This link has been bookmarked by 37 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jun 2008, by Scott Vine.
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19 Aug 10
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30 Jun 10
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23 Apr 09
Simon GianoutsosWritten from an employee who went from Microsoft to Google and back again, and why. It is a great read about what goes on at Google and organisational culture. "Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent
google microsoft management culture career business software opensource for:Gripnostril for:karenmonksnz for:nztebs
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16 Sep 08
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28 Aug 08
Eugenio Vaccainsights on google and microsoft work organization practices
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26 Aug 08
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16 Jul 08
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10 Jul 08
Akihiko KomadaI like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.
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06 Jul 08
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03 Jul 08
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There are many things that Google does really well, and I plan to advocate that some of these things be adopted at Microsoft.
Among them is the peer-based review model where one's performance is determined largely based on peer comments, and much less so based on the observations of the manager. The idea that a manager is far easier to fool than the co-workers are is sound and largely works. A very important side-effect that this model produces is an increased amount of cooperation between the people, and generally better relationships within the team. -
Unlike most other companies where internal life is regulated largely by management, a lot of aspects of Google are ruled by committees of employees who are passionate about an issue, and are willing to allocate some of their time to have this issue resolved.
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Hiring, resource allocations at Google are done by consensus of many players. If you are to achieve anything at Google, you must learn how to build this consensus, or at least how to not obstruct 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. -
Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!
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it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.
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You can turn really quickly when you don't have to build consensus between 3 disciplines as you do at Microsoft!
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. -
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.
Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing 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. -
Given all this, after a year at Google I realized that I had no idea how my career was going to progress. By contrast, my Microsoft career goals were pretty clear within the first month after I joined the company in 1998.
This is when I knew it was time to go...
Am I sorry that I spent this year at Google? Not at all! It gave me a different perspective. It gave me new ideas. It cleared my mind. -
I don't see why you wouldn't want to open source the software you sell in a long run.
You don't sell much selfware these days, and software as a pain treatment would work regardless of whenever it's open source. -
"and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work."
Nobody's willing to part with their money to have access to Microsoft's work. I can't think of one single person, ever, who was willing to pay Microsoft. They are legally forced to, if they want to use that software. Now what is rewarding, is when people who are under no obligation of paying, still donate for the software project.
Oh, and, not all open-source projects are free of charge, so you should have said "sorry freeware people". You obviously don't understand open source at all. -
Don't worry. Microsoft will soon be forced to switch to the open source model, once their market share is gone. Money isn't the sole sign of approbation (and in the case of Microsoft products it is not a sign of anything other than that OEMs and enterprises still feel compelled to buy into the outdated model). If you really wanted to know if people find your code useful, perhaps you should look at your access logs or start a project feedback page.
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Er, do you really care only about how much people are willing to pay for something? And that's the only way to measure its value? Really? Wow :)
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I wish the fanatics among us would try and refrain from being so stereotypical in your defense of the open source model and attacks on Microsoft.
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If you're serious about reliability, why aren't the end-users of Microsoft seeing the benefit of value(s) you speak of?
Microsoft (products) and reliability is like oil and water from my experience. -
Working at Google is probably not the holy grail of employee satisfaction. Or probably you had different ambitions than the thousands of other Engineers working there. Google is clearly still a company made by engineers and for engineers. And you probably had different ambitions, of being a manager.
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Google products are such high quality compared to what I'm used to be getting from Microsoft. What Google calls "beta" Microsoft calls a mature product (this is just how I feel about it, let's not drill down and try to prove or disprove).
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Like I said, I'm a big fan of both corporations, and I can see why would want to work in one and not the other, or vice-versa, but comparing the quality of products was really shooting yourself in the leg as far as I'm concerned.
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"and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work."
Dude, there are SO many ways to measure the usefulness of your work. What you've described is not usefulness, it's merely a corollary thereof. Usefulness is a simple enough concept. But by your definition, anything you write will pale in comparison to such consumer goods as:
-Cocaine
-Large yachts
-Toilet seats made from gold.
