Ballmer cracks me up. The emperor has no undies. Ballmer is incompetent. The interview mentioned previously is terrible. Ballmer has presided over the fall of Microsoft. He sucks. When are internal folks going to stop falling for this mythological aristocracy? He and Bill are just weak men who aren’t in control. They desire power and no longer care about software.

“Best and brightest” my back-side. He has morons on search. The product sucks! Market share is falling daily. Innovation is minimal. The new Live is like giving msn the paddles while the lips are turning blue.

“We are doing a great job innovating.” Bull! You copy and use your monopoly power to leverage others our of markets that they created. A polite way of saying it is that you are a “fast follower.”

Things in the late 90's were much more entrepreneurial, people really seemed to love their jobs and if you went out of your way to develop a new test harness or enhance a feature it wasn't frowned upon. People also willingly helped out other groups when in need. At that time I was in Windows and I can remember BrianV standing up to give his weekly world news report with the nice buffet of food on Friday afternoons. Ahh those were the days.. Fast forward to 2006 and things in my world are completely different. Speaking of morale, my old manager left our group and we all had to pay our own way for a goodbye lunch because there was no morale budget (there was just 6 of us). It almost feels like the cement of bureaucracy has set in at all levels. Its unbelievable how much of a pain in the butt it is to get anything done. If you need a bug fixed and its in you team you usually have a small fight to put up, but God help you if that bug is in another team and you are dependant on the fix. Forget about usability, or doing whats best for the user experience, its all about doing less work and managing perception to the upper brass. Thank you for letting me vent.