Victor Stone
Microsoft Corporation

January 12, 2001

"While Victor Stone is off this month attending to family matters, we reprint an article originally published by Informant Communications Group."

Before Microsoft went public with its .NET strategy, an ISV developer poked his finger into my chest and said, "I bet you're working on a new language!" and his friend chimed in, "Yeah, with a RAD tool, too!" A friend of mine from an unnamed, "blue" company came up to me at a conference and said, "Why don't you use the new language to make COM+ objects?" The next day he was sitting next to me when our dev lead announced and demonstrated two-way COM+ support in our new language. Not all comments had to do with languages and tools, some were more platform related: "You're going to do something with Web and television, aren't you? And handhelds! And cars!"

The good news is that developers are pretty sharp, and Microsoft's intentions are never far from the surface, so you don't have to be psychic to see which way the winds are blowing the chamomile. The issue for me is that I can never give a definitive "no" to any of these inquiries, because it's impossible to prove a negative. Just because you don't know about a project—even a shipping product—doesn't mean someone at Microsoft isn't working on it. We were selling a product named Microsoft Commerce Server a whole year before I realized we even had software that did that. So when someone comes to me at a conference and asks, "Is Microsoft working on a banana with the skin on the inside?" I hesitate to disagree. Sure, some of the insinuations are pretty out of this world, but heed the case of my colleague who left the RAD tools group to "work on Dolls." For the next six months I assumed "Dolls" was a bad code name for some wayward project, but after I came to connect him with the success of a computerized Barney doll last Christmas, I'd have to go with truth over fiction when it comes to degrees of strangeness.

Also, when your audience is measured in the millions, nothing really dies. "Have you stopped shipping Quick Pascal?" I've become inured to this stuff, so if someone told me we had a crew of three in Haifa working on adding some new IOCTL calls for DOS 11.5, I wouldn't miss a beat.

Basically I've come to accept that if there is a whiff of some software idea in the world, whether it's dynamic IP addresses for Agent 86 shoe phones, or an XML dialect for washing machines ("<WASH CYCLE=SPIN>"), somewhere between Redmond and Kuala Lumpur, Microsoft has three highly motivated (if forlorn) developers off in a corner, squirreling away the nuts of their labor.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we've thought of everything. It's just that between our embarrassment of talent, and the thrill of a new way of looking at things, we can get into some degree of trouble. This is demonstrated by the newbie mistake of sending out far-flung e-mail to all Microsoft employees asking about the existence of a given project. It's a mistake, because if the project doesn't exist, the mail will itself inspire the starting of the project. "Hey, that's a cool twist on something I was thinking about last year," sending untold genius into a potential rat hole that could penetrate the Earth's mantle if unsupervised for long.

Of course, our marketing and developer relations folks, phenomenally well-meaning people all, go to grave lengths to prepare us vulgar, uncouth, motor-mouth developers for dealing with the "rude Q&A." Rude questions such as, "When are you going to ship?" Speakers, and other Microsoft hangers on, get huge, bound volumes of pithy marketing sayings, drained of political incorrectness, the night before a public event like a developer's conference. People look at presidential grand jury testimony and congressional impeachment proceedings and are astonished at the hair-splitting, preposition spinning, and other verbal flaming-hoop-jumping the lawyers and politicians go through. I look at that and see a PowerPoint slide run-through to "wash" the content of my presentation. My favorite admonitions in these settings are ones such as "Be humble." Um, it may be too little too late for some of us in that department, but they don't want to hear that. By the time I get around to asking questions such as "Does self-deprecating count?" I realize just how patient my mother was after all, because these people roll their eyes at me more times than the joint-maker at a Jerry Garcia memorial picnic.

Finally, after years of trying to train the untrainable, I get to hear things such as "Talk about the API, but don't open your mouth. Can you do that?" Er, I don't know, but I'll try. Maybe some day they'll let me out of my office without my radiation suit. We can hope.

Victor Stone is a software architect in the Web Platform and Tools group at Microsoft. He says, "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace."