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Someone at Microsoft forwarded me a link to danah boyd's announcement, I will be joining Microsoft Research in January where she writes

Guess who has a post-dissertation job? [Yes, that implies I'm actually going to finish this *#$@! dissertation.] ::bounce:: In January, I will be joining the newly minted Microsoft Research New England in Boston, MA. w00000t!!!!! I couldn't be more ecstatic.
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It all began with Dopplr. Linda Stone noticed that I was swinging through Seattle and she called me up and told me that I had to do dinner with her. Linda's plots are always tremendous so of course I said yes. When I arrived, she introduced me to Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs, the physicists who were starting the new MSR lab. Jennifer immediately began interrogating me about my research and about social science more broadly. To say Jennifer & I clicked is a bit of an understatement. Like me, Jennifer is loud, crazy, and intense. We got along like peas in a pod and spent the night chattering away. When she told me that I should come work for her, I laughed it off and didn't think much about it. But I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Jennifer and Christian's vision for the lab aligned with my view of research. They believe in interdisciplinary work, believe in the ways that new ideas can come from unexpected collaborations. While I know a lot of social scientists who curl their nose at the idea of a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and economists, I find that quite appealing. I love the idea of such a diverse group thinking about how the world works from different angles. Plus, meeting the folks at the new lab - Henry Cohn, Yael Kalai, Adam Kalai, and Butler Lampson - only made me more intrigued by it. Everyone was so ridiculously nice and even though we didn't work on the same problems we found funny intersections.

The more that I talked with folks at MSR, the more I fell in love with the possibility of going there. And then I started meeting with execs and realized that what MSR researchers were telling me fit with broader strategy. I met with Rick Rashid, the head of MSR, who explained why he started MSR and how he saw it fit into the company. I met with Ray Ozzie (who I've known and adored for quite some time) and he confirmed the importance of research for the future of Microsoft. Both of them made me feel fully confident that my approach to research would not only be tolerated but welcomed. Plus, there's a broad desire to understand the intersections between computing and all things social which is straight up my alley.

Congratulations to danah, I've always loved her research and I'm glad to see that she will continue contributing to the industry as a part of Microsoft Research. She is one of the few people out there doing real research into how social software is changing the lives of people on the Web and I'm glad Microsoft can be a part of that effort.

Besides her research papers, danah also have some interesting insights into the current goings on in the world of social networking sites like her post Facebook and Techcrunch: the costs of technological determinism and configuring users on Facebook's continued determination to delete user accounts that don't conform to the company's beliefs about how the site should be used. Her post knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation which points out some of the shortcomings of Google's Knol when compared to Wikipedia is also another great recent post of note.

Good luck with the new job, danah.

Now Playing: Rascal Flatts - My Wish

Recently I’ve been bumping into more and more people who’ve either left Google to come to Microsoft or got offers from both companies and picked Microsoft over Google. I believe this is part of a larger trend especially since I’ve seen lots of people who left the company for “greener pastures” return in the past year (at least 8 people I know personally have rejoined) . However in this blog post I’ll stick to talking about people who’ve chosen Microsoft over Google.

First of all there’s the post by Sergey Solyanik entitled Back to Microsoft where he primarily gripes about the culture and lack of career development at Google, some key excerpts are

Last week I left Google to go back to Microsoft, where I started this Monday (and so not surprisingly, I was too busy to blog about it)
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So why did I leave?

There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.

I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.
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Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc)
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This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.

On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly…On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more
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The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.
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The second reason I left Google was because I realized that I am not excited by the individual contributor role any more, and I don't want to become a manager at Google.

The Google Manager is a very interesting phenomenon. On one hand, they usually have a LOT of people from different businesses reporting to them, and are perennially very busy.

On the other hand, in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they were doing. The better manager that I had collected feedback from my peers and gave it to me. There was no other (observable by me) impact on Google. The worse manager that I had did not do even that, so for me as a manager he was a complete no-op. I asked quite a few other engineers from senior to senior staff levels that had spent far more time at Google than I, and they didn't know either. I am not making this up!

Sergey isn’t the only senior engineer I know who  has contributed significantly to Google projects and then decided Microsoft was a better fit for him. Danny Thorpe who worked on Google Gears is back at Microsoft for his second stint working on developer technologies related to Windows Live.  These aren’t the only folks I’ve seen who’ve decided to make the switch from the big G to the b0rg, these are just the ones who have blogs that I can point at.

