This blog article by Dare Obasanjo purports to give an insider’s view of how Microsoft might be a more desirable workplace environment than Google, in contrast to all the media portrayals about how working at Google is like being in a playground. In my own blog essay here, I would like to offer the view from the customer/pundit’s side about how Google compares to Microsoft in terms of their technology, marketing and business directions.
While I still overwhelmingly use open source technologies (primarily LAMP), changes in the way Microsoft presents its technologies mean that I no longer find myself averse to integrating with or adopting them in the near future. Gone is most of the closed, proprietary mindset which used to characterize Microsoft technologies and make them wholly unattractive to hardcore developers. Perhaps changes of such nature in the way MS is driving forward their technologies also reflects changes in their corporate culture, hence the reason behind Dare’s observations.
The biggest obstacle Microsoft faces however, is that it is saddled with so much ill will and baggage accumulated over the years, that many technically savvy people just take it for granted that they cannot come up with anything worthy - technologically speaking. The reality on the ground today is pretty different from that old stereotype. Technologies like IronPython and the DLR (both open sourced, by the way), now make .NET a very interesting and capable environment to operate in, certainly superior to Java [grudgingly open sourced very late in the game as an act of near desperation, by the way...] in many ways. Mono, despite heavy initial pessimism, actually saw the light of day and is now a useful, working, somewhat mature platform.
Other Microsoft technologies like Powershell (formerly codenamed Monad) just do not reap the mindshare they deserve. Powershell is MS’ answer to criticisms that the Windows command line is anemic compared to Unix shells, which _was_ most certainly true. Now however, the Windows command line arguably leapfrogs over current Unix shells’ functionality. Moreover, it manages to do so by adopting the most common Unix shell-isms (a sign that the Microsoft engineers involved in this effort are not afflicted with the NIH syndrome), preserving the familiarity of tried and tested conventions but supercharging them with a pipe-based paradigm that operates on .NET objects/properties instead of just plain text. This sort of innovation is on such a fundamental level that Powershell can be rightfully called a revolutionary advance for the command line interface / paradigm.
I have tried out Powershell and I have to say, that contrary to what one would usually expect from Microsoft and despite my own heavy bias against the OO paradigm, it is _not_ lame. We have heard talk of “[pervasively] Object Oriented OSes” ever since the 90s, back when Taligent and similar initiatives (both coporate and hobbyist) were being touted as the future. Now that .NET is increasingly being overlaid on top of Windows and other Microsoft technologies and having a tool like Powershell give immediate command line access to (more or less) uniformly inspect and manipulate a whole array of .NET objects in the environment, we are effectively there today.
On the hardware front, MS again suffers from lackluster marketing, Microsoft’s multi-touch vision is far more comprehensive than Apple’s and yet it is Apple’s piddling iPhone that reaps disproportionate media coverage. Sigh…
Google’s Android, a Frankenstein-ish stack made up of a deliberately incomplete, incompatible Java implementation running on top of the Linux kernel is the media darling of the moment (scaring Symbian into open sourcing their C++-based mobile device OS, hehe), while MS seems to be doing precious little to let people know of how Mobile Windows can leverage off of the now thriving .NET ecosystem.
Even as MS fails to score points on the marketing side despite what I would consider are far more enlightened efforts today compared to those of yesteryears (karmic retribution, perhaps?), I would say that they have definitely learned real lessons from their open source competition. Many of today’s MS initiatives have genuinely picked up the good traits of the OSS philosophy and should convince those with a more pragmatic bent (e.g. those who do not possess ideological or sentimental attachments to labels and ‘movements’) - to at least reconsider their alienation to MS-originated stuff, if not consider moving to it.
All the flak and lost market share Microsoft has had to [deservedly] endure over the years seems to have changed the company. What is ironic is that while many people still have the narrow-minded view that “MS is evil”, they fail to see that Google, due to its enormous success, is in fact starting to become like MS during the latter’s heydays. We justifiably loathe MS’ former business practices and the parade of lame-ass technologies they used to introduce by the score, but Google isn’t immune to this:
When it comes to online advertising, Google, like any business with a competent, capable CEO at the helm is clearly aiming to achieve as dominant a market share as it can (aka a “monopoly”), which, to lefties, would certainly count as “evil” behaviour.
Another similarity too is that Google, having a cash cow in the form of Adsense, as MS did in the form of MS-DOS, uses it to fund as many throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks projects as it can, and a lot of those projects are insipid indeed. [ Google Base?!? My god, could anything be more uninspired? Fire the guy who "conceptualized" it already! Gmail is ok, but you'd think with all the initial hype, it'd have at least come close to giving Yahoo Mail a run for its money, but up to now I don't think Gmail has even a tenth of the market share Yahoo Mail does. ]
Finally, there are significant numbers of people who blindly adopt and/or defend their technologies simply because of the brand name. Whereas you had “MS zombies” before, you’ve now got uncritical, raving, Google fanboys who think the “Google” name is a rubber-stamp for cool technology. MS was obviously unable to topple Google the way it did Netscape, and now when it comes to the new frontiers of cyberspace such as online advertising, MS is clearly the underdog, while Google, the 500-pound gorilla. Still, I don’t see MS going down that easily. In the face of truly stubborn competition like was the case with Linux, Microsoft has proven quite willing to redefine itself in major ways to stay relevant (but not necessarily dominate).
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