>Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together
>It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done
Imagine paying millions of dollars for "the best" developers, designers, managers, yet they can't even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.
Where I'm from we have an expression - "many grandmas, lazy/spoiled child" - and it's especially rings true in creative work.
For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams.
It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.
Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated
different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.
>FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.
In my experience it wasn't the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn't match the size and leadership from the top down couldn't see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives.
A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as "done" because they were overworked and on an insane timeline. My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it. The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong. My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time.
I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn't have. This wasn't just one API team, it was seven. Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying "we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible."
I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms at every company. It's a human thing, not a valley thing or anything like that.
I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company.
Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call.
At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too.
We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.
In big companies a winning strategy I found is to avoid communicating with managers and get things done and then show them what you did and let them do their best to manage it to death. Communicate with other technical people you trust as you develop your solution but don't give managers an opportunity to say yes or no as much as possible.
In these emails it looks like managers/execs are trying to figure out how they could/can beat apple. My answer: get out of the way of the highly talented people you've hired. The business aspect is only possible with a technical solution people like (not zune!). MS has many products like that that feel like a committee of managers designed them and really smart engineers did their best to overcome those decisions (until the last few years at least).
Making the guy who wrote sysinternals (got shit done despite MS) as head of Azure is one if their best decisions. Not that Azure is the best but it is definetly very usable and very popular with enterprise customers.
My current experience in FAANG for last decade has been anecdotally similar. I have come to one conclusion about people and I put them in 3 categoties-
1. one who have tons of ideas and just enough motivation to implement them.
2. One who are good at maintaining the existing product and are so scared of breaking the boundaries that they often add roadblocks to first category people.
3. People who don’t know jack, and are effective at management, politics and rest and vest.
Often at FAANG, being the beast that they are, the leadership is filled 2nd and 3rd category people. Perhaps that is why you find them good at keeping the lights on, and they satisfy the 1st by buying out the competition.
I, not hyping myself consider to be of first category, but I found going down this path of carving out your ideas is extremely hard. The people at leadership, management are extremely good at politics and portraying themselves bigger than they are. As a result, you need either lot of eng and support team to build anything, or find your way out to develop things on your own and get bought back into FAANG.
There’s an irony in your post that you’re complaining about FAANG culture , but Microsoft isn’t a FAANG. Meanwhile, Apple which is, did manage to pull it off.
This is well-aligned with why I am soon leaving my moderately high six figures to work on my own thing for a while completely unpaid. Success to me is building something great and that is something that no longer can be accomplished at a FAANG for the vast, vast majority of engineers at all levels. Sure you can twist some knobs and increase as revenue by 0.01% and be extremely valuable, but that is dead empty work.
That (IMNSHO) is why Linux is such a success. Torvalds may be a tyrant, but he has run a very tight, effective, productive, ship.
The same could be said for Steve Jobs. Since he has passed, the company seems to be losing its focus (It was sometimes focused on the wrong things, though, when he was at the helm). I think that a certain other, tyrannical CEO may be a good/awful example...
> For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.
Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off
I really don’t think MS had the consumer product vision at the time to pull anything like a music store off. Apple had the vision to get from point A to point B and have huge swaths of consumers hop on board for the ride.
Wild oversimplification, but I always felt that MS suffered from their monopoly during the 90s in that simply never had to make products people really cared about. Apple did. And when the consumer market exploded — especially after touchscreen phones hit — MS just didn’t have any good muscles to use in the fight. They’d been sort of cheating it for so long that the stuff they kept bringing to market was just a total mess.
Steve Jobs and Apple can put together a music store and iPod prototype that was sexy, easy to use, and wowed the music executives who knew Napster and iPods were the future. Meanwhile Microsoft still manages to infuriate their own users with things like Windows 11 start menu. Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.
I'd argue it has slowly gotten worse at Microsoft, and that's pretty bad.
I login to windows and everything feels like they're coding / designing AT ME. It's like nobody making decisions is thinking about me accomplishing anything, more how they can make me do whatever it is they want.
Don't get me started with the dozen (ok maybe not exactly a dozen) or so design languages inside Windows and how unfriendly some are.
That’s still the case until today. Microsoft has zero innovation capabilities. Nothing they built themselves since the 90s became even remotely a product which consumers enjoy. Everything they have today is Office which is kind of okay and the rest are acquisitions.
Yep. They know what they want to build and make fewer compromises than Microsoft. If Microsoft had developed the iPhone, it would have launched on every carrier possible and to do that, they would have had to allow the carriers to junk up the phone and restrict all kinds of user features. Remember the days of $3 ringtones and carrier run app stores?
For all the problems we have with Apple and their products today, they did move us forward.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have questioned how it was possible that Microsoft went from these emails to releasing the Zune Store.
For those not familiar, the ZuneHD was an incredible device. I still miss mine and wish someone would build a phone that felt as good.
