How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Robert Sayre — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 01:05:00 GMT

What a fantastic argument for Open Source!

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Raymond Chen — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 01:58:00 GMT

Who develops the test plans for open source software? Who updates the screenshots in the user's guide and online help? And who translates the documentation into Polish and Turkish? Who verifies that the feature doesn't violate the Americans with Disabilities Act or German privacy laws? (Back when I worked on Linux, the answer was "Nobody. There is no test plan, there is no printed user's guide, what little documentation there is exists only in English, and nobody cares about complying with the ADA or German privacy laws." Maybe things have changed since then.)

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Eric Lippert — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 03:28:00 GMT

I'm not following you Robert. Thought experiment: tomorrow, Bill open-sources all Microsoft products and set up a hundred billion dollar endowment fund to pay for continued development of the codebase. What makes all of the costs I mentioned suddenly go away? Nothing! Open source isn't magic. There seems to be a strange belief amongst the open source community that just because you can make a change to the source code, and no one pays you to do so, that the change was free. But it wasn't, because changes don't cost money. Changes cost EFFORT to do right, and money is just a convenient way to measure effort, not effort itself. There's only a finite amount of effort in the world, and knowing how to apply it to greatest effect is a difficult problem. It doesn't take a couple dozen people to change a lightbulb here _because_ we sell software for a living -- it would take those couple dozen people even if we gave it away with the sources. It takes a couple dozen people because we deeply care about that legally blind Catalan-speaking customer. It takes a couple dozen people to change a lightbulb because software is an insanely complicated device that runs in an insanely complicated world. Managing that complexity is a lot more work than changing the code.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Robert Sayre — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 05:30:00 GMT

The point is that the customer is free to fix/alter that which affects themselves, but isn't worth fixing to you. Since the feature/problem isn't worth it to you, it obviously follows that the feature isn't for widely deployed software... where all of your effort is (rightly) focused. It just needs to work on a small number of boxes for a very specific purpose, where the blind Catalan-speaking customer doesn't come into play. Or perhaps the feature is very very important to the customer (yesterday! dangit!), and they don't have time to wait for MS to QA on Windows XP Home Arabic.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Eric Lippert — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 06:54:00 GMT

Got it. But this is precisely why we built the script engines to be extensible by arbitrary third party ActiveX objects. Like I said, if the feature is cheap and easy, then implement it yourself in a VB6 object. But the script engines themselves cannot be allowed to fracture into a million slightly different mutually incompatible versions -- that doesn't serve customers well.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Ian Ringrose — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:25:00 GMT

Now what if you ‘shipped’ an “open source” set of helper ActiveX objects for the script engine. You could post it on one of the Microsoft web sites and just say that it is a demo of how to extend the script engine… Can we find a modal that lets Microsoft employees get out ‘quick hacks’ without Microsoft being responsible for then in the nest 100 years? No all software help to be written to the same standard…

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:48:00 GMT

I believe MS already ships quit a significant amount of "open source" software in the form of all the samples in the msdn online, and the samples included with the various product installations, such as VB. And if that is not enough, you can find tons of samples online, in various trade publications, in newsgroups and obviously in blogs like this one. OTOH you cannot ignore the fact that Microsoft becomes somewhat liable for any piece of software it ships regardless of how unofficial it is. If you copy a sample for this site and it formats your disk, you will blame Microsoft and Eric could loose his job.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Dan Shappir — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:52:00 GMT

BTW, I wrote the above comment. For some reason, the "Remember Me" check box doesn't work for me. And I got a memory exception screen when I submited. More untested, buggy software from Microsoft ;-)

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Michael Howard — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 18:42:00 GMT

You missed one step - three people to argue about whether this method is safe for scripting :-)

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 10:26:00 GMT

Raymond wrote: "Who develops the test plans for open source software? There is no test plan, there is no printed user's guide, what little documentation there is exists only in English, and nobody cares about complying with the ADA or German privacy laws." Maybe things have changed since then" They certainly have changed. If you're interested in whether this is true, check out the Gnome and KDE projects. Much more organised (esp. KDE) than they ever used to be. In general it's work that most OSS developers don't want to do - it's not an itch to scratch to use the cheesy phrase I keep hearing. Now that there is interest in OSS and money is being thrown about, people are working on these things because they are being paid to do it. Eric seem to be arguing (please correct me if I am wrong) "How do we pay for peoples effort if we give everything away"? Well for a start OSS does not mean free. Just because some OSS apps are free doesn't mean they *have* to be. I wonder how many Microsoft employees have actually ever been to opensource.org and can now argue about OSS *without* resorting to the usual FUD we get from Microsoft. I'm not deliberately trolling here, I like OSS and I also like Windows, but when I see the FUD and things like the underhand funding of SCO I don't like MS. It's like they don't want to compete on fair terms - maybe I'm just naieve and that's how business works. I hope not. I have to say about the user guide and it being printed, I have NEVER seen anyone read it. No exageration. Never. Ever. Maybe you should do a poll, you could save money by not printing it :)

