How Microsoft Is Losing It’s Way

This is an interesting interview with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief architect (linked from Ryan Stewart’s blog). I am certain that Ray Ozzie has many talents, but I think that he is in an impossible situation.

Here is a quote from the interview:

The guidance that we are giving the development community — and the guidance that we use in-house — is to look at applications through the following lens: When the business model behind that app means that you have to get it everywhere, we call that the “universal web application pattern.” When the most important thing is the experience that the user has with that application and you might be willing to trade off the breadth of the web for the richness of that experience, we call that an “experience first pattern.”

I call this the “you must be dreaming pattern”:

Flex can do all the “experience” things that WPF can do like, scaling, rotations, animations, and 3D – what else is there? And it can run in almost any browser. And (with Apollo), it can run on almost any desktop. With Adobe, you get the “universal web application pattern” *and* the “experience first pattern” both together in *one big happy pattern*. Microsoft needs to make two patterns because they don’t have a clue as to where they are going.

Then there is the “let’s confuse the developers pattern”:

The .Net libraries contain *two* complete user interface libraries – one based on WinForms (Win32 API) and one based on WPF (vector graphics). And to make life interesting, a lot of the components have exactly the same names (eg Button, ListBox, etc) even although they are totally incompatible. Ok – maybe a smart developer should be able to figure it out (old style vs new style). But then, there is a third set of components (WPF/e) which is supposed to play a big role, but nobody will say what is going to be in the libraries (* because it’s still a secret *).

Adobe has *one* library for *everything* (desktop, browsers, all platforms) and *one* language for *everything*. Why, it’s so simple, that I actually have time to write code.

Finally, there is the “let’s reach out and disable our developers pattern”:

Microsoft was late with Vista and WPF/e, but they has no problem releasing WGA, which immediately declared that the Windows XP machine that I used for testing was running pirated software (which was wrong, because I purchased and installed XP myself). I couldn’t find the original CD, and I couldn’t use the unused XP CD from my new machine which I had just upgraded to Vista. But, that is still not the full story.

Because, WGA now thinks that the XP machine has pirated software, I couldn’t install IE7 or the WinFX 3.0 libraries. That is, I couldn’t use that machine anymore for testing .Net.

However, when I tried testing the software that I wrote in Flash, *on the same machine*, everything worked perfectly!!

In 1983, IBM was their own worst enemy – arrogance, incompatible products and endless licencing fees.

Microsoft in 2007 is making exactly the same mistakes.

In 1983, I started moving to Unix – and today, I’m starting to move to Flash.