Responding to Ed Brill's Blog

For some reason Ed Brill's blog is refusing my response to a post. Comments on the post in question referenced a previous post of mine. Rather than waste my words I've decided to post them here. Here's what I tried to say.


Everything is Relative



Regarding @18 Bob. (following the referrer links)



For what it's worth, I worked at IBM from the time Iris was absorbed until April 2005. Over that time I've known 4 people who left IBM to go work for MS. I've spoken directly to 3 of those 4 people and in each case they preferred the MS culture to that of IBM. In each case they found it less stifling and more productive (albeit not perfect). The fourth person who I've not yet spoke to about this is @18 Bob. I don't know if Bob's been at MS long enough to have an opinion on the topic but given we had many conversation about the mess in Westford, I'm pretty confident what his opinion will be.



That said, I don't doubt that some MS developers are upset. I'm sure old MS hands miss the good old days. Compared to what they had previously it's probably very hierarchical and bureaucratic, but that doesn't mean it worse than IBM.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shark Crackers

The movie Jaws has been a fan favorite for 30 years. A lot has been written about the impact Jaws had on the movie making business and summer swimming habits but there's one aspect of the movie that's seldom been discussed, the impact Jaws had on the image of the saltine cracker. Before Robert Shaw's Quint, a cracker was a bland cake of baked flour only good as a surface to hold peanut butter or cheese, but not after. Quint elevated the cracker into the snack of sailors and shark hunters. What man has not wanted to calmly snap chunks of a cracker while saying the words: Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish! Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin', no tenderizin', down you go. Much like the Eucharist is a symbol of Christ in the Catholic tradition, in Jaws, the cracker forms the edible representation of the
Read more

Running roughshod or ripshod

A common euphamism for political power abuse is saying someone or organization has ' run ripshod ' through the land. I was going to use the phrase myself the other day when I realized I had no idea what ripshod meant. I searched around and found many other users but no place that could define the word. This started me thinking that perhaps every example I found was just a perpetuation of a common mistake. I tried aother variations on the phrase and finnally hit upon a more common usage: run roughshod. The words roughshod and ripshod don't really sound the same but people use them in the same manner in similar contexts. Does anyone know the proper usage?
Read more

Axis, Axes, Axii?

While writing another post (it will probably follow this one) I needed to pluralize axis. None of the guesses I came up with passed the spell checker so I Googled it. The first hit I got was from a drafting company. (Interesting aside: word order matters in Google more than I realized - searching for "plural axis" didn't get the same dictionary oriented results as "axis plural") According to these folks the answer is: Grammatical Note : The plural of axis is axes. Some radical etymologists insist that the plural form of axis is axii, but that is only if there are three or more; One axis, two axes, three axii. The word axii, however, still doesn’t pass the spell checker, so perhaps getting grammar lessons from a drafting company isn’t such a great idea. More legitimate authorities simply list axes as the plural. If you do visit the above link to drafing company, can you answer me a question, what the heck are those diagrams depicting. I
Read more