more than a few months. I'm guessing the programming cost would be a lot higher than you might think.
I think there is a ill informed mentality that somehow hackers are "smarter" than the coders working at Microsoft. To be honest most of the people I have met at the startup community aren't really all that special in terms of "intelligence" but they do have that drive which is what makes them special. I just think people in this community need to stop ego boosting themselves... yes some of you are probably pretty smart... but most of you aren't impressively smart or talented -- just very driven... (which is a great trait by the way)
as far as the actual commentary goes I think Microsoft is doing it because honestly 30-40 million is chump change for them and yeah they could develop it but why bother when you already have it tall done and the structure already setup?
Perhaps the programmers I've met from Microsoft are atypical, but they've been smart as hell. Whatever Microsoft's problems are (and clearly they have some), it isn't that they don't have any smart people on campus there.
I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn.
If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department. And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?
Being good at bluster can make someone seem pretty smart. But the computer doesn't care about that. It filters out what you can really do from what you can fool people into thinking you can do.
> I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn.
Like I said, they may not be typical, but most of the Microsoft people I've met work on compiler design, static verifiers, and things like that. If where you come from that's considered trivial stuff, feel free to make your own judgements accordingly.
> If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department.
Really? Last I checked, there are openings on the F# team. Would it really be that horrible to get big-company pay and benefits to have the opportunity to hack on compilers for functional languages?
> And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?
No, the Microsoft people I've met tend to be from the language teams, mostly because I'm working a lot with IronPython and F# in my codebase, so that's the kind of thing I go to conferences about.
And, to be honest, working on language implementations in small teams for Microsoft sounds a lot more appealing than working on Windows or Office in ginormous bureaucratic teams. Then again, being a tiny cog in the AdSense machine doesn't sound appealing to me either.
> What's the process now?
Doesn't sound all that different from a Google interview.
"I've told folks that my MS interview was on par in difficulty as my Ph.D. candidacy oral examination, partly due to the fact that it was much, much longer. (A Ph.D. oral exam is done by 3-5 professors vs. you in a room and they decide whether you continue in your studies or whether they kick you out). Mine started at 10am and ended at 6:30pm or so when I sat down with Scott Guthrie at the end of my loop."
I also know a lot of dumb people that can't program worth a damn. What's your point?
Wanting to work a corporation that has big revenues with job security, stability, steady paychecks, interesting projects (yes, there are still interesting projects everything from online, web, to Xbox), big campus treatment, vacation, healthcare benefits, and et al. Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.
> I also a lot of dumb people that can't program worth a damn. What's your point?
Try to keep up here, Freddo. Try following the context :) Smart is orthogonal to skilled at a particular endeavor.
> Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.
Funny how you twisted "lacking in the taste department" into "dumb". It's a computer industry truism that MS lacks taste, whereas Apple has good taste.
I think an emphasis on taste can be good, but not when it leads to a holier than thou attitude. Not only in terms of decency, but it also means less efficiency and aesthetics.
Say efficiency and aesthetics are two sides of the same coin. So, if you put them at odds with each other you won't ever reach the epitome of either.
You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste.
The original point was that MS had smart people so a lack of smarts couldn't be the problem. The salient points are 1) smarts don't guarantee programming skill, and 2) smarts don't guarantee taste.
> You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste.
Fair enough. In that sense, then, I wouldn't say that programmers at Microsoft lack taste by definition.
There are things at Microsoft that have demonstrated solid taste: the original NT kernel comes to mind, as do early iterations of Word and Excel (starting back when they were primarily developed for Mac). LINQ. WCF. The DLR. There are also smaller pieces of tools that seem elegant, even when there are issues with the larger design. Active Patterns in F#. Attributes in C#. The ADO.Net CommandBuilder and DataAdapter.
I'm not convinced that it's that everyone at Microsoft is individually defective as much as that their methods of collaboration, like those of most large corporations, usually yield results less effective than good individuals or small teams could have produced with sufficient autonomy.
"I'm not convinced that it's that everyone at Microsoft is individually defective as much as that their methods of collaboration, like those of most large corporations, usually yield results less effective than good individuals or small teams could have produced with sufficient autonomy."
Which brings this thread from the religious fervour of "what it means to be smart" right back to the subject at hand: Why MSFT would pay M$20+ for Xobni rather than write a kock-off in-house.
I didn't say anything about intelligence. I just said better engineers. Being a great engineer requires many qualities, of which intelligence is only one.
