Alex Hopmann’s Blog

A brief mention of me in Mini-Microsoft today.
Its always nice to get recognition for cool projects you worked on. I still
really enjoy reading mini, although as many people have observed his
comments section has really gone to hell. My other observation is that while
I agree with a ton of the stuff that he writes, in many ways I think his
central premise- that the key thing to fix Microsoft is to just reduce its
size a bunch, is just incredibly unrealistic. There are two key issues here-
1) Just who does the scaling back anyway? The problem is that once you have
an organization with entrenched power structures, fiefdoms, etc. as you
scale back those tend to get maintained or even enhanced. Unless the senior
management types are super-human, the fiefdoms protect themselves and the
cuts probably in exactly the wrong places. 2) Microsoft has lots of
legacy. Sometimes you can try to ignore it, but the reality is that just
about every computer user in the world today relies on Microsoft’s products
and they can’t just quit maintaining them. And this means that every time
they fix something they need to fix it across ~33 languages across 6+
different OS revs, etc. They can’t afford to just abandon their existing
customers and architectures and the reality is that much of their bulk is
because of situations like that. If people blindly took mini’s advice you
would likely have another situation like the run up to the great “security
push” and temporary abandonment of IE where people (myself included) got too
focused on the new great innovative stuff and ignored supporting the
existing stuff.

On another topic I really really need to upgrade this site- I’m going to make it my top
project to crank out some RSS feeds, etc. I’m still going to stubbornly stick to
using my own custom tools to build the site. Also if people have been connecting to
this page on alex.hopmann.org, I’ve also registered
www.alexhopmann.com since the more
normal URL structure seems to be easier for people.

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