Microsoft and Grad School Part 2

When I was in grad school in the early 90’s, the world was a much different place. If you wanted to discuss your research results, the only people you could meaningfully discuss those results with were your supervisor or other members of your department / network (talking with random people on the street wasn’t very helpful). This restriction was largely one of necessity since the web was largely a novelty in those days.

There were, however, ‘business reasons’ for this as well. Sometimes you were competing with other groups around the world, and publication means everything in academia. So by necessity there would be some degree of secrecy around results from research. However, once publication has been established (e.g. paper submitted for publication), then scientists turn into a really chatty bunch of people who are eager to share their results in a very ‘open source’ fashion.

Which brings me back to Microsoft. Around here, it’s common to think of the Strategy Tax, although most folks that I talk to don’t refer to it by that name. Regardless of what you work on, at some point you have to think about how it relates back to the platform, or other teams that are working in the same markets as you are. These things are purely business-related things that come back to how you justify your (continued) existence. If you think of Microsoft as a VC company that funds different groups based on their ideas and their results, then you’ll have a better model of how Microsoft works.

Which brings me back to my work at Microsoft. We’re paying the strategy tax right now with our silence. Folks around here really like to make announcements about the future direction of our platform at big developer-focused events like MIX and PDC. Once these events happen, it’s the equivalent of ‘publishing’ in academia. At this point, you’ll start seeing a lot of technical posts about what we’re doing both from myself and others on my team.

I can’t wait …

Comments

[Bertrand Le Roy]

Interesting. I think we all love to talk about what we're doing because developers are such an egocentric bunch :)
On the other hand, I think in general at Microsoft we tend to talk too early: look for example at how after the PDC where Longhorn was shown for the first time, many features ended up being implemented in other OSs way before Vista was released (and now ironically MS is being accused of having stolen some of those same features).

[John Lam]

I think that MS tends to talk too early as well, unlike say Apple, who really likes to keep things secret until Steve talks about them. However, even the brief amount of time before we can announce does seem like an eternity :)

[zhuhengguo@gmail.com]

Interesting in uby.
The Future NetWork OS = Service/FrameWork/RubyCLR/Grid/P2P
Maybe?