March 25, 2006

19 Comments »

1. 

   Larry Osterman, a developer who’s worked at Microsoft for 21.5 years, laughs at the report that Microsoft would rewrite 60% of Vista in two months: “Anyone who’s ever worked on a project that involves more than a thousand or so lines of code understands how utterly laughable that is.”

   LOL. When Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin testified in the antitrust trial, under oath, that Internet Explorer was a part of Windows that couldn’t be removed, anybody with 15 years of coding experience at Microsoft would have recognized it was a lie. Why were Mr. Osterman and his experienced developer co-workers quiet then?

   Larry’s blog doesn’t make any claim as to whether 60% of Vista’s code needs a rewrite or not. It only states that 60% of Windows couldn’t be rewritten by January. Well, no duh. I guess if Vista ships in January, then there was no rewrite of 60% of the code. But that doesn’t mean a complete rewrite isn’t necessary or that Vista will ship before that is done.

   Comment by anon — March 25, 2006 @ 11:42 am

2. anon,
   It wasn’t a lie. The claim was that IE couldn’t be removed without breaking a TON of stuff, including a lot stuff in the OS. That statement was totally true. The help system was based on having a high quality HTML renderer built into the OS, as was a huge amount of the shell (most of the shell windows are actually written in html from what I can see). In addition there’s a HUGE 3rd party ecosystem that depends on having IE built-into the OS. For example, pulling IE from the OS would have broken many games, because the games pull update content from web sites and display it in IE (hosted within the game’s window).

   Comment by Larry Osterman — March 25, 2006 @ 3:30 pm

3. I think anon posting should be discouraged.. because it could be misused. Here I am glad to see Larry correcting it very quickly

   Comment by N. Venkat Venkatraman — March 25, 2006 @ 5:12 pm

4. 

   Larry, then why have Allchin stand up there and lie to the court with doctored videos? What is it about Microsoft that makes them act like some corporate Eddie Haskell? See, thanks to that, and Bill Gates suddenly turning into a Carlos Mencias routine on the stand…(The HEAD OF MICROSOFT barely knows HOW TO USE EMAIL??? DEE-DEDE!! YOU’RE RETARDED!)…no one trusts anyone from the Windows side of the house anymore, because it’s been shown time, after time, after time, that when the chips are down, Microsoft senior leadership quickly exude a slime coating and try to slide out of trouble. Maybe if they started acting more like adults, and in a more trustworthy fashion, they’d have a chance of undoing the damage they did from about 1995 - 2005.

   Oh Robert, since you’re all about being correct and all…Scott Byer didn’t say Adobe can’t release Intel versions of their applications. That statement is completely incorrect. What Scott did was talk about why they haven’t done it yet and why it makes little sense to make CS2 a universal Binary, so instead, CS 3 will be a Universal Binary, as will Lightroom, since it’s new enough that it would make no sense to not make it a Universal binary. So current versions for Mac OS X will not be Universal, but future versions will. That’s rather different than “Adobe can’t release Intel versions of all its applications”, which is what you said.

   So your statement makes it sound like Adobe is incapable of doing UB’s. Of course, that’s not true, and you’ll correct that asap, right?

   Comment by John C. Welch — March 25, 2006 @ 5:51 pm

5. 

   One other thing…Larry, there’s a difference between the HTML rendering engine, i.e. Gecko, WebKit, Tasman, KHTML, etc, and IE the *application*.

   If you mean that yanking the HTML rendering engine would have been bad, sure, that makes perfect sense. But if you’re trying to say there’s no difference whatsoever between removing IE and removing the rendering engine, that’s just silly, and it means you guys have done something really silly. i can yank Safari off of Mac OS X, and at most a couple of Applescripts might fail. That’s it. WebKit and WebCore are still there for use by all the applications who use them, such as BBEdit, Ecto, etc.

   Perhaps if Microsoft hadn’t tried to make it sound like there was no way to separate the application from the engine, they wouldn’t have sounded as dumb as they did.

   Comment by John C. Welch — March 25, 2006 @ 6:00 pm

6. Welch,

   yea but once you have the rendering system, IE is just a window with menus to access it. (anyone could have made a browser in visual basic in 5 minutes.) for that reason if they told them to remove the executable it would have been extremely silly. i think microsoft and the government though were interpreting IE to mean all of the technology and code behind the brower.

   Comment by Brian Shapiro — March 25, 2006 @ 6:10 pm

7. “Scott Byer, of Adobe, explains why Adobe can’t release Intel versions of all its applications.”

   Scoble, if you’d read his piece you’d know that in fact, he was talking about rewriting Adobe apps in their current versions, for free updates, vs. rewriting Adobe apps for their next versions, which will cost money. Adobe is certainly working on Intel versions of their entire suite. To think otherwise is just Microsoftie wishful thinking…

   Comment by Nate Green — March 25, 2006 @ 6:19 pm

8. Just saw that Welch had already corrected that Adobe issue…Sorry for the duplicate…

   Comment by Nate Green — March 25, 2006 @ 6:25 pm

9. John,
   IANAL. But it’s my understanding from reading the documents at the time that the government was asking for the entire rendering engine to be removed, not just the IEXPLORE.EXE stub launcher.