To buy music, you had to buy Microsoft points(1). Points had to be purchased in a minimum of $5 increments, and I think you got more points depending on how much you spent. Then your songs would be 87 points, or some ridiculous number. It was basically hostile to the user experience. Nobody wanted Microsoft points, and they were discontinued in 2013.
I really like these "leaked" emails because a couple of times I've gotten to see behind the curtain of projects, like this one, that I was involved in.
I remember one issue here was trying to demo Microsoft's DRM to music execs. At the time Microsoft's software was unusable on Mac, but the music industry was Mac all the way through. Microsoft was first through the door, through outside agencies, they would do the grunt work of turning the labels on to selling their music, then Apple would turn up, sometimes literally the next day, with a much slicker promotion and win the deal.
Microsoft's biggest problem through all of this was its absolute certainty that it should only provide the pick axes and not build this thing itself. It was certain the end user wanted a choice of 50 weak music players and a dozen different badly-developed music stores.
If you want a job done properly do it yourself. Apple won because they did that and owned the whole vertical.
Oh, that reminds me of Windows Media Player which had like 8 separate music stores embedded in it, seemingly as an iframe. They had the most random companies running them as well, like phone companies, supermarkets, etc. Of course it was just a white label product, so why even include them all?
From what I know it wasnt Microsoft that broke ground. I remember reading a story about CD distributor whose clients started retracting contracts in 2004. Owner quickly realized Jobs was screwing him over and it took a series of meetings to somewhat fix it.
Coincidentally, I just started re-reading Steve Jobs' biography a few days ago (~11 years after I had first read it). When I had first read it as a kid, I was more into the design/tech stuff.
This time, I see my focus mostly going towards Steve's personality traits. His weird diets, his abrasiveness, his rudeness, his stare, him walking barefoot everywhere, his charisma, his directness. Him just going up to people and bending their wills in his "reality distortion field".
Gates being incredibly candid about Jobs and the music store situation is quite admirable. I’d like to find myself always working with management and executive types who speak and act that way.
I've worked for a couple of companies that were struggling in one way or another. The funny thing was everybody in the organisation knew what the problems were but they still couldn't address them.
In one case the business failed and most people went off into new roles which were exactly what they should have been doing before.
What me most every time I read these sort of posts, is that these things get discussed in an email thread, yet most managers want meetings upon meetings
FS: What was Microsoft's philosophy or attitude regarding games when you began?
Alex St John: Oh, it was completely nonexistent! During that time, their entire focus was on multimedia video, the primary mission of DirectX wasn't to benefit and push gaming, but simply to drive Apple and Quicktime into the ground.
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Microsoft and Intel had been shocked to find that Apple's QuickTime product made digital video on Windows seem like continuous motion, and was far in advance of anything that either of them had, even in a planning stage. The speed was achieved by bypassing Windows' Graphics Display Interface and enabling the application to write directly to the video card. The result was a significant improvement over the choppy, 'slide-show' quality of Microsoft's own efforts. Apple's intention was to establish the driver as a standard for multimedia video imaging, so that Mac developers could sell their applications on the Windows and Mac platforms. Microsoft requested a free licence from Apple for QuickTime for Windows in June 1993, and was refused. In July 1993, the San Francisco Canyon Company entered into an agreement with Intel to deliver a program (codenamed Mario) that would enable Intel to accelerate Video for Windows' processing of video images. However, although Intel certainly knew that Canyon had developed key parts of the code for Apple, it did not specify that this must be undertaken in a clean room,"
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
[+] [-] thecupisblue|3 years ago|reply
>It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done
Imagine paying millions of dollars for "the best" developers, designers, managers, yet they can't even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.
Where I'm from we have an expression - "many grandmas, lazy/spoiled child" - and it's especially rings true in creative work.
For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.
Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.
[+] [-] operatingthetan|3 years ago|reply
In my experience it wasn't the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn't match the size and leadership from the top down couldn't see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives.
A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as "done" because they were overworked and on an insane timeline. My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it. The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong. My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time.
I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn't have. This wasn't just one API team, it was seven. Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying "we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible."
A true organizational illness.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company.
Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call.
At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too.
We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.
[+] [-] badrabbit|3 years ago|reply
In these emails it looks like managers/execs are trying to figure out how they could/can beat apple. My answer: get out of the way of the highly talented people you've hired. The business aspect is only possible with a technical solution people like (not zune!). MS has many products like that that feel like a committee of managers designed them and really smart engineers did their best to overcome those decisions (until the last few years at least).
Making the guy who wrote sysinternals (got shit done despite MS) as head of Azure is one if their best decisions. Not that Azure is the best but it is definetly very usable and very popular with enterprise customers.
[+] [-] null3cksor|3 years ago|reply
2. One who are good at maintaining the existing product and are so scared of breaking the boundaries that they often add roadblocks to first category people.
3. People who don’t know jack, and are effective at management, politics and rest and vest.
Often at FAANG, being the beast that they are, the leadership is filled 2nd and 3rd category people. Perhaps that is why you find them good at keeping the lights on, and they satisfy the 1st by buying out the competition.
