Where is the focus?

Joel made some comments on competing forces within Microsoft and lots of people commented, including me.

Well it seems that some people within The Great Satan have taken it to heart. What did catch my attention was this:

The Microsoft culture is about creating the newest, latest greatest thing that 'changes the world' not improving what is already out there and working for customers.

Wow.

Here's an important guy working in the trenches, creating APIs for millions of developers, and he admits they don't work for customers and they have a culture that's about doing cool stuff. Maybe they aren't that far from the OSS community after all :-)

Of course, Joel didn't miss that point either, and concluded:

As a developer, I would much prefer if the Raymond Chen camp won -- it sure makes my life easier -- but as a competitor to Microsoft, I have to assume that the stupider Microsoft is, the better.

...to which I add my thoughts. It's a balance - cool stuff and customer satisfaction. Cool stuff is strategic, long term, things you have to invest in or else you will lose in the end. Microsoft have to do this, because with 85% desktop market share, there's only one place to go - down, if they don't. There will always be some nimble startup, some guy in his garage, who will come up with something cool and eat your lunch.

On the other hand, customer satisfaction is tactical, short term, easily lost, and something that is driving people to Nirvana every day. The fact that security isn't getting better out of the box under Windows, that you still need to install n different products on top of Windows to get a usable and secure experience, and that every software upgrade needs a subsequent hardware upgrade due to the bloat creep, shows that they don't get the customer side of things either.

So, it's a balance. Does OSS do it better?

In some ways, yes. OpenOffice is seeing massive uptake everywhere I look - on the OSS desktop and on Windows. Similarly the Gimp - on OSS and Windows! Seeing how easy it is to manage my Debian boxes remotely puts Windows to shame with that SMS mess. But hearing horror stories of getting Gallery running with Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows, shows me we still have a long way to go in some areas. OSS has the moral upper hand advantage too.

OSS needs to focus on delivering for customer, while continuing the astounding pace of innovation. GNOME's doing just that, other OSS projects can too.

| 27 Aug 2004 | #