Microsoft Has PMS
5th February 2009
Cringely is on the case.
But people don’t change. That kid you knew in high school who was a weasel-rat, well he’s probably a fat and balding weasel-rat today. People are sometimes changed by life- or career-threatening experiences, but generally not even then, which is why organizations that try to change hardly ever succeed.
The way a company that prides itself on tight code can build something as floppy (in every sense) as Windows Vista is because Vista is simply too big for any one Microsoft executive or engineer to understand in detail. So they embrace the idea that piling lots of chunks of tight code somehow won’t turn into a huge steaming mass of not-very-tight product. But it does.
A Microsoft designer once said that the biggest difference between Apple and Microsoft was that at Apple designers usually owned the product features, while at Microsoft, PMs always own the features. And most of the PMs at Microsoft are highly technical, often with computer science degrees. This is considered a good thing, by the way, but it isn’t good at all. It means the PMs tend to lean in favor of the developers just as management leans in favor of the developers, too. So in most cases where usability goes head-to-head with development, usability loses. And so do users.