When good ideas look bad

re: When good ideas look bad

Shane King — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 09:07:00 GMT

Why not just ship the code, with a warning it may be insecure, and they should only use it on documents from a trusted source? Lets face it, a converter from some obscure document format that most users have probably never heard of, let alone have the converter installed, isn't really a very likely attack vector for a bad guy to choose.

re: When good ideas look bad

ed — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 16:13:00 GMT

To the end user its all the same. Why should I trust Microsoft's closed source converter instead of Foo Inc's closed source converter? No really...

re: When good ideas look bad

Karen Mazner — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 03:23:00 GMT

I think Jeremy's analysis of this situation is brilliant and insightful.

re: When good ideas look bad

Marc Cohen — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 00:54:00 GMT

Hi Jeremy, I'm the prof who started all this about converters. Your explanation about the code and security issues was very informative. And I think you are right that a few more informative sentences in the KB would have helped a lot. (I often have a lot of trouble with KB articles that are obscure even to reasonably smart people with a lot of experience as computer users but who are not techies.

As for the WordPerfect converters, I can hardly believe that the MS view is that these are not really needed. A large percentage of the legal community still uses it. Last year I had some dealings with a lawyer in Chicago which involved sending documents back and forth with new edits. He sent me WP files, I worked on them in Word, and then routinely converted them back to WP to send to him. I suppose I could have left it up to him to read the Word files and convert them, but why should I have to have confidence in someone else's software to do this?

At any rate, I'm glad there's someone at MS that takes these customer concerns seriously.

Marc

Riding Herd — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 21:19:00 GMT

Ed Kaim — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 02:56:00 GMT

Ed Kaim — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 02:59:00 GMT

When good ideas go bad

Dennis T Cheung's Microsoft Blog — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 04:17:00 GMT

re: When good ideas look bad

Androidi — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 07:26:00 GMT

Good "story", and there's definetely a point to it:

There is a lot of KB/MSDN documentation around that could benefit of having atleast a link to more indepth talk about why something is like it is or why some things should/shouldn't be used in particular way(s).

If it could be shortly explained it could be just included in the same page. A great feature, seen on php.net for example, is the ability for users/customers comment directly on documentation, in php.net, often the answer to particular problem is in the user comments, and if someone posts a bad example, there's soon people pointing this out. If it works so well for others, why would it not work with MSDN (maybe even KB)? If (>x) people from different networks tag a particular comment as spam/bad, it could perhaps be auto-hidden. Self-managing comments? There's a lot of algorithms to deal with spam etc, but looking at Outlook, it seems MS needs more people working on this department.

Late night thoughts on customer care (by yag)

VS DATA Team's WebLog — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 11:47:00 GMT

re: When good ideas look bad

Vijaya Kittu M — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 07:07:00 GMT

I am into content design few years ago and this kinds of problem often come across in content when one web page gives an old info while a new one at a different location gives in the newer info.

The best way is that the content team (or the KB team in this case) is to put a relevent searches / relevent pages that link to the pages that could probably give more newer info. This way, the reader can go through all the pages (old and new) and judge himself (without getting angry).

re: When good ideas look bad

Charles — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 21:59:00 GMT

Wouldn't have to make converters if the specs were made public for the ever changing DOC format...

re: When good ideas look bad

Brian — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 00:01:00 GMT

Who are you trying to kid? Are you seriously trying to convince people that WordPerfect 6x converters aren't needed, when there are 15,000,000 customers still using WordPerfect?

Get real. How naïve do you think people are?

WPUniverse

TrackBack — Sun, 25 Apr 2004 19:59:00 GMT

WPUniverse

re: When good ideas look bad

Don — Sun, 25 Apr 2004 21:17:00 GMT

I second Brian's motion.

Office 97 came out how many years ago? The WordPerfectWin file format has changed only slightly since 6.x. I happened to look at the WPWin SDK yesterday, which sets out the file format. Gobbledy-gook to me, since I'm not a programmer, but surely there's enough programming talent at MSFT to take those specs and write the converter even if you can't trust an outside source DLL.

Isn't everyone using Windows a customer of Microsoft? If you're serving the "customers", why can't/doesn't the richest software company provide a conversion filter for another wordprocessing product used by those customers.

MSFT has $51 billion in cash. What would writing those converters have cost (in development and maintenance time and presumedly lost Word sales) out of that cash? A million or two? My last machine came pre-loaded with Word; you have to go out of your way to avoid it.

By not providing the converters, you pass on to your customers, who are said to be important to you, costs in excess of what MSFT would bear, with the back and forthing an earlier poster described.

re: When good ideas look bad

Jeremy — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 16:47:00 GMT

we are listening to this feedback, and as I mentioned in the post, the Office team has already told me they are gathering customer feedback on whether they made the right decision.

Don, I understand that from the outside it's easy think that $51B buys a lot of converters ;) But there are tradeoffs here, and not every engineering project can be made better by adding more people and money. A few of the considerations:

Product bloat. There are some who complain that MS products are too big and filled with stuff that only a fraction of users care about. Every time we add a feature, we try to evaluate how broadly it will be used.

Scheduling. Even if a feature makes sense, it has to fit in with the overall product schedule. You don't want to be stuck holding up a Beta or RTM because one feature took two weeks longer to finish up.

Testing. It might not take long to code up a converter, but the test burden is enormous. To hit the quality that users will expect, you'd have to test a huge variety of documents, each of which isolates a particular layout, formatting or language feature of the app, then export that file, open it in the other app, and visually compare the results. That's a significant test burden which can't be automated, and if you've got testers working on that, they can't be spending their time elsewhere. Not only that, but the test matrix only increases as other new features are added to the project, so you end up with this exponential growth of test cases. As a general rule, any time someone responds to an engieering dilemna by saying "just add x more people to the team," it's a sign you're in trouble.

Resources. That $51B is an asset that belongs to Microsoft shareholders, and management doesn't hand it out without a solid business justification. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get an extra headcount added to a project here. It would take a very well thought out plan, showing the impact/tradeoffs on bloat, scheduling and testing, as well as customer demand, to get funding for a new project.

So those are perhaps a few of the things the Office team has to take into consideration. Your feedback is part of the equation -- I'd suggest sending feedback to Chris Pratley (http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley) via his blog to let him know how much you value WordPerfect exporters.

re: When good ideas look bad

Brian — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 21:02:00 GMT

Yeah, I can *clearly* see how creating WordPerfect converters isn't in Microsoft's shareholders' interest.

Product Bloat? Excuse me, but a user has to CHOOSE to install the WordPerfect converter. How is an optional converter Product Bloat?

re: When good ideas look bad

charles — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 00:28:00 GMT

Jeremy,
But keep this in mind: Your response on Product bloat... applies to many ISVs
Scheduling... same
Testing... same
Resources... same (except for the $ amount available)

The main difference I can see (having been on the inside and the ouside)... is choices: MS has the choice, Yes/No doesn't really matter they dominate anyway...

for the rest of the ISVs... choice is very limited: Yes, we have to do it as per MS or we die...

re: When good ideas look bad

Jeremy — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 22:33:00 GMT

For some real background on how the Word team goes about doing feature design, from the guy who now leads that team, see http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/04/27/120944.aspx

re: When good ideas look bad

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