Does Microsft really care about you?

Short answer is, I am not sure. I admit that I work for the big brother and I enjoy what I do. But that doesn't mean I can't speak my mind. I have been watching Microsoft's moves in the last couple of years and nothing that I see tells me we are heading in the right direction. Does that mean it is going down? Not anytime soon. It is going through what IBM went through in the last couple of decades with and it would take a good few years before a major re-structuring happens like in IBM. Here is why?

1. Linux : "Your Potential, our passion", this is our mission and it sounds nice when you hear it. But does MS lives up to its expectation? No. In reality, it reads like "Your potential to be our desktop OS user is our passion. If you go for something else, screw you. We will do everything to make sure your experience is miserable". Microsoft's first and the greatest mistake is ignoring the linux. First it was a cancer to the society, and then officially became our main competetive threat.
   Why hate Linux so much? Instead, just like we made MS Office & IE available on the Mac, I would have loved if it jumped on the opportunity and built Office and its other flag ship applications for Linux. That would have shown its real passion and enabled many of our user's potential. Instead, we chose to fight for nothing. I see Linux as just another platform in which Microsoft has huge market opportunity which it missed entirely. I for one want Linux to be a mainstream OS so that users have a real choice instead of the choice of "XP Home"/"XP Pro"/"XP Starter Edition" etc. This is not what I call choice but a repackaging off the same stuff for a different price.
   


2. Internet Explorer: Everytime I think of how IE was handled, I feel pretty sick about how bad MS screwed it up. MS reacted to NetScape only because it saw a threat to Windows dominence. Once the battle was won, it ignored the product pretty much and moved on to other things. It just left the 95% or so users in limbo and didn't care to listen to their needs and improve on it and fix the damn security bugs. When one has this much market share and potential, you just don't turn your back and move on to other things when you claim to be passionate about software and its potential.
   


3. Product Quality: Microsoft's product quality is mediocre. It is not because it does not have the best minds and resources. It is because, it has compromised on quality in favor of more ship cycles and its thinking that investing in fixing the existing code does not give any return on investment. Fixing bugs in existing code is not a priority for us. Instead, adding more new (buggy) features are the mantra. With Microsoft products, bugs tend to live forever. (I proposed recently about fixing an ugly printing bug found in the product we just released in the new version we are working on and the asnwer I got was not to touch the code since it would mean testing investment etc etc. This is not just once and happens periodically.)
   You would think that product version X + 1 will not have the same bugs that were there in version X. You are wrong. Product X +1 version will have all the bugs that the previous version had plus more bugs. I am a developer and I can't tell you how many days I felt really bad about postponing bugs just because someone decided that it is not a mainstream scenario. The bad part is it doesn't get fixed in the future releases either.
4. Focus: I see a lack of focus overall in the company. MS seems to be in a lot of businesses where it shouldn't be. It is because the company is not seeing the impressive growth it had in the early ninties and is entering into anything and everything it can to show everyone that it could still keep the profits up. IBM did something similar before it shed its excessive unwanted fat (under Lou Gerstner) and focus on its core business. A better approach would be to spin off small companies that could work better and faster due to its smaller size. This is the focus on another MS employee's blog and I read his often with some interest.

I do want to work for a company that not only gives me challenging work but also embrace OS diversity just like it belives in diversity in people & culture. Few more years and if I don't see a change, I sure be the one to find opportunities elsewhere.

Microsoft has a long and tough road ahead. It hasn't been making any progress on embracing the OS diversity, customer interests and of course being the "Good" company.

Note: I made some edits on 2/18/05.