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

a. — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 18:31:00 GMT

geeks doesn't read it. joe user does.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Eric Lippert — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 19:01:00 GMT

> Eric seem to be arguing (please correct me if I am wrong)"How do we pay for peoples effort if we give everything away"? No, I'm certainly not arguing that. Perhaps Raymond is, but I am not. I realize that there are companies that pay people to work on open source. My argument is that IF you are in the business of writing software that is to be used by millions of people around the world, THEN the primary cost of implementing that software is NOT in the implementation. The cost is in the design, the review, the documentation, the testing, the maintenance, the support calls, etc. Whether your business model calls for selling that software or -- as we did with the script engines for the last seven years -- giving it away for free, whether the source is open or closed, has not the least bearing on my point. Does the open source model work well for one-off changes that will be distributed to one person? Obviously. But that's not the kind of change I'm talking about.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Dan Isaacs — Sun, 02 Nov 2003 07:35:00 GMT

Opportunity costs are hypothetical. "Stealing" refers to the act of depriving someone of actual property. As a hypothetical is not actual property, "stealing" is a poor word to use in your last paragraph. Better to let the facts stand up for themeselves instead of concluding with a false characterization.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Eric Lippert — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 05:54:00 GMT

> Better to let the facts stand up for themeselves Actually, "facts" are abstract entities which do not have legs. So they can't really "stand up" for themselves. That's kind of a poor choice of words, wouldn't you say? Fortunately, by using my advanced skills in inference I can probably figure out what you intended by your imprecise and colloquial expression. :-)

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Andrew — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 15:14:00 GMT

You can tell that these are only techs reading this because hey guys! (particularly Robert, etc) - End-users don't want half-baked software!!! While as a dev, I would gladly rather have the software do what I wanted it to, I would also rather have it do what it can do (without causing more problems), and allow me to change its behaviour. Just because Tech Guy down the street can change the behaviour of an application doesn't mean that all end-users can. We, in the tech community, are in a position where we not only "see" the final result but also see how its made and can affect change. End-users, although this attitude is sometimes changing, don't care how it works - they just want it to. When I ask the time, I don't want to know how to build a clock nor how to fix the clock - I just want the clock to tell me the time. Open Source isn't a solution for the problem mentioned above- it's simply another take on it.

RE: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 12:00:00 GMT

"Just because Tech Guy down the street can change the behaviour of an application doesn't mean that all end-users can." Admittedly not, but at least they would have the opportunity to pay/hire someone to do it for them. If I want someone to add something to my house heating system, I want *ANYONE* with the skills to fix it to be able to fix it, I don't want to be FORCED to go back to the original installer ....

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re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Rj — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 13:19:00 GMT

So the Answer is "41 at a minimum"?

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re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Patrick Schmid — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 10:28:46 GMT

Eric,

just wanted to make sure you saw my response to your comment on my blog:
well deserved feedback. I remember vividly that I made the argument that a certain bug fix for Outlook 2007 would only be a few lines of code (I stopped short of volunteering to write the code for the devs) without knowing how much other work would be associated with those few lines.

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

David — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:46:09 GMT

What if the user can't create an ActiveX object? Not becauser they can't code, but because they don't have access to the development environment, compiler, or sufficient authority to create and/or install the object? After all, VBScript (and JScript, VBA, WSH etc etc etc) is available to many more users than visual studio, or some other development tools.

You can argue that they should obtain the neccesary software/authority etc to develop ActiveX objects (and perhaps after 12 months the business case might get approved...). But a language that requires a business case to implement some needed functionality is essentially crippled.

I can say from personal experience that having a language not go "all the way" is as frustrating as the allusion implies.

Christopher J. Baker » How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

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re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

RK — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:03:37 GMT

So much about open source talk. Forgive me for my ignorance. Who uses open-source? I have heard everyone promoting it. Haven't seen anyone, at least in the develoment community that i have seen till date using any of those products. Let's not be hypocritical. You want to make something that people use, it costs. Listen nothing comes FREE.

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re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Yuhong Bao — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:34:07 GMT

Sounds so similar to bureaucracy!

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Blah — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:15:13 GMT

As much as I love Open Source software, this arguement (the one made by the article-writer) holds true for Open Source software, too. However, with Open Source software, you usually don't have the luxury of a Program Manager, multiple QA folks, etc all collaborating. It's usually you and maybe a couple other dedicated folks passionately working on something. You get done, you toss it out to users, and then tons of bugs show up that you never thougt about (who'd have thought the user's would stick the bulb outside in zero-degree weather...OOPS!) So, in my opinion, this is not an argument "for" Open Source software. Open Source software suffers from the same "how many does it take" syndrome.

