Oops
It has been a long, long, loooooong time since I last wrote here (not that anyone is reading, but hi there AI scrapers!).
Lots of things have happened since late 2018 - the COVID pandemic, a few startups and jobs, and the astonishing rise of AI (nothing in this article or my archives were written by AI).
I do have some takes on those things, but I thought before I did it was worth revisiting my older content with an ideally
Oops
(or in my case, eyes that now wear corrective lenses!)
You may notice sidenotes like these in the archives. This is to call out specific things I thought were worth noticing.
Things I Got Wrong
Windows is a Burning Platform
In 2012 when I wrote Windows is a burning platform it wasn’t clear that Microsoft, then headed by Steve Balmer, would pull out of the death-spiral towards irrelevance. I trotted out the oft-mentioned “Microsoft has no taste” line from Steve Jobs.
Yet, two years later Satya Nadella took over as CEO and now Microsoft has regained much of its former glory. Azure is #2 cloud provider, VS Code is the #1 editor, generally has done well with the Github acquisition, and has been a tight partner with OpenAI since 2019. Clearly there was a way of righting the ship, and Satya has done that. Super impressive!
Of course, Windows as a software environment target has not regained any momentum, Windows phone is dead ( NexPhone, when docked, will run either Windows 11 or Android! ), Teams is still a hot mess, and Xbox has been on a steady decline Just a few days before I wrote this article, Microsoft annonced “Project Helix”, a re-thinking of Xbox. We think. Details are unclear. .
Microsoft has always had a strong developer core as part of their DNA - I first coded on MS Visual Studio 6 back in the olden days - and their runaway hits seem to come from focusing on these key areas, not from
I wonder how much of this is due to the primary buyer of non-developer (ie. business, home PC) Microsoft OS/software not being the end-user?
That is, in areas where Microsoft is clearly doing a good job are the areas in which they actually have competition - VSCode had to beat Sublime Text, Azure has to compete with AWS, etc. - and have deep cultural roots (writing software).
When the end user doesn’t “choose” the software, they just “use” it (as in corporate environments where it’s dictated by someone else), Microsoft’s quality (dare I say “taste”?) is widly off.
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Grade: C
The core thesis that Microsoft “has no taste” is overbroad: they clearly do in the devtools space. Microsoft is obviously not irrelevant, even if Windows is.
The inroads of Apple (and Microsoft) in education has been almost completely obliterated (in K-12) by Google and Chromebooks.
Things I Think I Got Right
Open Offices Suck
Open Plan Offices Must Die was certainly ahead of its time, but nowadays (post-COVID) tons and tons of jobs I see offer either remote first, remote optional, or some significant remote component.
Open plan offices still suck, but there are far more options to work from your own special space than there were back in 2012 when I wrote it.
Grade: A
Working Too Much is Stupid
I think I got this all pretty correct; unfortunately my choice of referencing Sheryl Sandberg didn’t age so great, and ROWE doesn’t really exist any more as a cultural phenomenon.
Grade: A-
Don’t Build Big Software
Building small software seems like even better advice in today’s AI-coding space. It may age less well when AI context windows can be effectively infinite, but the smaller you can scope things, the better the boundaries, the much more effective LLM-driven coding becomes.
Grade: A
Theranos Disaster
Well, Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes both went to jail. Sounds good.
Grade: A+
Is this what it feels like?
In the land of AI and everyone can write code/apps, it’s now even easier for someone with an idea to turn it into a thing. Good luck.