And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

re: Transparency and accountablility...

WebGk.com — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 15:00:49 GMT

I am glad to hear it from you that you are moving towards greater transparency and accountability. That's a great and perfect direction which will make a huge impact on Micro$ofties. I would suggest to participate actively in the discussion boards other than Microsoft's. I guess you are already doing that. This will give you a better view about what others are expecting from MS. Great Post!

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Evan — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:08:05 GMT

I wouldnt worry too much about the haters. I shop at Walmart and drink coffee at Starbucks. They both have their haters too. (Although I do try and avoid Walmart like the plague)

As for specific teams at MS which aren't very transparent, I'm not really sure. I don't have a good handle on *what* teams exist, so it's hard to compare them.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Corey — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:38:43 GMT

Scott Guthrie and his team in my opinion do a very good job. Can't wait for MVC!

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Peter Ritchie — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:15:43 GMT

For me the Office team is the least transparent/responsive of the MSFT products I've had to deal with. IE is a very close second.

Most responsive... That's hard, there's so many good teams. Visual Studio PowerToys, Codeplex and ASP.NET would be some at the top of that list.

But, I don't know if pointing fingers is all that useful. I think the groups that aren't transparent know they're not responsive (either for reasons of their own or they just don't care). I think it would be more productive to ask: of the teams you find least transparent, what qualities do they possess that make them opaque and unresponsive? And, of the teams you find most transparent and responsive, what are the qualities that you find make them transparent and responsive? From there you can begin to create metrics to gauge the success/failure of any group with regard to transparency and responsiveness. You can also use those metrics when new groups are spinning up to ensure they are transparent and responsive from the start.

Some opaque/unresponsive traits of MSFT groups:

* Although providing a means of gather feedback (bugs/suggestions), the vast majority of feedback is not used.

* Make it very hard to provide feedback.

* Avenues of providing feedback are always after some opaque milestone that means 99% of the feedback cannot be acted upon until vNext.

* Customer feedback for vNext is not managed properly and results in never being acted upon (other than staying in some vNext pool).

* Have a tag-as-unreproducible-then-ask-questions-later experience with many customers.

Some transparent/responsiveness traits of groups at MSFT:

* Involve customers at all stages so all types of feedback can be acted upon.

* Provide a responsive means of gathering, managing, and round-tripping customer feedback.

* Provide dedicated staff to managing customer feedback.

* Don't become a black-hole and begin a death-march towards release. (i.e. as release approaches resources are allocated to that release to exclusion of all other priorities, like transparency and responsiveness)

* Are responsive to all supported releases, not just the release with all the marketing dollars or the majority of engineering staff.

For opaque groups they often have a better reputation than groups that attempt to be transparent and responsive but completely fail to follow-through. Connect is a good example of that, for many people, they view it as a complete waste of time because while Connect offers the ability to provide feedback, the follow-through experience is horrible. Many people have simply given up on Connect as a valid way of providing feedback because of it. Some just view it as a way of implicit opaqueness--it's not the product group that is opaque anymore, it's the Connect group.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Mike — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:47:08 GMT

You guys are doing a great job at opening up, if you want to do better you could start providing more details and timelines for future products, better samples, continuity, fixes, polish.

Future

The best example I have is Silverlight, a truly revolutionary product. However the lack of UI controls is crippling. This has been discussed in the Silverlight forums and in many blogs, and the team rarely chimes in, it’s just a bunch of users speculating. This is a big problem for ISV’s that need to plan. Silverlight is especially annoying as it is a subset of WPF so why not just disclose the details of the subset even if it’s subject to change, we certainly understand.

Samples

Another area that could use some improvement is real-world examples of solutions to complex problems, even with entlib many of the examples are simple and don’t convey the benefits of the framework. A pack of VS solutions that evolve into a complex app stating the how and why would be great across the board.

Continuity

How about consistent databinding across platforms, it’s seems as if the left hand in unaware of what the right hand is doing.

Fixes

For years web developers begged and petitioned to get the PNG alpha problem fixed in IE6 as we resorted to hacks. This is huge, here is a browser that has 60% penetration, and a major flaw, and it was NEVER fixed. This is scary stuff, the devs spoke and were ignored.

Polish

In IE7 we have tabbed browsing, great, however you must select a tab before you can close it via the X. I know from experience that this may change in 5 years when a new browser is released but not a minute before. So another suggestion is to polish software as you release patches.

