Brennan’s Blog

It seems to me that Microsoft has changed quite a bit the past few years. The company grew too quickly and earned a bad reputation for several years, and over the past few years have made strides in changing their ways. The phrase I often hear applied to Microsoft is "over sell and under deliver" which was due to Microsoft's marketing teams making promises that their research and development teams were unable to deliver.

It appears that the research and development teams are now wearing the pants. I have personally been quite happy with Windows Server 2003 and the .NET 2.0 framework. It is stable and modular enough for me to turn off the bits I do not want active, such as the Frontpage extensions. It is still not nearly what I want it to be, but I am seeing efforts pushing it in the right direction.

I believe the change has been due to Channel 9 and various blogs maintained by Microsoft developers and teams. I have found these blogs to be enourmously helpful. And instead of having trouble with this monolithic corporate machine I have had personal contact through regularly updated blogs. A good example is Scott Guthrie's Blog. He leads the ASP.NET team and works closely with the IIS team. His frequent blog entries give me access to the decisions he and his teams are making and allow me to submit my own thoughts directly as comments on his blog. I even emailed him directly about a few different issues as I worked with .NET 2.0 Beta 2 and got responses within hours.

Regardless of the improvements, I am seeing the old Microsoft is still alive. For some reason Microsoft wants to kill Google, a company which has offered up many services which help us all on a daily basis in markets Microsoft was not involved in just a few years ago. Google has fostered these markets and demonstrated a way to make money doing it and now Microsoft wants to take their lunch money. This is the behavior the general public does not appreciate. Google has won us over. We want Microsoft to leave them alone. Why does Microsoft have to dominate everthing, anyway?

And while Microsoft is trying to work over Google, their efforts to produce their next generation operating system, Vista, does not appear to be going well. It is supposed to address security as the top priority, but Microsoft seems to have placed too many features into an unproven set of technologies with an overly aggressive deadline. It appears to be back to "over sell and under deliver" again. If Vista fails to deliver on their promises it will likely leave most users behind with Windows XP or perhaps feed Apple's growing numbers. And when the happens, Microsoft will be missing a major revenue stream and will feverishly lash out in various markets with their massive resources. At that point I do not see how the old beast could be restrained. Their actions will show no regard for their public image or how they treat their customers in a mad dash to get that dollar.

Things have been going so well and I would hate to see it revert to the bad old days. The good guys within Microsoft have to stick to their guns to ensure Microsoft keeps heading in the right direction.