Matt’s Blog

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

So I was browsing the site for another project management tool the other day and I came across something that I frequently see on competitor’s websites yet I’ve never understood. In the copy on the page describing the product I saw the following phrase:

We give control back to the project manager.

I must admit, I was alarmed. Have we here at The Empire© stolen away the control, the very freedom of project managers everywhere? Surely not! I mean, maybe those jerks over at Oracle with their mighty all-knowing Primavera solution, or those IBMers with their Rational portfolio management platform. I could see them snatching away control from project managers quicker than you can say “Gantt Chart.” But not us.

Boy was I wrong. I started asking around about the missing control and found out that even here at the newer, more compassionate Empire© we too frequently strip control away from helpless project managers. And not only that, but we even have a special room in which we hold hostage the control along with the tears of 1 million Vista users. I took a picture of it, but I must warn you I’m risking my job by posting it online:

And yes, if you’ve read this far and haven’t realized this is a joke then you might want to ask a friend about sarcasm, or about Front Page. The extensive use of either will likely ensure that you end up in hell.

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.

Note: This was written last Friday, when I was traveling to Nashville. But since I didn’t have internet then, and had better things to do when I got to Nashville, I haven’t gotten around to posting it until today. Therefore: “today” = “last Friday”.

Today has not been the best day. It started out very early (3:30 am) getting up to get ready for a very early flight out of Seattle. Or, I should say, what was supposed to be a very early flight out of Seattle but ended up being a somewhat early flight out of Seattle due to mechanical problems. This of course meant that my rather loose connection in Minneapolis ended up being a very tight connection, actually too tight as I hustled up to the gate for my Nashville flight right as the door was closing.

Now those of you who have gotten up at such an early hour know how tolerant you are of even the smallest of problems. Yeah, so my limited patience was not really all that thrilled to have to deal with the missed flight. Add to that a headache from lack of sleep and I was not feeling particularly plesant, but the day was not done. Thankfully I was booked on another flight in the mid afternoon. Never mind that this flight was leaving Minneapolis when I was supposed to be arriving in Nashville, at least I had a flight out, right?

Well sort of. As the weather got worse my mid-afternoon flight quickly became a late afternoon flight, and then an early evening flight. The bottom line is that I’ll now be landing in Nashville 4 hours later than I had planned. And I’m certainly not any less tired.

Now you might argue, 4 hours? That’s nothing! And that’s kind of the point. In the wide world of things that could have gone wrong this is a relative non-issue. And that got me thinking. It’s very tempting to rant about all the incompetence of Delta Airlines maintenance or gate agents or whatever, or make baseless claims like, “that’s the last time I ever fly such-and-such airline.” But honestly, I don’t really feel any better afterwards, and it’s not likely anyone’s fault that the plane had mechanical problems, and it’s definitely no one’s fault that the weather wouldn’t cooperate. But that doesn’t mean that it’s any less frustrating to me, particularly when I’m tired and have a headache and don’t want to spend my day off in a weird airport instead of with my friends I only get to see every so often.

One reason this situation was so frustrating was that I had virtually no control and no options. I felt trapped. And as I thought about it (there was plenty of time for sitting and thinking) I realized that I, like the Delta employees, work for a company where our users are in mostly the same position. Many of our products are given to the employees of large companies where there is no option for other solutions, and by virtue of our market dominance in many segments users are forced to use our products, for better or worse, in their personal and professional lives.

We catch a lot of flak at The Empire© about our products, and most all of it is filled with frustration-infused vitriol. The internet is the great equalizer, only there can a trained journalist have the same exposure as the Apple fanboi (or, as I recently heard: ifanboi) commenting on the particle. But prodding aside, many of the complaints I read about The Empire© are strikingly similar to my, and my co-travelers, complaints about the airline industry today. Here are some examples I’ve heard recently where you could easily exchange “Microsoft” for “any particular airline”: “Microsoft employees are rigid, greedy, automatons working for a dying company that can’t innovate and just steals ideas from Apple and Google” or: “I’ve had enough of M$ and I’m switching to Linux/Apple/whatever…” or my personal favorite: “Windows 7 is just re-branded Vista.”