Unsurprisingly, the fact that Google isn’t a good place for senior developers is also becoming clearly evident in their interview processes. Take this post from Svetlin Nakov entitled Rejected a Program Manager Position at Microsoft Dublin - My Successful Interview at Microsoft where he concludes

My Experience at Interviews with Microsoft and Google

Few months ago I was interviewed for a software engineer in Google Zurich. If I need to compare Microsoft and Google, I should tell it in short: Google sux! Here are my reasons for this:

1) Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering.

2) Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?

3) Microsoft have really good interview process. People working in Microsoft are relly very smart and skillful. Their process is far ahead of Google. Their quality of development is far ahead of Google. Their management is ahead of Google and their recruitment is ahead of Google.

Microsoft is Better Place to Work than Google

At my interviews I was asking my interviewers in both Microsoft and Google a lot about the development process, engineering and technologies. I was asking also my colleagues working in these companies. I found for myself that Microsoft is better organized, managed and structured. Microsoft do software development in more professional way than Google. Their engineers are better. Their development process is better. Their products are better. Their technologies are better. Their interviews are better. Google was like a kindergarden - young and not experienced enough people, an office full of fun and entertainment, interviews typical for junior people and lack of traditions in development of high quality software products.

Based on my observations, I have theory that Google’s big problem is that the company hasn’t realized that it isn’t a startup anymore. This disconnect between the company’s status and it’s perception of itself manifests in a number of ways

1. Startups don’t have a career path for their employees. Does anyone at Facebook know what they want to be in five years besides rich? However once riches are no longer guaranteed and the stock isn’t firing on all cylinders (GOOG is underperforming both the NASDAQ and DOW Jones industrial average this year) then you need to have a better career plan for your employees that goes beyond “free lunches and all the foosball you can handle".

2. There is no legacy code at a startup. When your code base is young, it isn’t a big deal to have developers checking in new features after an overnight coding fit powered by caffeine and pizza. For the most part, the code base shouldn’t be large enough or interdependent enough for one change to cause issues. However it is practically a law of software development that the older your code gets the more lines of code it accumulates and the more closely coupled your modules become. This means changing things in one part of the code can have adverse effects in another. 

   As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS. These processes exist to insulate the companies from the mistakes that occur after a company gets to a certain size and can no longer trust its employees to always do the right thing. Requiring code reviews, design specifications, black box & whitebox & unit testing, usability studies, threat models, etc are all the kinds of overhead that differentiate a mature software development shop from a “fly by the seat of your pants” startup. However once you’ve been through enough fire drills, some of those processes don’t sound as bad as they once did. This is why senior developers value them while junior developers don’t since the latter haven’t been around the block enough.

3. There is less politics at a startup. In any activity where humans have to come together collaboratively to achieve a goal, there will always be people with different agendas. The more people you add to the mix, the more agendas you have to contend with. Doing things by consensus is OK when you have to get consensus from two or three people who sit in the same hallway as you. It’s a totally different ball game when you need to gain it from lots of people from across a diverse company working on different projects in different regions of the world who have different perspectives on how to solve your problems. At Google, even hiring an undergraduate candidate has to go through several layers of committees which means hiring managers need to possess some political savvy if they want to get their candidates approved.  The founders of Dodgeball quit the Google after their startup was acquired after they realized that they didn’t have the political savvy to get resources allocated to their project.

The fact that Google is having problems retaining employees isn't news, Fortune wrote an article about it just a few months ago. The technology press makes it seem like people are ditching Google for hot startups like FriendFeed and Facebook. However the truth is more nuanced than that. Now that Google is just another big software company, lots of people are comparing it to other big software companies like Microsoft and finding it lacking.

Now Playing: Queen - Under Pressure (feat. David Bowie)

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/microsoft/The_GOOG_MSFT_Exodus_Work';

I've spent all of my professional career working at a large multinational company. In this time I've been involved in lots of different cross-team and cross-divisional collaboration efforts. Some times these groups were in the same organization and other times you would have to go up five to ten levels up the org chart before you found a shared manager. Surprisingly, the presence or lack of shared management has never been the key factor that has helped or hindered such collaborative efforts.