I, not hyping myself consider to be of first category, but I found going down this path of carving out your ideas is extremely hard. The people at leadership, management are extremely good at politics and portraying themselves bigger than they are. As a result, you need either lot of eng and support team to build anything, or find your way out to develop things on your own and get bought back into FAANG.
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lightbendover|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rco8786|3 years ago|reply
This article is 20 years old.
[+] [-] ranting-moth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
The same could be said for Steve Jobs. Since he has passed, the company seems to be losing its focus (It was sometimes focused on the wrong things, though, when he was at the helm). I think that a certain other, tyrannical CEO may be a good/awful example...
[+] [-] neximo64|3 years ago|reply
Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off
[+] [-] chasing|3 years ago|reply
Wild oversimplification, but I always felt that MS suffered from their monopoly during the 90s in that simply never had to make products people really cared about. Apple did. And when the consumer market exploded — especially after touchscreen phones hit — MS just didn’t have any good muscles to use in the fight. They’d been sort of cheating it for so long that the stuff they kept bringing to market was just a total mess.
[+] [-] rawgabbit|3 years ago|reply
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/itunes-10t...
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
I think they’re quite content with that now though. They’re firmly developer, enterprise and gaming focused these days.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
I login to windows and everything feels like they're coding / designing AT ME. It's like nobody making decisions is thinking about me accomplishing anything, more how they can make me do whatever it is they want.
Don't get me started with the dozen (ok maybe not exactly a dozen) or so design languages inside Windows and how unfriendly some are.
[+] [-] dustedcodes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|3 years ago|reply
Yep. They know what they want to build and make fewer compromises than Microsoft. If Microsoft had developed the iPhone, it would have launched on every carrier possible and to do that, they would have had to allow the carriers to junk up the phone and restrict all kinds of user features. Remember the days of $3 ringtones and carrier run app stores?
For all the problems we have with Apple and their products today, they did move us forward.
[+] [-] pedalpete|3 years ago|reply
For those not familiar, the ZuneHD was an incredible device. I still miss mine and wish someone would build a phone that felt as good.
To buy music, you had to buy Microsoft points(1). Points had to be purchased in a minimum of $5 increments, and I think you got more points depending on how much you spent. Then your songs would be 87 points, or some ridiculous number. It was basically hostile to the user experience. Nobody wanted Microsoft points, and they were discontinued in 2013.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points
[+] [-] kingcharles|3 years ago|reply
I remember one issue here was trying to demo Microsoft's DRM to music execs. At the time Microsoft's software was unusable on Mac, but the music industry was Mac all the way through. Microsoft was first through the door, through outside agencies, they would do the grunt work of turning the labels on to selling their music, then Apple would turn up, sometimes literally the next day, with a much slicker promotion and win the deal.
Microsoft's biggest problem through all of this was its absolute certainty that it should only provide the pick axes and not build this thing itself. It was certain the end user wanted a choice of 50 weak music players and a dozen different badly-developed music stores.
If you want a job done properly do it yourself. Apple won because they did that and owned the whole vertical.
[+] [-] lozenge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|3 years ago|reply
Was it CD Baby? Definitely not CDNow.
[+] [-] neximo64|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhaynayar|3 years ago|reply
This time, I see my focus mostly going towards Steve's personality traits. His weird diets, his abrasiveness, his rudeness, his stare, him walking barefoot everywhere, his charisma, his directness. Him just going up to people and bending their wills in his "reality distortion field".
It's really powerful stuff.
[+] [-] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagacrap|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindwok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Macha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptozeus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducknalddon|3 years ago|reply
In one case the business failed and most people went off into new roles which were exactly what they should have been doing before.
[+] [-] jbverschoor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PokemonNoGo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|3 years ago|reply
FS: What was Microsoft's philosophy or attitude regarding games when you began?
Alex St John: Oh, it was completely nonexistent! During that time, their entire focus was on multimedia video, the primary mission of DirectX wasn't to benefit and push gaming, but simply to drive Apple and Quicktime into the ground.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Microsoft and Intel had been shocked to find that Apple's QuickTime product made digital video on Windows seem like continuous motion, and was far in advance of anything that either of them had, even in a planning stage. The speed was achieved by bypassing Windows' Graphics Display Interface and enabling the application to write directly to the video card. The result was a significant improvement over the choppy, 'slide-show' quality of Microsoft's own efforts. Apple's intention was to establish the driver as a standard for multimedia video imaging, so that Mac developers could sell their applications on the Windows and Mac platforms. Microsoft requested a free licence from Apple for QuickTime for Windows in June 1993, and was refused. In July 1993, the San Francisco Canyon Company entered into an agreement with Intel to deliver a program (codenamed Mario) that would enable Intel to accelerate Video for Windows' processing of video images. However, although Intel certainly knew that Canyon had developed key parts of the code for Apple, it did not specify that this must be undertaken in a clean room,"
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
[+] [-] bobleeswagger|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esafak|3 years ago|reply