Microsoft SP2 Interview on Winsupersite
Since I could be killed by coyotes if I go outside for a smokie treat, I've been killing some rods and cones by reading through an interesting interview that was posted around the web the other day with some of the leads behind Microsoft's Service Pack 2. (note to brain - do check and see if watching tv with the lights off is really bad for your eyes)
I probably saved it off as a PDF for when I had time because I wasn't really expecting much - the site is named 'WinSuperSite.com', and with a name so original you don't immediately expect great things... but that's marketing for you, and besides, my site is called DrunkenBlog. However, itt really is an interesting read and even if you aren't interested in Service Pack 2 or Windows, some of the issues they had to deal with are fairly universal. I was pleasantly surprised.
It was interesting to see them touch upon the problem of compatibility as they move forward, in a fairly blunt way... which I can imagine a lot of people are taking in a bad way, in some cases because the interview seems to be aimed at peers and not the general public.
They had some really interesting points about why they did certain things involving group policies, but I'm not sure your average person has an understanding of what they are... and I'm too foggy at the moment to really explain it except to say that it involves administrating large groups of Windows machines.
I.E., one of the big problems with pushing FireFox in the corporate environment is that it doesn't really support these, so it's hard for administrators to have FireFox exactly the way they want and pushed out to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of client machines like they can do with Internet Explorer.
Plus those damn coyotes just set off on another round of howling again... I'm damn close to finding a heavy object to keep in reach. But I digress...
While they don't come right out and say it, if you read between the lines you could see the big struggle they were having between shipping something 'usable by the consumer' and something that errs on the side of security.
The fact that they actually said something like that is probably fodder for the mailing lists right now, but consider the notion that if you break too many apps with your fix, or even just that one app that the user just can't live without, you run a good risk of the user deciding to not install your fix.
Which is better: The uber-secure fix that never gets installed because it breaks too much of what the user has, or the one that is more secure than what is out there and will get installed?
Ah well, it would have been interesting to see them dive more into that as it is a fairly universal development problem. I've certainly seen it on the Mac, although not nearly in as an extreme form.
There are some other gems:
"Todd: This was a big win for us. I don't know if we took as much credit as we should have for such a big win. Maybe it's because we had dug our own hole."
It's probably the time, but the tidbit directly after the quote above had me stifling laughter in a big way.
Posted by drunkenbatmanDecember 30, 2004, at 12:20 PM
Comments (4)
Posted by: Yle at December 30, 2004 11:25 PM
Which is better: The uber-secure fix that never gets installed because it breaks too much of what the user has, or the one that is more secure than what is out there and will get installed?
I've seen this twice that I can think of. Once I set up my friends WindowsXP install and following online instructions set everything to highest security and turned a bunch of stuff off only to be told to turn it back on because they couldn't chat at their games site.
The second was with passwords. IE was patched so that passwords and usernames cannot be used in the URL to protect from phishing scams, and there are now patches users are distributing (lots of PRON sites) to turn it back on. Crazy.
It was a good read, but I don't know. I'm just glad as a Mac user I don't have to deal with it.
Posted by: D00d at January 2, 2005 10:10 PM
That's just a bunch of horsecrap. If you want to know what it really was like, get an interview from developers and testers, i.e. the people who really do some _actual_work_. A bunch of PMs who can't tell XML from GUID ain't gonna give you the real thing.
It annoys me to no end that these folks think SP2 is their achievement. 9 PMs out of 10 are money wasting lazy idiots. One out of 10 is worth his/her weight in gold.
Posted by: Tony at January 3, 2005 05:52 PM
I tried to read that article, unfortunately I was completely put off by the guy's name. You see, here in Australia 'wank' is slang for 'masturbation', a 'wanker' is a pretentious dickhead, and 'wanky' is something pretentious. It was completely distacting, but oddly appropriate for Paul Thurrot's site :)
Surprisingly this article by Paul Thurott isn't a steaming pile of *ahem*.
Personally I refuse to read his "articles", but this interview was actually really well done.
Now back to your daily Mac bashing by Mr. Thurott and Mr. Dvorak.