Matt’s Blog

It’s a good thing the weather isn’t so great this time of year in Seattle:

When I started working at The Empire© I learned that we, like most major tech companies, have people called “Evangelists” whose sole purpose is to get other people (read: potential customers) excited about our products. I must admit, as someone who comes from a Christian background, the idea of that particular term applied to business was a bit unsettling. But come to find, it’s a pretty common practice across the industry and after all, it is a pretty good description of what they do.

But it did cast an interesting light on a debate that the technology world been involved in for a long, long time. A debate that, at times, has taken on the ferocity of a religious jihad. A debate with the power to take normally rational, even-tempered people and make them so angry they are red in the face, and makes normally cordial people behave like complete asses. A debate that has weakened many friendships, and even destroyed some. Yes, the never-ending debate: Microsoft vs. Apple/Google/Linux/salesforce.com/Open Source…

I’ve usually tried to stay away from this debate when it came up. Typically in my fraternity someone would spark it every few semesters via our e-mail list, and I would do my best to ignore it. But now that I work for one side of the issue I’ve become a magnet of sorts for this kind of thing. It’s as if someone taped a sign to me that says: “Hey, please be a complete ass to Matt about the company he works for, I’m sure he’ll think your little joke/barb is soooo clever.” Recently I feel that additional signage has been added that reads: “Please also be sure to mention any of the Apple commercials created to compete with Windows 7 as I’m sure he has not heard of them and will appreciate you bringing their insults about his employer to his attention. Their logic is so sound he will have no choice but to abandon his beliefs and his paycheck and go out, buy a black mock-turtleneck sweater, and become a devoted worshiper of Steve Jobs.”

Allow me to clue you into something. I work for Microsoft. I like Microsoft products, I get a lot of work done with them and I like using them. I’m highly unlikely to agree with you when you make baseless claims about the lack of quality in of our products or the deficient intelligence of our employees. This goes double if what you are saying is straight from a competitor’s advertising campaign.

Some might argue, “Well Matt, you brought it up. What did you expect me to say when you expressed excitement about Windows 7/Office2010…?” Which makes me wonder what in the hell is wrong with being excited about the products made by your company, products that you often have invested much of your time and energy into? What, have I somehow insulted you with my excitement or do you just like arguing?

Apparently yes. How many times have I heard this:

“Oh but Matt, you don’t understand. Macs are just so much better than PCs. They just work! I was so frustrated with my old PC, and now that I’ve switched I’m so much more productive and so much less frustrated.”

Now I don’t know about those productivity claims, my opinion is that the most productive machine would be one on which facebook.com is inaccessible regardless of underlying operating system. But seriously, professional productivity is very difficult to measure quantitatively and personal productivity is even more difficult to qualify. Sure you can come up with some task that used to take you hours to complete on one OS that only takes you 15 seconds on another, but I’m sure there are other areas you aren’t keeping track of (or, in your love of the machine, intentionally overlooking) where you are spending a lot of extra time/money. And as for frustration, let’s be honest; computers are frustrating no matter what’s running on them. I used to have a Windows Mobile phone and I swore at the thing regularly for all its flaws. It was slow, it didn’t browse the web very well, there were no apps for it, it crashed, it hung and it did a lot of other infuriating things. So I switched to an iPhone looking forward to enjoying the “never-ending bliss of Apple Computer’s flawless design” and lo and behold it was awesome. Until it dropped a call. And then another, and another, and… Now my iPhone regularly drops calls at such a prolific rate that I joke that I have yet to complete a conversation longer than 30 seconds without experiencing the “iPhone Tax”. And that’s not the only problem with the device. Applications crash, the web browser is slow and auto-refreshes pages when there is no need to, some basic things take forever to load, and it’s even crashed itself a time or two. Now I’m not hating on Apple. I’ll freely admit that with all its flaws, the iPhone is still a great product (still better than WinMo), but it’s not a perfect product and I’d never be willing to destroy a friendship over it. It’s a tool, used to conduct tasks.

Which leaves the question: Why are people so devoted to products that are basically a heap of sand and plastic?

And then it occurred to me, this isn’t a debate about technology, it’s a debate about theology. All these snarky and emotional comments from consumers aren’t about technical issues; they are the religious arguments of the disciples of Macintosh, the followers of Linux, and yes even the devotees of Microsoft. Although, I must admit, I see far more dogmatic arguments out of the Mac and Linux camps than that of The Empire©. I don’t understand the complete devotion that people are willing to express to what is basically an appliance. For the most part the selection of computer systems has little effect of the lives of most people. My choice of personal computing device does not greatly affect your life. If anyone should be upset it’s the person who’s livelihood is most likely to be directly affected by the choice between Microsoft vs. others; in short, me. Regardless it seems that most users are not going to rest until the entire world has been converted to their way of computing.

And the worst thing is that this technological idolatry has all the negative traits of religious devotion with none of the positives. Namely, it makes you kind of a self-righteous jerk. I can only assume that one or more of the following is true of people who completely devote themselves to a particular technological cause:

1. You are incredibly arrogant and assume that you can know everything about everyone’s job and how technology is employed in it. You know the best solution for everyone’s job, and you view others with the smug self-satisfaction that comes from knowing what solution they should have selected.
2. You are incredibly ignorant and can’t imagine anyone else having a different experience than you. You view others with the smug self-satisfaction that comes from knowing that you have such high requirements that what is good for you is good enough for everyone else.
3. You think yourself more intelligent than everyone else because you have made the “right” selection of device for personal/professional productivity and everyone who disagrees with you is too dumb to realize their error. You want everyone to know how smart and clever you are, and you view others with the smug self-satisfaction that comes with being so much smarter than them.
4. You were much luckier than everyone else in that you chose the “right” device even though you didn’t know it was the right device at the time you chose it. Everyone else was either too dumb, or just unlucky to have not made the right choice and you view them with the smug self-satisfaction that comes with being right.