MSFT wants great engineers, and most of the people there probably aren't. Surely some are, but for a very long time now the kinds of people who make great engineers have shifted en masse either to going their own way (startups) or to working at Google, Facebook, or a number of other places.
Seriously though, that seems to be a self talk thing in the hacker community, making me skeptical it's true. Places like Slashdot and the like seem to be echo chambers of ego boosting phrases.
I think you nailed it with the line:
"they get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup".
Exactly what I was thinking. If it's not the features, not the engineers, it must be the positive buzz they get for it. Probably this is some lame attempt by Microsoft to appear cool and show that they understand the new wave.
Or, you know, call me crazy, but maybe they just think those would be good features to add to Outlook, and this is the easiest way to add them and keep them out of competitors' products at the same time.
Xobni might be as useful and interesting as all those combined, and the Xobni team can deliver it today. The evidence suggests that Microsoft would take years to deliver something similar.
My estimates weren't ex-recto as you said. I took a brief look at Xobni, and thought that even I could have done it in a few months. Then a few engineers from MS could do it even more easily.
Paying millions of dollars for a few talented engineers, who will probably work half-heartedly for a few months/year, depending on the clauses in the contract, then move on to the next startup? Come on, USD is not that weak.
I can see this, but it's not one of those things I'm so certain of that I could defend that point of view in a discussion with someone else. It'd be interesting to explore the reasoning behind it more.
Come on, building a working OS is a gigantic effort. Last time I checked Xobni was regex-ing phone numbers and names from e-mail texts, plus some fancy GUI of the kind that you said in one essay that you hate (messing around with obscure Windows APIs). Following your reasoning, the Xobni guys could have more easily built a full OS, which, with all respect, I seriously doubt.
You're not; you're supplying new reasoning for me. My point was that big companies can screw up even apparently straightforward projects, so screwing up novel ones would be even more likely.
There have been noises from Microsoft going right up to Gates to the effect that they themselves are abandoning Vista. This would make the life of this product pretty short if it only targets Vista's flaws.
Also, only people forced to use Vista are using it at this point which boils down to employees of corporations with not-so-wise IT departments - not the prime audience for a startup product IMO.
I do think there is potential for money in the idea of building a layer on top of Windows that makes it more usable. Xobni seems to be doing exactly that starting with email. (I'm sure they are looking beyond email by this point).
Depends on why users think it's intolerable, I suppose. The most common complaints I hear about Vista, even from casual users, are about performance, and I'm not sure what you could do about that.
In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit:
the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.
One issue there is that I know I personally decline to mod people if they already have a large positive or negative balance on a single post. (There are some posts which I think should sit at 0 rather than -30, or even -5, for example.) If I have to mod someone to see what others mods were then I will be much more likely to unintentionally karma-bomb someone when I really just want to see what other hackers here thought about their post.
Isn't the real cause of their problems maintaining backwards compatibility? As I understand it, Apple doesn't do this, making it easier for them to create a good OS.
it's not that apple "doesn't do this." it's that apple had a recent "ground zero event," a term i just made up, which means they had a perfect opportunity to ditch all their old APIs and start anew when they switched operating systems, from macos "classic" to macosx. that was in 2001, which is pretty darned recent. most new mac apps are written to the cocoa api, which didn't even exist before macosx.
however, microsoft is slated to do the exact same thing with the next version of windows, which will supposedly break binary compatibility with old windows apps. if ms has the guts to follow through on this, it will be a Very Good Thing.
Microsoft not doing something that could make them money and is in all likelihood perfectly legal (not that that has stopped them in the past) just to "not be called assholes"? Really?
> If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.
Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.
Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.
Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.
You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.
In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!
I would guess it gets leaked to the press by people who will eventually want favors in return. Sometimes it might be founders who want to prod other potential acquirers.
Hopefully Xobni is able to secure contractual assurances that they'll be able to maintain a level of sovereignty to continue to work on their amazing vision. Microsoft, from experience, is a patchwork of fiefdoms, some the domain of engineering teams, and some product marketing. A team at Microsoft can easily get lost in the shuffle or killed randomly, without a strong exec as high up in the org as possible to make things work.
Cautionary tale: Lookout, that fantastic Outlook plugin that got bought and then promptly taken offline / never heard from again. I believe they were folded into Live Desktop Search. (Will leave it to an exercise to the reader as to whether that was a good move.)