We are a Microsoft Certified Partner, and love all the great innovation and newfound openness the above issues would make working on Microsoft platforms that much sweeter.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Klaus — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:39:11 GMT

My votes are:

Least transparent: The IE team and the RSS team. (What are the plan for the platforms right now?)

Most transparent: All things relating to .NET.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

WebGk.com — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:07:01 GMT

I don't understand this part "being rigid or least transparent". Is there any reason to be least transparent? Or are they in fear of losing the hold?

May be lack of transparency indeed is a problem .... But

MS developer — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:22:01 GMT

Yeah, it is true that MS is openning up and and having a dialogue with customers. And there may be ppl at MS that do not like the change. But in my opinion, this isnt the exact problem ... (the problem: looking MS as Micro$oft!) ... It is that the MS's business practices! Need examples?

---The way it tried to get its new Office file format ISO certified

---Business practices ..

---Less/Non Compliance with open standards ..

---Nagging anti piracy measures...

---Monopoly..

These are the real reasons!

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Brennan Stehling — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:41:01 GMT

Perhaps I am biased because lately I have been working on Visual Studio Extensibility, but I have found the lack of response from the VSX Team Blog to be disappointing. I have posted questions to the VSX forums as well with no response. I just gave a presentation to the local .NET User Group this past week on VSX and CoDe Magazine just published an issue dedicated to VSX and leading up the presentation I could not get a single response from contacting the owner of the VSX Team Blog or the forums. Given that VS 2008 is being prepared as a shell for extensibility I would expect a better community presence and involvement.

Beyond that I have received great responses from the ASP.NET side of things. I usually participate in the forums. Most of the time I go into the forums to answer questions but when I do ask questions I can expect a response within a day or two.

FYI, here is a post I put up after my presentation this past week.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2007/10/17/code-generation-software-factories-and-visual-studio-extensibility/

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

noocyte — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:38:41 GMT

I would definately nominate the Visual Studio Team System guys as most transparent/open to feedback. They actually release specs before the were implemented and so they were still able to respond to feedback. Excellent!

As the least transparent team I'd nominate IE, Windows and Office.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

lynn — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:21:21 GMT

The .net team does a really good job of blogging. But look at the top of that unit - Scott Gu leads the way.

The IE and Windows teams are a disappointment. Maybe for good reason at this time considering the Longhorn disaster - but some word from them would be nice.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Bas — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:00:39 GMT

From a developer perspective the company is wonderfull. They put a lot of education out there and the virtual labs for .net 3.0 were amazing. The idea that they jsut give you a virtual pc to play around w/ new features is fantastic.

I think that the closer you get to the end user, the more problems you run into for communication.

As for the people that hate microsoft. You won't change it, this is a fundemantal part of their faith. they beleive that microsoft is evil and will interpet everything in that light. And if you argue you have to realize that you are starting something like a religous argument.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Will A — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:07:41 GMT

Any of the teams that blog often are usually the best transparent. They give examples of problems that they are currently facing, and solutions to problems they encountered in the past.

I believe that Michael Kaplan (International Fundamentals Team), Microsoft’s UK team, Larry Osterman, Eric Lippert, G. Andrew Duthie, Mdocter (BizTalk Adapter), etc… are good examples of transparency.

The Office Team, should be more transparent.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

sbotros — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:31:34 GMT

OK, I actually love the M$ thing... I love the aggressive business attitude; survival of the fittest in this jungle, and if the competitors dont like it, that means its working!

I am a programmer and I was technology-neutral coming out of uni, just happened to get a job using VC++ in a M$ shop, it could have been a java job in a unix shop, did not matter to me just needed a job to get married.

I have been with M$ technology ever since and it has served me and my family very well. And now I am biased, the M$ business model is FANTASTIC and a success (you guys still making good $$$ yeah? :)

And YOU HAVE given back to the community, YOU HAVE embraced educated enhanced elevated the community, and that also is a very good business attitude

And all that aside your technology is marvelous, every bit of it.

I want a T-shirt that says M$ cause I will wear it with pride. When I happen into an M$ hater rambling nonsense, I smirk and feel good.

As to my vote: hats off to Scott Guthrie & Co, and I love The Architecture Journal

Transparency is in the eye of the beholder

My Technobabble — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:12:31 GMT

My former colleague Tom is always addressing some very interesting issues. Today he decided to broach

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

MichaelD! — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:40:51 GMT

I <3 the MSDN Forums. You can see which team really cares about their products based on the amount of Green Checks vs. Red.

That is, check out MSBuild's Forum as opposed to ADO.NETvNext's. There's no comparison.

