Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Since it's open season for Microsoft employees criticizing other Microsoft employees, I will use my pulpit too .
A few days ago Dare posted about moving RSS Bandit to Sourceforge. That's fine and dandy, Dare can do what he wants. However, as a Microsoft employee I personally would not have done what he did, I'll explain why.
Dare posted the Top 10 reasons for moving his project, and I even commented on some of them in the RSS Bandit GotDotNet workspace. I asked Dare if he sent this feedback to the GotDotNet team and Andy Oakley, the PM for that team. Dare wrote back that he sent the same list to Andy, but well, since I guess he did that at the same time that he made the move, I'm guessing there was little Andy could do or say about fixing any of Dare's issues.
Tim Marman then commented on his blog:
"My only question is, if you work for Microsoft, wouldn't it be more beneficial for the entire community to work with the GDN team and have these things fixed? I'm sure it won't help the GDN community grow when you have Microsoft employees moving their (high-profile) projects elsewhere."
"My only question is, if you work for Microsoft, wouldn't it be more beneficial for the entire community to work with the GDN team and have these things fixed?
I'm sure it won't help the GDN community grow when you have Microsoft employees moving their (high-profile) projects elsewhere."
Which is something that struck me, because I thought the same thing. Dare responded to Tim and stated:
"Which is more valuable to Microsoft, that developers and users have access to well-written and innovative applications targetting the .NET Framework or that everyone use GotDotNet to host their project? Quite frankly, I'm quite irritated by the number of people who've been hassling me about decisions regarding a project I work on in my free time and the implicit obligations they've placed on me. Should I also sell my iPod because it doesn't support WMA? How about my car? Should I also sell my car and get a BMW 7-series so I can run a car with Windows Automotive? Should I get rid of my TiVo since it doesn't use Windows? Should I sell the shares I have in other companies and buy only Microsoft stock? If RSS Bandit being hosted on GotDotNet is so important to you, the source code is available. You can fork the project and keep it alive on GotDotNet."
"My point was that GDN does have these problems. I just thought Dare, as a Microsoft employee, might be in a better position to identify and work with people to get them resolved."
Dare, myself, everyone at Microsoft is in a better position to work with other employees to get these kind of issues resolved. I routinely dofood (Microsoft speak for using pre-release versions of software) numerous products, and get on the internal mailing lists for those products and give plenty of feedback. I did this for OneNote, Media Center, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and am currently doing this for Lonestar and a bunch of other products I can't talk about. When I find issues I find the Program Manager who owns that feature and let them know how I feel, check on dates for when fixes might ship and so on. This is just part of my work ethic, not everyone is like this, and I don't expect that everyone do what I do. However, I do believe that as an individual I personally have the ability to help other teams succeed. And as a Microsoft employee I have unique access and the ability in influence some of the brightest people in the industry to help them make their products better.
Microsoft has a vested interested in making GotDotNet a success. As an employee I use GotDotNet for my personal projects (currently dasBlog and JPEG Hammer) and while I find that there are warts, and problems, I also recognize that it's a v 1.1 product. If I look back on what Entourage (the product I used to work on) was like when it was v1, and look where it is now, I am thankfully that many of our customers stuck with us because they knew it would get better, because we worked on the product for 3 years and released v2 and v3, and now we have a product that I am extremely proud of and has received much fanfare. It's the people that stuck with the product (we have an incredible loyal group of beta testers) and kept giving us honest feedback that are the real heroes of our development efforts. This experience has probably shaped my perspectives and attitudes on issues like this one. In this case of GotDotNet I am happy to support and give feedback to Andy and his team, and live through the growing pains and support my company in making a better product for me, and our customers.