Of particular interest to me is the religious-ness of the debate which is essentially about which productivity tools are best. Now, I’ll be frank: The only reason I don’t have a Mac right now is that I can’t afford one yet. There are a lot of things that are easier on Macs and I hope to get one soon. I don’t hate Macs, I don’t love PC’s. They are TOOLS that are useful for conducting various tasks. Granted, there are some things that a Mac is better for than a PC like video editing, graphic design, audio editing, and other creative tasks. And there are things that I know PCs are better for office productivity, CAD design, data analysis (Excel), and simulation (Arena, VISSIM). And of course there are things that you can easily do on both. Now I work at Microsoft which means that the vast majority of my tasks are conducted using the Microsoft stack: Windows/Office/Visual Studio/MS SQL/SharePoint bla bla bla. I like my job, and I like our tools. I think that, for the most part, we create pretty neat tools for productivity in the enterprise. Are they always the best? No. Are they even good? Not all the time. But I am excited about our products, I try to work them into everyday tasks and I will always advocate for the use and improvement of them wherever possible. And all for good reason: they pay me.

But I’ll tell you what I won’t do, get mired down in debates about technology that ruin relationships. I think the whole argument is about as rational as trading verbal jabs with your friends over Craftsman vs. DeWalt.

Now all that said, I must say that I’m willing to accept a fair amount of teasing about my employer. After all, I work for “The Empire©” and it comes with the territory. Just consider this some friendly advice from someone who actually has a reason to be religiously devoted to a particular technology stack, but (mostly) chooses to put his relationships first.

So today we have a planning off-site which is actually in just another company building in a different part of town. So far about the only thing I’ve planned is how to move our group to this building as soon as possible because the offices are much nicer than the ones in our building.

I don’t think that you can consider something to be “off-site” unless you have to enter some funny password to get access to the wireless network. Or, better yet, no internet access regardless of funny passwords. Regardless the table always ends up looking like this anyways:

Ok, I lied. I actually have planned some things while I was here. Of particular note is how to stay awake given the volume of food provided. Seriously, they put out sausage, eggs, pancakes, and potatoes for breakfast and then expect us to actually focus on work?

An entertaining aside; a friend of mine sent me this post which seems to be based on the story of a MS employee or contractor who is *very* upset. Maybe he (she?) got up on the wrong side of the bed today, or perhaps he/she didn’t have a good breakfast today. Maybe he/she should have come to the offsite, I can guarantee that we did not have a bad breakfast.

So a few months ago this article would have been entitled “Laptop Stickers: Completely Retarded or Just Stupid” but ever since starting work at the Empire I’ve had a slight change of heart. Not that I’ve fully embraced the concept of covering the back of one’s laptop lid with stickers quite yet, but I guess you could consider me curious. See, most people here at work have a variety of MS-related decals on their portable computers. At first I thought the idea was pretty dumb, but then I wondered: “hey, what’s wrong with repping a company that is paying for your house/car/food/whatever.” So now I’m reconsidering; what about putting MS-related stickers on my work laptop?

First the positives:

1. Everyone immediately identifies you as a MS employee. Who else would have an “I’m a PC” sticker on their computer?
2. Promoting Microsoft properties.
3. You can immediately identify which laptop in the conference room is yours. Not inconsequential considering that pretty much all 20-some PM’s on my team have the same model.
4. Annoying mac fanboys at Starbucks.

And now for the cons:

1. Everyone immediately identifies you as a MS employee and therefore assumes you are an arrogant tool.
2. Smartass questions/comments from people who actually are tools.
3. Promoting our less-successful properties. Windows Mobile I’m looking at you.
4. Annoying cute girls with macbooks at Starbucks.

So, seeing no clear winner I’m going to try an experiment. Up until now I’ve had no pro-Microsoft stickers on my computer. In fact, I’ve had no stickers of any kind at all. Starting today I’m going to add the most outrageous sticker I can find to the laptop lid, in this case this happens to be the “i bing u bing” sticker that has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. I would have opted for an “I’m a PC” sticker, but alas there are none to be had around the office.

From now on, whenever I can I will work in a public space just to see what kind of reaction I get. If nothing happens then I might have to up the level of dorkiness in the sticker selection. Or I could just put a pro-Republican sticker on there and that would piss everyone here in Seattle off guaranteed.

At Microsoft’s newest datacenter in Chicago you’ll see evidence of a new trend in datacenter design and deployment. While the upper floors are more traditional computer-filled rooms the ground floor consists largely of parking spaces for these:

It’s a new concept detailed more completely elsewhere, but the gist of it is that you use self-contained multi-modal containers packed with servers as modular units that can be moved and configured to meet changing demands. There’s also a pretty strong case for disaster recovery and deployment in developing countries as well.

Here’s a video detailing the concept:

Microsoft Generation 4 Data Centers

And another video detailing the actual implementation in Chicago:

Microsoft Chicago Data Center Container Bay

I saw this on today’s background image on Bing:

Zooming into the relevant part:

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.

Last weekend I finally got around to downloading the pictures off my camera, including the pictures from my recent cross-country journey from Atlanta to Seattle. I got to see a lot of great American countryside on that trip including the spectacular view of the Snake River from the bridge leading into Twin Falls, Idaho. Because I’m a giver (ha!) I thought that I’d share my experience with you via one of Microsoft’s coolest projects; photosynth:

This: http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritehire/2008/12/microsoft-project-team.php

Made me laugh this morning. Although it is all true, I find it funny that anyone would care that much about me moving to work for Microsoft. That, and being quoted on a news site is cool, but also strangely creepy.

That’s one heck of a educational discount.