red hot placeThe long awaited update to MSN Spaces has finally released!
I think some of the really cool features are still turned off, but now there’s better Search, Spaces Profile, and Live Contacts. Personally, I love the fact that /members/ is gone from the URL. And you can now upload 500 photos a month (and I’ve heard the photo album thingy is much improved). Need to play with it a bit.
[ I haven’t been posting here as much as I would have liked to. It’s actually pretty tough to come up with posts that aren’t just regurgitations of other people’s posts or press releases. I will endeavour though. In the meantime, here’s a regurgitation: ]
From Carnage4Life:
… Microsoft’s corporate culture is very much about looking at an established market leader then building a competing product which is (i) integrated with a family of Microsoft products and (ii) fixes some of the weakneses in the competitors offerings. … New employees to Microsoft are sometimes frustrated by this aspect of Microsoft’s culture. For some it’s hard to acknowledge that working at Microsoft isn’t about building cool, new stuff but about building cooler versions of products offered by our competitors which integrate well with other Microsoft products. …
Right on the money. I can’t say that I’m a ‘new employee’ anymore, but this still bugs me (although I understand the business reasons to justify it). In one of my conversations with a manager I mentioned how frustrating this was–to see other products come out of the blue and to ask ourselves, ‘why didn’t we do that? we completely could have..’ and was told, "It’s the Microsoft way." We let other companies bake ideas; if those ideas get traction and start getting enough attention, then we’ll devote time and energy to it, to look at the weaknesses of said ideas and attempt to come out with a competing product that’s better, easier to use, and caters to the common person.
[Going slightly off topic now: ] When I was an intern back in Summer ’03, all the interns under Blake had a get-together/meeting with him. It was not too revealing, and afterwards, I e-mailed him asking why we didn’t jump on the blogging bandwagon to come out with a Blogger killer. (I don’t recall whether this was before or after Wallop was created, but it was definitely before Spaces had started hiring.) He said something about it not being something they were considering at the moment and it not being an area MSN wanted to invest in (this is just my swiss cheese of a memory talking; I’d have to dig up the mail somewhere to be sure of what he said). Now I completely understand not wanting to reveal anything to a lowly intern; in reality they were probably already thinking about how to invade that space. Eventually MSN came out with Spaces to bring blogging to the masses and it worked out quite well (save some recent availability issues). Blogger and others are far from dead, but Spaces doesn’t really cater to that audience.
Anyhow, what does The Microsoft Way mean for someone that wants to work on something new? (I’d guess a good number of people fit in this bucket.) It’s quite a shame.
red hot place 