shahine.com/omar/

So who is right? Well as Steve Ballmer has said in speaking to us, we always face the “tyrany of OR”. For example, do you focus on quality OR features when developing software? Do you slip the release, potentially missing your budget, OR release something that doesn't have the quality you want? The tyranny is that we face these kinds of decisions all the time and to succeed as a company we have to do both. That is the tyranny Steve talks about.

 

I think that Dare is oversimplifying things (I have an iPod too). It's not about the fact that he is perfectly entitled to move his site to SourceForge and spend his free and spare time working on RSS Bandit in a way that makes him happy. However, I agree whole heartedly with Tim. He succinctly states:

"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.

Andy has already publicly responded to Dare's Top 10 list. A bit to late for the move I guess, or maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway.