The Problem with Microsoft is Management, Not Developers
I have decided, after reading Sriram Krishnan’s wonderful post on MSDN about “Lisp is sin“, that Microsoft does have incredible developers and thinkers in their crew. I want to be as smart as Sriram some day.
However, reading this entry got me thinking about why these type of developers and the type of innovation this developer is obviously capable of is not being shown to the outside world? Could it be that a lot of Sriram’s peers aren’t in the Windows world at all? That, at the end of the day, we assume Windows developers are more Morts than anything else and don’t expect much from them, regardless of the great technology Microsoft throws their way.
It might also be the case that this whole Mort, Elvis, Einstein thing is a sign of arrogance in Microsoft’s developer ranks that shouldn’t be encouraged. Read Wesner’s blog posting and see how it rubs you. It rubs me the wrong way.
January 27th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Thanks for the compliments
I want to clarify two things
- The Mort, Elvis and Einstein personas comes from a lot of research, talking to our customers,etc. We didn’t pull them out of thin air
- They’re not about blocking people or assuming that they’re not good programmers. It’s about making sure that features are usable by all types of programmers, irrespective of their interest and experience in programming.
If we didnt have it, we as developers would create features usable by developers like us. But there are a lot of developers who are not like us - who have different priorities, interests,etc. We have a responsibility towards them as well.
A good analogy would be movies. Not all movies are for everyone. If movie makers made movies based on how they are rather than what people like, it wouldnt make much sense would it?
Another example would be a lot of music today. I hate boybands - but I know a lot of people like it. If I were a record company, I have a responsibility towards *all* my customers.
Btw - Wesner Moise doesn’t talk about Windows devs being Morts - he was talking about VB developers. That is a generalization - we usually try to take all personas into consideration for any feature - across languages.
Sriram Krishnan