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A Q&A With Joel on (Microsoft) Software ByDevSource 2004-10-22
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Former Microsoft employee and software-development pundit Joel Spolsky shares his two cents with Mary Jo Foley on what's going on with Microsoft.
If you work at Microsoft (or are part of the Redmond ecosystem), Joel Spolsky probably needs no introduction. And it's not because his company, Fog Creek Software, is a household name. But Spolsky (known in Microsoft circles as just-plain Joel, or "The Joel") is one of the characters whose words have had serious impact on Microsoft, especially this past year.
Spolsky is a former Softie himself. From 1991 to 1994, he was first a program manager on Excel, and later, a Microsoft Consulting Services employee, specializing in Excel. He founded Fog Creek, a software vendor and consultancy that develops software-management products, among others, in 2000.
Spolsky's blog, known as "Joel on Software," is a must-read among many Microsoft employees, as well as among the development/programming community in general.
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This past June, Spolsky wrote an article, entitled "How Microsoft Lost the API (Application Programming Interface) War," that is still a hot discussion topic in Microsoft circles. Spolsky's premise: Microsoft has decided that backward compatibility should play second fiddle to new features. But HTML, not Win32, is the API around which the world is building. So Microsoft is making this risky choice at its own peril, and to developers' and customers' dismay.
Spolsky spoke with Microsoft Watch Editor Mary Jo Foley in September. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation with Joel. The full version originally appeared in the September 23 and October 1 issues of the Microsoft Watch newsletter.
MSWatch: I'm curious. Why do you think your words carry so much weight among the Microsoft folks. After all, you haven't worked there for nearly a decade. And you're just one software developer.
Joel: One of the reasons I get read there is the people I worked with on the Excel team are (or have been), to a large extent, the leadership of the company now. I worked with Brian McDonald on Project; Lewis Levin, Chris Capossela, Ben Waldman. A lot of people had the connection with Excel. I think at some point they realized that Excel didn't need that much help, and Excel became the farm team for the rest of the company. The thinking was, "We don't have to isolate all the good people in Office. It has enough market share. Maybe Office can struggle a little bit and we can farm out the talent elsewhere."
MSWatch: Since you left Microsoft in the mid-1990s, how do you think they've changed? Is there any similarity now to Microsoft where you once worked?
Joel: The similarity is it's still the same products that make the money. (CEO) Steve Ballmer used to get up and shout "Word, Excel, DOS, the mouse, Windows." That was at sales meetings, when he was the head of sales. His point was, Don't get confused by all these developers in Redmond coming up with these random little products like SQL Server. These five products are where we make all the money. I don't have any inside information, but it still seems like it's pretty clear that this is where Microsoft still makes its money.
Microsoft has a lot of troubles steering the company. If you look at InfoPath and talk to developers on it, they had that thing ready to go years ago. But they couldn't release it, because they had to do all this "Office stuff" — things like customizable tool bars, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and lots and lots of other things like that. The cross of being a good Office application which took 90 percent of their time is what's called the "strategy tax." And that makes them a much less nimble company, I think.
Microsoft Watch: Where do you see Google going? Is it on a collision course with Microsoft?
Joel: I think Google is orthogonal to Microsoft. Microsoft will be chasing their tail lights. I wouldn't say Google is really a challenge to Microsoft. Or maybe they are. Maybe Google is to Microsoft what Microsoft is to IBM. In the 1990s, Microsoft's nemesis was IBM. IBM was a boring, established company. (But then the PC revolution happened, and Microsoft sailed past IBM in that space.) Google is saying the Internet is the computer — it's the Internet computer in the sky. And Microsoft's not getting it.
But one of the mistakes Google is making is applications like Gmail are great on the Google platform. But if Google was really paying attention, they'd say we have to have outside developers writing applications for Google. There should be 27 different e-mail systems using the Google infrastructure. And then they can become Microsoft. It will be interesting to see if Google will wake up and open themselves to developers. The (current) Google API is incredibly narrow and not open.