Getting back to the article writer's point, you don't want to toss all kinds of one-off crap into your project, because then it bloats up the project. However, more and more projects opt for a foundation and then extensible scripting (EG: some video games, firefox, etc). Of course, if your project is nothing more than a scripting language (VBScript), then it's meant to be light-weight. So, yeah, suck it up and do the 5 lines of code yourself. If VBScript got bloated with everyone's "one-off" junk, it'd be such a cumbersome hodge-podge of stuff, nobody would use it (or complain about how complicated it's gotten.)

I think Bill Cosby said it best..."I don't know the secret to success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everyone."

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Blah — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:26:45 GMT

Lots of folks use open source. From the person who decides to use Open Office or Firefox, to the person who downloads a piddly little program or trainer to hack some game file so they can buff up their character. Software is so ubiquitious and easy to make these days, that folks think it has to cost tons of time and money to make it still. Open Source just means the source is viewable and (possibly) modifiable (depending on the license the author releases it under). Open Source isn't necessarily free in some cases...folks can let you see the source, but still charge you to use it or the compiled program. But, software isn't some commodity large corporations have sole entitlement to. It's like regular writing...anyone can do it, and lots of folks do. Whether you choose to buy a book from the store that has the info you want, or get the info for free from an internet site is a matter of choise. Free doesn't necessarily mean "bad" or "poor quality". However, in United States especially, folks think the more something costs the better it is. So, there's still a frown on Open Source and Freeware. It's like saying only the expensive Dealer can fix your car, because the shade-tree mechanic down the street doesn't know anything. On the contrary, the shade-tree mechanic may know a lot. Then again, he may not. There's a greater variance in quality with the shade-tree mechanic, but you can still get poor service from the Dealer. Quality is not a given just because you pay money for a product or service. And, inversely, poor quality is not a given just because you get something for free.

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re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

bob — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:10:05 GMT

I think the problem is that the development tools are not free. Writing and ActiveX extension as the author suggests shows great extensibility, however, if I have to spend $500 or $1000 to get the tools to do this then it's a non-starter.

Just one more reason Mac OS X with free developer tools is superior. :-)

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

David Parslow — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:24:30 GMT

The problem that Microsoft has is often scale! When you have millions of people that depend on your project changes that normally are done without a second thought are now all of a sudden very difficult. This is the huge dependency on product use. Divide the number of people using your product by the number of people making your product and you might get a better idea of the efficiency of your team (not the best metric I know but it helps with perspective). The second problem that is described is flow. Most of the time described in the many week process is waste due to time waiting on other people. If you had everyone in the same room then the task would be completed much faster. Open Source is great, but Open Source has the same problems at larger scales. These scale issues often cause the community to "fork" and that can make this better but can also cause fragmentation.

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

anonimous — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:06:30 GMT

It doesn't take a single employee to change a lightbulb, Bill Gates just redefines 'Darkness' as the new industry standard...

(it was in my englishbook bill...)

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Aakash — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:10:04 GMT

Love it!

I tired telling my managers how much time a little bug may take to fix and get on production. :-)

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Matthias — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:29:22 GMT

I can see the point you're making in the article. In fact this is why I value stuff coming from Redmond so much. It actually is tested, some API concerns are taken into account and above all one can actually find some real-life examples of how to use a particular part of the system.

No wonder it takes so much to implement such a trivial thing.

A note about open-source frameworks: they are great, even fantastic! But the best ones have extensive documentation and a fat set of examples. The ones that don't have that learning resources, even if they are best in the issues they are solving, are doomed to be used once, maybe twice.

re: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

Zbyszek — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:46:16 GMT

I totally agree with this article. People too often do not realise that a simply change can cause such a huge side effects. Our website is in 16 languages, we have accepted that some text (on some pages even majority) is not translated, because traslating it caused more grief than happines. For example translating some text caused grammatical errors (consider plural form - in English is easy, 1 photo, 2 or more photos, buut in Polish is 1 zdjecie, 2 zdjecia, 5 zdjec, 12 zdjec, but .. 22 zdjecia, however 21 zdjec, etc) and caused a flood of complains, which created an extra task of answering them, which ... costs time==money

@bob - of course you have free development tools (on MS platforms - Express editions, on Linux Eclipse, etc)

@open source supporters - I love some opensource stuff, but you must accept that if someone makes changes which are just for him they have to accept that the WHOLE modified product cannot be then properly supported, as their small change in the code might have a knock off effect in a very unexpected place. I have developed many libraries in my life and I know from the painful experience that you will get errors in totally unexpected places.

One the strangest erross we have had had a following scenario (code written in C, many years ago). User input was accepted as a number, including decimal comma. Then we introduced localization allowing decimal comma, routine was scanning a number changing comma to dot, like while(*ptr!=',') ptr++; *ptr='.'.

Of course once it happenned that users input did not have a comma and code (it was C!) was continuing happyly beyond array and ... found value 2c on the stack and converted it to 2e. It happenned to be return address, so as the effect next line after the call of this routine was not executed, and this skipped was a short jump out of the loop, so external loop executed once more and customer name was changed to something else. It took us almost two days to find this problem.