Now I would hope that most rational people would realize that these statements aren’t true. Creating software on any scale is an incredibly complex process, and there’s bound to be compromises that are going to leave people wanting something more, even at Apple (see: iPhone). But none of that really matters to the end users when they are forced to use something that’s frustrating and when they really don’t have any other options. So, while I can’t promise that the products produced at The Empire© will always satisfy, or even placate, our end users I can promise to understand that behind every vicious comment is a user who’s likely tired, with a headache, who just feels trapped in a system that seems illogical and very frustrating. And I promise that I, along with many of my co-workers, will be committed to doing everything that we can to make the experience a little better. If anything, today has taught me a great deal about what it means to be completely pissed at a major corporation.

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 this week at The Empire® we have been working on a rather important intermediate milestone in my product (it’s going well thanks for asking) which means that there was a lot of pressure. Work pressure is one of my favorite things because, much like real pressure, it makes something very valuable out of what is essentially a pile of crap. Humor works in pretty much the same way so:

work pressure == humor (for large values of work pressure)

One of the traits that makes this happen is that work pressure takes what is would normally annoying and turns it into something that is a REALLY BIG DEAL. Take co-workers for example. Seriously I think people around here like making other people’s lives difficult. There’s some kind of perverse power in saying: “Behold! You will bend your work habits to my will! I’m taking the server down for an upgrade and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

Whatever. Usually you just log off and find something else to do while you wait. That or you get “workarounds” which is really just code for: “time-consuming normally unnecessary steps that might make the product barely usable.” But sometimes there is justice for the worker. Twice this week I get mails something like the following (and I’m paraphrasing):

From: team_A_serveradmin@theroot.ofallevill.com
To: alltheotherteams@theroot.ofallevil.com
Subject: Your Life Will Now Suck

Hi team,

Just letting you know that <critical-productivity-tool> will be in running in <obscure-configuration> so we can test <obscure-test-scenario> today. So … <details-about-how-this-will-make-your-life-suck> … thanks!

Allow me to interpret: “We need you to test our configuration for us, but you would probably never do it on your own, so we are going to make you do it.” Now this is something that happens from time to time and is an important, albeit annoying, part of the process here at The Empire®. But as I mentioned earlier, on a week where you are trying to deliver a major milestone “annoying” quickly becomes “REALLY BIG DEAL”. So it came as no surprise when… *Ding*

From: team_A_serveradmin@theroot.ofallevill.com
To: alltheotherteams@theroot.ofallevil.com
Subject: Re: Your Life Will Now Suck

Hi team,

Hey, so just go ahead and ignore the e-mail I sent out earlier, we’re gonna postpone to another time. Thanks!

Now I imagine there was a conversation in between those two e-mails, and it probably went something like this:

Boss: “So I saw your e-mail and there’s been a few complaints about the impact of your changes on productivity.”
Worker: “Yeah, well did you tell them to get out a straw and suck it up? Haha!”
Boss: “Um… no. Did you consider the release schedule when you planned your changes by chance?”
Worker: “Consider other people’s needs? Yeah, that’s not really my style.”
Boss: “…”
Worker: “So I should change it back.”
Boss: “Yeah, you should probably do that.”

So sometimes at work I have these short casual conversations with co-workers who stop by my office. After a few jokes or stories are exchanged the conversation begins to wind down, and enters what I call the “awkward landing” phase. Also known as the: “I want to get back to work but I don’t want you to think that I didn’t appreciate your story” stage of the conversation. It’s important that this phase of the conversation be handled with care, because otherwise I’ll be known as the awkward weirdo with whom you should not share your funny stories. And let’s face it, working at The Empire® predestines you to a life where it’s rare to be told a story that does not relate in some way to: SharePoint, programming, code, computers, chess, WoW, Halo, acne…

There doesn’t really seem to be a good way to get out of this situation. Not that the other person is bugging me, it’s just time for us to go our separate ways. What I need is a phrase that’s halfway between “get the hell out” and “that was cool, now let me tell you a story that is slightly related to yours as repayment for the humor you have shared with me so you don’t think that I’m a total tool who only cares about work and didn’t appreciate your non-work story about (college football/drinking/cars…).”

Add to all of this the fact that this is The Empire® and so there is already a healthy dose of awkwardness drizzled all over the interaction like hot fudge on a Sundae. So yeah, if you have any ideas, let me know.