Compare this with the Internet, for which people pay much, much less. And compare it with Google's search engine, which is free... and totally instrumental in how every single user surfs the internet!
Please, for Microsoft's sake, define usefulness as whether people want to use your software. The goalposts for Vista and Win7 would be in rather different locations in that case. With Windows, you can screw 80% of computer users out of their money by default (other 20% being mac,*nix,pirates), but it won't mean that the software is automatically more useful to any of these people. :) -
I strongly feel this is an extremely subjective discussion. And moreover as most of comments are say, Microsoft and Google are having extremely different views on their business.
And, regarding paying for GMail services, its not jus advertisers, I personally pay for extra GMail space. Free is limited to an extent where things dont burn themselves. -
Google is an infant yet. It is very creative, but very caotic also.
Microsoft is a vey old man. It has a good tricks, but is fat and walks like a ball. Rolling, not running.
If you want a really good example of a software company, that knows how to create great products and have a excelent customer satisfaction and high profits, look and Apple man... That is the company that rocks!
Goog luck for your new job. -
Great post. I think I like google's world better, but I'm totally willing to admit it isn't for everybody.
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I'd love to get to the point where you're doing art for the sake of art (true open source people are more akin to true artists than developers, making code for the sake of efficiency, etc) but there are people who don't want to be artists!
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Google is an infant. It's made $ on one thing: search. It's done 2 other things very well: maps and gmail. Other stuff that it's done is of questionable value.
Compare to MS. Word was better than Wordperfect. Excel was better than 123. Outlook better than Notes. Powerpoint, Visio and Project have no legitimate competitors. .Net has overtaken Java. Visual Studio is by far the best developer's tool. The XBox is as good as any other game environment.
So to all the Google fanboys, I say come back in 5 years when Google is making $ on something other than Search. -
Will never work for MSFT - I consider it evil and a copy cat (e.g. Windowing system, OS, .NET, Zune - the list is endless; thankfully, there are some few exceptions), and have turned down an offer to move out there
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Will never work for Google either - no career path. However, I did phone-screen once with them for a manager's position to see what it's all about, and I have to tell you the interviewer was extremely technical and knowledgeable - can't tell anything about his management skills. I passed the very tough (all low level networking questions) phone screen according to their recruiter, but never heard back from them - so I suppose I didn't really pass.
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someone said right above that .Net has surpassed Java. LOL!!!
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Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!"
This is an opinion about HIS FEELINGS. It's not a statement that can be judged right or wrong. -
He's saying "if someone is willing to pay extra to have the product I work on, it makes me feel better than if the company makes money giving away the product and advertises." This is an opinion about his feelings.
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I found interesting your comment about your preference for code that produces immediate revenue vs. experimental 'cool' code that may not. How do you feel about pure mathematics vs. applied mathematics? Should researchers stop pursuing lines of research which, while interesting to them and leading to something new, show little sign of immediate applicability?
Google's (and Apple's) style seems to be: let smart, creative people do interesting things...some will be profitable, most won't, but in the end we make money and everyone is more fulfilled. This, in my opinion, is how most revolutionary changes have come about in any field. Microsoft focuses on mimicry, so personally I'd rather work for an innovative company. -
While Google's products still lack the sophistication needed by enterprise customers, they are more than adequate for small and even midsized customers. Combining Google Apps with other products like Open Office gives customers alternatives to the costly Microsoft product suites.
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but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).
Bothers me that a senior techie in this day and age would say that blogging, online video and social networking are somehow "time wasting" apps and not as "useful".
I mean, c'mon. Smell the coffee. -
If all that is said in the post is true regarding Google and Microsoft busines models, only question I have is why Microsoft considers Google the biggest threat/competitor?
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02 Jul 08
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01 Jul 08
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Vahid Masrourgoogle vs microsoft... interesting. But the parti pris of "MS is better fit for me" should be the title of the piece, instead of somehting in the middle of it.
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30 Jun 08
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Andrew PascoeAmong them is the peer-based review model where one's performance is determined largely based on peer comments, and much less so based on the observations of the manager. The idea that a manager is far easier to fool than the co-workers are is sound and l
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