Of all the problems I've seen when I've had to depend on other teams for help in getting a task accomplished or vice versa; there have been two insidious that tend to crop up in situations where things go awry. The first is misaligned goals. Just because two groups are working together doesn't mean they have the same motivations or expected end results. Things quickly go awry when one group's primary goals either run counter to the goal(s) of the group they are supposed to be collaborating with. For example, consider a company that requires its technical support to have very low average call time to meet their metrics. Imagine that same company also puts together a task force to improve the customer satisfaction with the technical support experience after lots of complaints from their customers. What are the chances that the task force will be able to effect positive change if the metrics used to reward their tech support staff remain the same? The funny thing is that large companies often end up creating groups that are working at cross purposes yet are supposed to be working together.

What makes misaligned goals so insidious is that the members of the collaborating groups who are working through the project often don't realize that the problem is that their goals are misaligned. A lot of the time people tend to think the problem is the other group is evil, a bunch of jerks or just plain selfish. The truth is often that the so-called jerks are really just thinking You're not my manager, so I'm not going to ask how high when you tell me to jump. Once you find out you've hit this problem then the path to solving it is clear. You either have to (i) make sure all collaborating parties want to reach the same outcome and place have similar priorities or (ii) jettison the collaboration effort.

Another problem that has scuttled many a collaboration effort is when one or more of the parties involved has undisclosed concerns about the risks of collaborating which prevents them from entering into the collaboration wholeheartedly or even worse has them actively working against it. Software development teams experience this when they have to manage dependences on their project or that they have on other projects. There's a good paper on the topic entitled Managing Cognitive and Affective Trust in the Conceptual R&D Organization by Diane H. Sonnenwald which breaks down the problem of distrust in conceptual organizations (aka virtual teams) in the following way

Two Types of Trust and Distrust: Cognitive and Affective
Two types of trust, cognitive and affective, have been identified as important in organizations (McAllister, 1995; Rocco, et al, 2001). Cognitive trust focuses on judgments of competence and reliability. Can a co-worker complete a task? Will the results be of sufficient quality? Will the task be completed on time? These are issues that comprise cognitive trust and distrust. The more strongly one believes the answers to these types of questions are affirmative, the stronger one’s cognitive trust. The more strongly one believes the answers to these types of questions are negative, the stronger one’s cognitive distrust.

Affective trust focuses on interpersonal bonds among individuals and institutions, including perceptions of colleagues’ motivation, intentions, ethics and citizenship. Affective trust typically emerges from repeated interactions among individuals, and experiences of reciprocated interpersonal care and concern (Rosseau, et al, 1998). It is also referred to as emotional trust (Rocco, et al, 2001) and relational trust (Rosseau, et al, 1998). It can be “the grease that turns the wheel” (Sonnenwald, 1996).

The issue of affective distrust is strongly related to lacking shared goals while working together as a team which I've already discussed. Cognitive distrust typically results in one or more parties in the collaboration acting with the assumption that the collaboration is going to fail. Since these distrusting group(s) assume failure will be the end result of the collaboration they will take steps to insulate themselves from this failure. However what makes this problem insidious is that the "untrusted" groups are often not formally confronted about the lack of trust in their efforts and thus risk mitigation is not formally built into the collaboration effort. Eventually this leads to behavior that is counterproductive to the collaboration as teams try to mitigate risks in isolation and eventually there is distrust between all parties in the collaboration. Project failure often soon follows.

The best way to prevent this from happening once you find yourself in this situation is to put everyone's concerns on the table. Once the concerns are on the table, be they concerns about product quality, timelines or any of the other myriad issues that impact collaboration, mitigations can be put in place. As the saying goes sunlight is the best disinfectant, thus I've also seen that when the "distrusted" team becomes fully transparent in their workings and information disclosure it quickly makes matters clear. Because one of two things will happen; it will either (i) reassure their dependents that their fears are unfounded or (ii) confirm their concerns in a timely fashion. Either of which is preferable to the status quo.

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From the press release entitled Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.
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The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the following high-volume Microsoft products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products. Highlights of the specific actions Microsoft is taking to implement its new interoperability principles are described below.

• Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products.
• Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions.
• Enhancing Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document formats.
• Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative.
• Expanding industry outreach and dialogue.

More information can be found on the Microsoft Interoperability page. Nice job, ROzzie and SteveB.

Now playing: Timbaland - Apologize (Feat. One Republic)

Given that I work in Microsoft's online services group and have friends at Yahoo!, I obviously won't be writing down my thoughts on Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. However I have been somewhat amused by the kind of ranting I've seen in the comments at Mini-Microsoft. Although the majority of the comments on Mini-Microsoft are critical of the bid, it is clear that the majority of the posters aren't very knowledgeable about Microsoft, it's competitors or the online business in general.