(As such, it would be nice to see Silverlight forums ported over to MSDN... not sure why different teams are using different forum software in 2007...)

And as such, I would recommend looking into the management of the ADO.NETvNext's team. They are incredible/amazing/wonderful in how they go about getting feedback, interacting with customers, and being on top of any issue that pops up. They are something else.

As for "haters," it's a side effect of success. Deal with it. :) (Mike's post is dead on).

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Oran — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:23:54 GMT

Dude, didn't you get the memo? "Transparency" is from the old guard. Under Sinofsky, the politically correct word is "translucency." Good luck swimming upstream with people like him getting promoted. :(

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=627

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

bri189a — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:23:19 GMT

I think Microsoft has done a great job overall. I found a few things flawed, but my biggest concern with Microsoft lately is that they are listening 'too much' to the purists and fundamentalists. Being black box isn't a bad thing - you should let the light in every now and then, but don't leave the door wide open.

Take for example this MVC thing. UIP was MVC, and let's face it, while theoretically a great concept, many organizations that I've worked with or had colleagues that worked with had problems with it in practice (sorry Tom) because the Morts out there just couldn't conceptualize the idea and the Einstiens out there over-architected there systems implementing it when it didn't need to be (because MVC is the flavor of the last year or so (now that Factory is off the front line); while a few of the Elvis' out there (such as Brian Noyes) could come in and say how to do it right, there just aren't a lot of those around.

So why then, is the ASP team, after having P&P do UIP twice, then WF, go and now build an MVC pattern into ASP.NET? I really think the people who are so hyped up on this should go find someone (such as I did) that worked with the real and original MVC in Small Talk and find out how MVC came about. And then, after they think about it, they'll see that using MVC in ASP.NET is more of an anti-pattern then it is a pattern to be built upon because the problems MVC was trying to solve in Small Talk is not the problem people are trying to solve in ASP.NET. People I think in general don't understand what patterns are for because they just look at the pretty pictures in Fowler's and the GoF book and 'known usages' rather than analyzing the pattern and understanding when to and when not to use it.

My fear is that if Microsoft continues to listen 'too much' to the community they are going to encounter all the problems and reasons I've (and many I work with) left pursuing the Java world - too many cooks in the kitchen - too much design for endless 'what if' scenarios - too much trying to make everybody happy.

re: May be lack of transparency indeed is a problem .... But

developer MS and non-MS — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:07:40 GMT

MS developer's post "May be lack of transparency indeed is a problem .... But" is exactly why we have a strong opinion against Microsoft.

Honestly I think Enterprise Library is a great product, but the license agreement stating that you can only use it on Microsoft Windows is exactly like Microsoft's lock-in approach, you have to use our products, only our products, regardless if they are not as good. No mixing. Its either only us or not us at all. It is this attitude that pisses us off. I think competition is good, not monopoly, forcing a product down other people's throats.

Back to EL for a moment. I code in CL (.NET, Mono), and want my applications to be cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), and would love to use EL in my applications, but with EL's license I have to make a choice between being tied to Windows or being cross-platform and not using EL.

Microsoft isn't the only Monopoly offender, Apple does the same thing. I like Mac OS X, but let me buy my own hardware, don't force me to pay exorbitant prices for your hardware. I would use Mac OS X if I could install it on my own hardware.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

tomholl — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:52:49 GMT

developer: Actually you seem to be talking about lock-in, not monopolies, but I get your point - and lock-in is one of the major reasons why I do not use any Apple products. While I understand your perspective around the licence clause in EntLib, I encourage you to look at it from Microsoft's perspective too. MS spends literally millions of dollars each year developing p&p deliverables and gives it all away for free. The business model behind this is that we want people who choose our products (eg Windows Server) to be more successful, so they will keep using/buying it. The company couldn't justify this amount of R&D without confidence it will result in product sales, unless the deliverables had a revenue stream of their own.

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

si — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:06:27 GMT

Using the word "blemishes" is pretty funny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

I read slashdot so I guess that makes me in the M$ camp huh?. Problem is I love most of the .NET tech (ASP.NET webforms excluded), hmmm, what's a coder to do?

re: And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...

Josh Berke — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:31:39 GMT

Most Transperant: Most of the .net teams (especially ASP.Net), there was a ton of exposure around the latest release of Visual Studio which I thought was fantastic.

IIS7 has also had decent exposure. But more samples and more detailed info would have been better.

Least Transperant: IE & Office