Two Days at Microsoft

As some folks already know, this summer I’ve got an internship at Microsoft. They’ve got me under all sorts of NDAs and confidentiality agreements, so I don’t know how much of what I’m working on I’m allowed to talk about, but suffice it to say that I’m working with the Office team on something pretty cutting-edge.

Microsoft stands in pretty stark contrast with the kind of Free Software stuff I do in my free time. I’m not even working with on a project under the Ms-PL. There are several reasons for this. The first is that I’m not enough of a Free Software zealot that I’d turn down the opportunity to work on something cool but closed (especially if I were to be paid). The second is that I think it’ll be an interesting lesson in culture to compare that of the monolithic and proprietary Microsoft with those of the FOSS community in general and the Ruby community that I’m most familiar with in particular.

Don’t worry, I fully intend to neither lose my love of freedom nor stop working on my various projects. I am allowed to contribute to open source projects as long as it’s not on company time and they don’t relate to what I’m doing for MS, and I’ll certainly continue doing so.

Note that this is not actually why it’s been so long (Almost two weeks! Yikes!) since I last posted. That would have to do with a combination of finals week in school, and me working on a revision of the engine behind this blog. I had wanted to not post until the revision was finished, but that didn’t quite work out. Oh well. It’ll be done soon enough; more information then.

Back to my internship: today was the second day (for some reason, these things seem to start on Tuesdays). I haven’t actually gotten to do any coding yet; my “coach,” who’s assigned to get me up and running, is actually on vacation most of the week, and I also need time to get everything set up.

Two days isn’t really a lot of time to come up with deep and enlightening cultural observations, but there is one thing I’ve noticed. Of course everyone uses Microsoft products almost exclusively. I’m told there are a few people who use GMail for webmail and Google for search. I’ve even heard tales of a couple MacBooks here and there, although I have yet to see one; they all run Vista, though.

The really odd thing is that there really appears to be no desire for anything else. It’s not that people are happy with what they have; it’s just that that’s what they have. They’re happy when some new useful feature is added. They’re sad when something breaks. But that’s it. They don’t think “Why am I using this shitty software?” They don’t try to find something else that works better. They accept it, work around it, and move on.

I should add a few disclaimers to this observation. First, this is based on a lot of extrapolation from very little observation. I never actually saw anyone go through this process (although I did myself once or twice). But judging by everyone using Outlook, IE(Internet Explorer), and of course Windows, I can only presume that that’s what’s happening.

Second, I say “they” when I should really say “we.” I did exactly the same thing. There’s just no alternative. Everyone uses all these Outlook-specific, Visual Studio-specific and IE-specific features; there’s no way to avoid following suit and being locked in. And in a sense, it’s comforting; there’s no need to think about the programs you use, what they could be doing better, the various flaws in their user interfaces and how they annoy you. You can’t let them annoy you, because you’re stuck using them no matter what.

Of course, it’s also terribly stifling. I want Firefox! I can’t stand IE7’s tab UI, let alone the thought that I’m using the very browser that causes me such agony when developing websites! I like Thunderbird’s nice, simple interface! I want to take notice of issues, to report the bugs and maybe even fix one of them! And that’s why I’ll never be able to really become a member of this culture¹.

I also got to play around with Vista a bit, which I haven’t had a chance to do until now. It convinced me of one thing: It would be very, very good if GTK became compositor-aware. Smooth animations, transparency, and all that good stuff can definitely be used to good effect in the application itself.

¹ If by some twist of fate I do end up a member of that culture, anyone with a printed-out copy of this blog post has license to whack me over the head with it. One whack per person.