There were comments from people who are so out of it they think Paul Allen is a majority share holder of Microsoft. Or even better that Internet advertising will never impact newspaper, magazine or television advertising. I was also amused by the person that asked if anyone could name 2 or 3 successful acquisitions or technology purchases by Microsoft. I wonder if anyone would say the  Bungie or Visio acquisitions didn't work out for the company. Or that the products that started off as NCSA Mosaic or Sybase SQL have been unsuccessful as Microsoft products.

My question for the armchair quarterbacks that have criticized this move in places like Mini-Microsoft is "If you ran the world's most successful software company, what would you do instead?"

PS: The ostrich strategy of "ignoring the Internet" and milking the Office + Windows cash cows doesn't count as an acceptable answer. Try harder than that.

Now Playing: Birdman - Hundred Million Dollars (feat. Rick Ross, Lil' Wayne & Young Jeezy)

Over a year ago, I commented that sometimes it feels like working at Microsoft is like working in Dinosaur Country. Every time, I hear the phrase “software as a service” or it’s cousin “software plus services” it makes me feel this way. Most of the people uttering this crap don’t realize that this makes them sound as dated as the old codgers who kept on talking about “horseless carriages” when everyone else called them automobiles or just plain cars.

Case in point, this article from the Telegraph entitled Microsoft powers up for change which contains this humdinger of an opening paragrapgh

Chief executive says free software, downloadable online, is on the horizon for consumers. Josephine Moulds reports

Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, yesterday signalled another step towards a dramatic change in the software giant's business model.

In London on a whistle-stop tour, Ballmer was discussing the delivery of software packages over the internet. "We are a software company, and yet in a sense, the very form of our core capability is changing. We need to change our capabilities so that we are not just good at writing bits that you put out on CD and deliver, but rather writing this thing that is a living, breathing, dynamic, organic thing."

What’s next? A press release announcing that pasteurization may not be a fad? A news story conceding that heavier-than-air aircraft may just be the way to go after all? 

*sigh*

Now playing: The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

Recently an email written by a newly hired Microsoft employee about life as a Google employee made the rounds on popular geek social news and social bookmarking sites such as Slashdot, Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg. The mail was forwarded around and posted to a blog without the permission of its original author. The author of the email (who should not be confused with the idiot who blogs at http://no2google.wordpress.com) has posted a response which puts his email in context in addition to his reaction on seeing his words splattered across the Internet. In his post entitled My Words Geoffrey writes

Today my words got splashed all around the Internet. It’s interesting to see them living a life of their own outside the context they were created in. I enjoyed seeing it on Slashdot, reading the thoughtful responses whether they agreed or disagreed, and laughing out loud at the people who were just there to make noise. It’s fun, in the abstract, to the be the author of the secret thing everyone is gathered around the water cooler talking about.

The responses are my personal impressions, communicated to my Microsoft recruiter in the context of a private 1:1 conversation. A few days after I sent my response to the recruiter, I saw an anonymized version floating around and being discussed inside Microsoft. I hadn’t realized at the time that I wrote it that it would be distributed widely within Microsoft so that was a bit of a shock. To see them distributed all over the Internet was another shock altogether. The biggest shock was when Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet Blogs sent a message to my personal email account.

Read the rest of his post to see the email he sent to Mary Jo Foley as well as how he feels about having words he thought were being shared in private published to tens of thousands of people without his permission and with no thought to how it would impact him.

Matt Warren has an excellent Microsoft history lesson in his blog post entitled The Origin of LINQ to SQL which explores how LINQ to SQL (Microsoft's Object/Relational mapping technology with programming language integration) came to be despite the internal politics at Microsoft which encouraged the entire company to bet on WinFS. I'm excerpting a lot of his blog post because I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up taking it down or redacting it later. He writes

LINQ to SQL, possibly Microsoft’s first OR/M to actually ship in ten years of trying, was never even supposed to exist.It started out as a humble Visual Studio project on my desktop machine way back in the fall of 2003
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Luckily, it didn’t take me long to get the basics up and running. You see, it wasn’t the first time I’d slapped together an OR/M or modified a language to add query capabilities; having already designed ObjectSpaces and parts of C-Omega so I was certainly up to the task. Fortunately, it gets a lot easier the ‘next’ time you design and build something, especially if it was you that did the designing before and you have the opportunity to start over fresh.
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Why didn’t I start with WinFS? After all, it was all the rage inside the SQL Server org at the time. Unfortunately, it was the same story as with ObjectSpaces. They were shipping before us. We weren’t on their radar. Their hubris was bigger than ours. Not to mention my belief that WinFS was the biggest fiasco I’d ever bore witness to, but that’s another story.

