As part of what is called the “Interns and New Grads Tech Fest” at Microsoft, I had the opportunity of watching Steve Ballmer again giving one of those energetic speeches that have made him famous* (you can check here). Ballmer talked about Microsoft´s relationship with Academia as its main recruiting source since the eighties, about how he thinks now it´s a great moment to be in the software industry because of the many changes that are going on and of course about competition and how Microsoft, being the holistic company it is, has many “battle fronts”, something that no other company has (IBM, Google or Novell are all restricted to a specific market, whereas Microsoft covers from XBOX hardware to SQL Server). Then he took some random questions from the audience, two of them I found very interesting as I’ll comment in a second.
Let me first admit that this kind of events are something in which Microsoft excels and that they really help all employees to feel part of a big workforce and dissolve the barriers among levels. Both Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, when I´ve had the opportunity to talk with them or hear them addressing other people, talk to their employees in a direct and appreciative way, and look quite committed to ensure every single idea you want to communicate gets to them (Steve Ballmer war chant today was: “Remember! steveb at microsoft dot com wants to know!”) That’s something a lot of companies should learn from. Here at Microsoft they really take the whole “plain structure” and “team building” thing very seriously
Two brief oppinions about the questions he was asked: regarding competition I couldn’t help noticing the kind of words he used to refer to XBOX vs Sony or MSN Search vs Google. He seemed to recognize right now they´re number 2, but is quite decided to fight the battle until the end, the motto here was “take from them, bring to us! take from them, bring to us!” (to be amenized with the appropiate movements of grabbing and putting in your bag, of course) What was the idea behind this? In his own words: “find the people who are not using our products and ask them WHY? Is it the cost? Is it a feature? Is it the support? And them MAKE OURS BETTER and give it back to them” Well, I sincerely hope they really mean that, looks like a good way to go
Then a girl told him that most of the people she asked preferred the competency because they tought Microsoft products had more bugs and that she wanted to know whether there will be a time in which instead of shouting “Developers! Developers!” the war chant would be “Testers! Testers!”. Of course, applause followed (I guess she probably was an tester).
The answer from Ballmer was “Touché!”… and then he commented that there were several initiatives trying to change that now, like the Security initiative and the Engineering Excellence Practices, that are followed in all Microsoft projects. Having been in two Microsoft projects as a developer I can tell you that those methodologies are there, that there are obligatory courses and practices for all team members in the release cycle and that definitely they’re putting an effort on that, even having dedicated teams, like .NET security and Mike Howard’s people and completely new tools for code analysis and testing. But I think for projects as huge as the ones they do here, the effort should be even bigger. They are in their way but I think that there’s a little problem of mentality they have to fight against (and this is of course only my oppinion)
We all know Microsoft is a two-year-release company. Basically they need to release new versions every 2-3 years to balance their investments in development and innovation. Development here is fast and has this market timelines (like in every company). When Ballmer referred to this testing and quality issues he said they were needed even at the cost of “sacrificing innovation”. I reckon this is not the way to see things and definitely is not the right choice of words. When you develop features, no matter how innovative they are, you need to make them rock-solid. Even more if you’re Microsoft. It doesn’t matter how innovative your product is if people find bugs in them, even more if you consider that there are going to be myriads of people scrutinizing your product looking for them and showing them in a magnifying glass. It’s all a question of image and of fighting against that image, and I think that the only way of fighting an image is combining strong facts to go with your words.
I really hope Microsoft really bets high on this quality-an-security motto. After all, no matter what system we prefer, we don’t want 90% of the desktops out there running something that is not solid and secure, do we?
And just for the record, after the answer he REALLY shouted “Testers! Testers! Testers!” };D
[*] Just one comment about the “energetic speeches” part. I know that in some countries Steve Ballmer’s behaviour can be regarded as bizarre or even ridiculous, but I should tell you that he´s no fool. On the contrary, he’s a quite brilliant guy and his speeches are perfectly directed to the people he addresses. Cultural/National issues are so important. Sometimes we forget what is appropiate for us is not for our neighbour country. If you don’t believe that… you’ll probably remember the first time you address or teamwork with people from a different culture
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