In my ("How Microsoft Lost the API War") essay, I quoted a Microsoft guy (and Longhorn Avalon team member) named Joe Beda. I quoted him saying "Microsoft is making a big bet on the rich client." And now he works at Google with Adam Bosworth. I'm sure what they're doing is a new browser. It's the IE (Internet Explorer) team reconstructed inside Google.
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MSWatch: Some things have changed since you wrote your essay ("How Microsoft Lost the API War") — like the back-porting of Avalon to older versions of Windows. Do you think Microsoft is getting it? Are they really listening to customers and developers?
Joel: It certainly wasn't just me. There were a lot of developers who said "That (Longhorn') is nice. But tell me when my customers have it." My best estimate for that was 2008, if Microsoft delivered Longhorn in 2006.
One of the things that a lot of people have tried to do — Microsoft, Apple, Sun — is when we went from DOS to GUI (graphical user interface), it was an incredibly good value proposition for your operating environment. Let's say it was worth $1,000 to go from DOS to GUI. Then we went from Windows 3.X to Windows 95. That was worth upgrading. It was worth $100. Then we went from the Windows 95 generation to the XP generation. Your system crashes a lot less. Worth $5.
Everyone's been trying to recapture that moment of moving from DOS to Windows. It was worth throwing everything away — all your old DOS applications — in moving from DOS to Windows because it was so much better. But it's never been the case since then and it probably won't be unless somebody invents some newfangled thing.
Will people upgrade to Longhorn? Probably, but at a much slower rate than they upgraded to XP. If you look at the different aspects, like Indigo, I'm not really even interested. It's just a big communications architecture that makes it easier for programmers to build communications things. But there's no application you can't build right now because you don't have a good communications architecture. It might be harder (without it), but it's not going to enable you to build a whole new class of applications.
Avalon is nice. It's a very pretty GUI. You'll be able to make things a little bit transparent. The truth is, we've had these bit-mapped displays. And it's not entirely clear that that in itself will be motivating, although it might be because it looks so much better.
I think XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) is a better upgrade than Longhorn. The Number 1 problem people have with their PCs right now is malware and spyware. And SP2 does a very respectful job of addressing these (and other security) issues. And that's what people are clamoring for right now.
MSWatch: Playing off your essay on Microsoft and the API war, do you think we're coming back to a time when the so-called "Raymond Chen" camp at Microsoft is back in style again — in other words, where backward compatibility matters as much, if not more than, adding more new features?
Joel: I think we're seeing a shift in power, a resurgence of the old guard. With the growth that Microsoft's had in the past decade, the culture had changed. It became the culture of the latest and greatest and re-invent everything.
If I were Bill (Gates), I think I'd fire about three quarters of the people working on that (the presentation system). Not because they are incompetent. But because there are too many people creating too many technologies.
MSWatch: What about Office? What should Microsoft be doing there, in your opinion? Is the idea of an "Office Server System" that builds out of the core desktop suite a good idea?
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Joel: I actually don't know what goes on in large corporations any more. But there's something strange about SharePoint. Whenever you have a technology that's sold only to the enterprises — SharePoint, InfoPath or whatever — it's always going to be at a competitive disadvantage, in terms of mind share than something that gets sold to the whole world.
For example, nobody's ever going to use SharePoint in college. Ever. So no startup is ever going to use SharePoint because none of the kids who leave college are going to know it. This was BEA's big problem. Kids in college, when they want to learn about Web development, they learn Perl, PHP, maybe Microsoft's (ASP.Net) stack. They don't learn about Domino or BEA. So the only way those guys have hope of getting mind share in the market is to have an extensive sales force. They're always going to be sweeping back the waves against the force of the cheap, easy way of getting started in college.
It's weird Microsoft doesn't recognize this with things like SharePoint and InfoPath. The whole reason Microsoft was successful is they recognized there had to be this low point. The whole principle behind Microsoft is low-cost software for everybody.
I don't see a lot of innovation (with the core Office product). And what I do see is a lot of churning - like new XML file formats. It's like cars. The newer models look a little bit different. You might want the newer one for the fashion. There's a lot of great stuff in Office that people still haven't discovered. But they don't want to learn it. They just want to get their jobs done.