   Comment by Larry Osterman — March 25, 2006 @ 7:41 pm

10. 

    IE is no more “just a window with menus” than Safari is. If that were even remotely true, then the entire non-HTML engine IE team could be a college intern with a copy of VS2005 and a spare hour or two a day.

    IE is a product that uses the HTML rendering engine and other OS tech for its functions. It is a *hell* of a lot more than “just a window with menus”.

    Comment by John C. Welch — March 25, 2006 @ 7:46 pm

11. 

    Larry,

    If so, it’s understandable, considering Microsoft’s corporate behavior. Again, when you present yourself in a shady, not trustworthy light, you aren’t trusted. Had Microsoft simply come out with a great product, and left all the BS in the trash where it belonged, (You have to pay us for windows even if you don’t install it on the system, etc.), and behaved in a forthright manner, they would have had far less problems. Instead, Bill, Steve, and the Brads managed to look like complete lying slimeballs, and are just so shocked that people don’t trust them.

    When you doctor videos, that’s called lying and when you lie constantly people don’t believe you, especially when you reward people who lie by giving them promotions.

    Given Microsoft’s history, and even current behavior to non-MS platforms, why should anyone believe anything they say beyond shipping product?

    Comment by John C. Welch — March 25, 2006 @ 7:51 pm

12. So, when Microsoft said at Gnomedex they were going to support XML throughout Vista, what they really meant was they’re going to launch a Vista Media Center thingee that won’t even be part of the Vista Media Center product - let alone the version of Vista most people will buy? What am I missing?

    Paul

    Comment by Paul Colligan — March 26, 2006 @ 1:21 am

13. What a gag watching you guys argue… If you don’t like a company then don’t use their products. What god are any of you to judge someone else? Have none of you ever lied? Can you claim you know how it feels to be in someone else shoes? I have no illusions that anyone will care about my post, what makes you think anyone gives a crap about yours? Scoble is a microsoft employee, I think you might have come to the wrong site.

    Comment by mattd — March 26, 2006 @ 1:45 am

14. […] I got mentioned at Scobleizer!! Today I suddenly got suprised with congratulations…I was like why, what did I do?It seems that Mr. Rober Scoble likes my name..he mentioned my “Blogname” and blogitem about RSS on his blog: http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/25/a-bunch-of-stuff/ I hope Scoble and everybody else do not only like my name but also like my items and stuff i put onhere. I am going to stay a long time so you got no choice!!! Filed Under: 12. Off Topic […]

    Pingback by A Freaky Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Blog : I got mentioned at Scobleizer!! — March 26, 2006 @ 2:31 am

15. Allchin and Gates were claiming Internet Explorer had to ship with Windows because it was inextricably tied to the shell. That’s just not true. Microsoft could have included their HTML rendering libraries if they wished so that apps could have an HTML rendering framework and their beloved games wouldn’t have broken. The issue was that Microsoft lied about the actual browser application being required by Windows and not allowed to be uninstalled or replaced with something else. Internet Explorer is just an application that calls Microsoft’s rendering libraries and wasn’t tied to the shell at all. It was bogus.

    This clarification over what was said is necessary because the only reason the browser was forced to be included was to kill the Netscape and web threats and tie people to IE, and therefore, Windows.

    Comment by bonch — March 26, 2006 @ 6:25 am

16. As a side note, it’s interesting that Microsoft employees continue to claim the defense that was used during the trial, even after that trial already concluded and sided against them years ago. Surely there’s some PR policy that employees aren’t allowed to speak out on this issue since legally, they’re still supposed to be complying with the verdict, correct?

    Comment by bonch — March 26, 2006 @ 6:30 am

17. 

    John: this is a case of typing a bit too fast. When I said “release” I meant today. Anyone could see what was meant. But, I am fixing it to make it clearer.

    Comment by scobleizer — March 26, 2006 @ 5:24 pm

18. 

    Robert,

    This is text. Not human interaction. The only thing that the reader is responsible for is reading your words, and the explicit meaning they carry. To ask anyone to “know what you mean” is ridiculous. If people carry away the wrong message from what you write, that’s a sign that you aren’t being explicit enough.

    The fact that I wasn’t the only person to point this out should have been a hint that you wrote it up incorrectly. What, is there something in the water at Microsoft that makes simple admission of error and contriteness impossible? Stop trying to justify it by saying “Anyone could see what was meant”, because no, they couldn’t until they clicked on the link. Sheesh.

    But thank you for fixing it, it’s accurate and correct now.

    Comment by John C. Welch — March 26, 2006 @ 6:22 pm

19. RSS for MS CRM

    Microsoft just released some sample code with which to create RSS feeds from Microsoft CRM. I think this is a great development and provides a lot of value to users of the product. Being able to subscribe to a feed for a particular person, or class of…

    Trackback by High Context Consulting — March 27, 2006 @ 3:43 pm

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