Yet, part of that story was the impetus to turn LINQ to SQL into an actual product.

WinFS client API even started out as a complete copy of the ObjectSpaces codebase and had all the same limitations. It just had more political clout as it was being lead by a figure at a higher-point in the corporate org chart, and so it was positioned as part of juggernaut that was making a massive internal land grab. We on the outside used to refer to WinFS as the black hole, forever growing, sucking up all available resources, letting nothing escape and in the end producing nothing except possibly a gateway to an alternate reality. Many of our friends and co-workers had already been sucked in, and the weekly reports and horror stories were not for the weak-of-heart. It eventually sucked up ObjectSpaces too and in the process killing it off so that in WinFS v2 it could all be ‘aligned’.

At that point, those of us designing LINQ got a bit worried. There were not too many in the developer division that believed in the mission of WinFS. As a developer tool for the masses, something simple that targeted the lower end was paramount. ObjectSpaces had been it, and now it was gone. There was still some glimmer of possibility that WinFS v2 might eventually get it right and be useful as a general OR /M tool. But all hope of that was shot when WinFS was pulled out of Vista and its entire existence was put in doubt. Had they immediately turned around and brought back ObjectSpaces, that might have worked, but in the intervening months ObjectSpaces had slipped past the point of no return for being part of .Net 2.0, turnover within the SQL org was spiraling out of control, and most of the brain-trust that knew anything about OR/M had already fled.

That’s when we realized we had no choice. If LINQ was to succeed it needed some legs to stand on. The ‘mock’ OR/M I was building was shaping up to be a pretty good contender. We had co-designed it in tandem with LINQ as part of the C# 3.0 design group and it really was a full-fledged implementation; we just never thought it was actually going to be a shipping product. It was simply meant to act as a stand-in for products that now no longer existed. So, for the sake of LINQ and the customer in general, we took up the OR/M torch officially, announcing our intention internally and starting the political nightmare that became my life for the next three years.

This takes me back. I had friends who worked on ObjectSpaces and it was quite heart breaking to see what internal politics can do to passionate folks who once believed that technologies stand based on merit and not who you know at Microsoft. At least this story had a happy ending. Passionate people figured out how to navigate the internal waters at Microsoft and are on track to shipping a really compelling addition to the developer landscape.

Editor's Note: I added the links to ObjectSpaces and C-Omega to the excerpts from Matt's post to provide some context.

From the Microsoft press release entitled Microsoft to Acquire aQuantive, Inc we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it will acquire aQuantive, Inc., for $66.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $6 billion. This deal expands upon the Company’s previously outlined vision to provide the advertising industry with a world class, Internet-wide advertising platform, as well as a set of tools and services that help its constituents generate the highest possible return on their advertising investments.
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The aQuantive acquisition enables Microsoft to strengthen relationships with advertisers, agencies and publishers by enhancing the Company’s world-class advertising platforms and services beyond its current capabilities to serve MSN. The acquisition also provides Microsoft increased depth in building and supporting next generation advertising solutions and environments such as cross media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV.
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aQuantive, which has approximately 2600 employees, will continue to operate from its Seattle headquarters as part of Microsoft’s Online Services Business. The combination of Microsoft and aQuantive takes the Company’s advertising platform to the next level in its ability to serve Microsoft’s first party audience assets like MSN, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and Office Live, as well as for third party publishers and applications such as Facebook and Activision game titles.

The first thing I thought when I heard this news is that it is quite telling that Microsoft's biggest acquisition ever is for a Web advertising company. The second is that it seems that Google's overpaying for market share disease ($3.1 billion for DoubleClick and $1.65 billion for YouTube) is contagious. And finally, Microsoft now has offices in downtown Seattle. Oh. Yeah. :)

I worked with some of the Avenue A/Razorfish folks as part of the Social Networking feature in Windows Live Spaces. They seemed like good folks. I'm glad Microsoft has decided to open the pocketbook instead of just rolling over when it comes to buy versus build. Sometimes you really just have to suck it up and buy.

Excerpts from the conference call at TechCrunch.