The past week or 2 I’ve seen more and more articles about how developers are choosing to work at Microsoft over Google. The general tenor of these is:

• Google is disorganised.
• Microsoft presents a professional approach to interviewing.
• Microsoft follows software principals they understand.

They’re probably correct on the facts. While I have little respect for MS products, everything I hear indicates they have good processes, source code control and of course they write some of the best IDEs in the world.
Google on the other hand looks messy. No-one ever accused any of their products of looking good and they can be hit and miss on the features. I remember a frustrating afternoon trying to get IMAP working on my gmail account only to discover that you had to have US English set as your language to support this (why? probably some technical reason that has nothing to do with the fact that it still makes no sense, but I digress).
I still use Google everyday. I live in Google Reader to keep up with everything in the world. Google search is built into the toolbar of my Safari browser and it gets used about 10 times a day (the graph is monthly total searches).
And there’s the general feeling that MS has comprehensively dropped the ball with Vista and many other things recently. Their new office suites look really nice and I’ve had almost no crashes but it’s a bit of an exception.
I suspect the problem comes in professional developers wanting their cake and eating it as well. IT development is slow in these environments – any business manager who’s been asked to wait 9 months for a featuer change understands the frustration. Professionalism in software development has come to mean slow and inflexible.
Meanwhile the unprofessionals are delivering systems and new stuff every week. Vista is a technical marvel of engineering and completely useless at what it is supposed to do. Google delivered over 400 changes to it’s pagerank algorithm last year – that’s more than 1 change a day to a live system used by hundreds of millions of people. Vista dropped features like it’s database based file system and still failed to deliver anything anyone wants.
I think we’re heading to a place where developers don’t matter that much anymore – and it’s a good thing. I love the purity of good code, and I felt somewhat weak at the knees the first time I understood the Quicksort. To this day deep algorithmic insight inspires feelings in me akin to those other people have when they see a setset or something like that. It makes sense to have a craftsman spend a year writing the best Quicksort in the world.
But then it’s done. Everyone of those professional programmers can just use it. Web frameworks with built in AJAX and cross-database support are to be had at every corner. SOA architectures are rolled by clicking on the SOA checkbox. Yes there’s some complex stuff still to do, but largely any 2 guys in a room for 6 months can build something decently usable and scalable.
Google appears to concentrate on finding people who can think deeply about problems and as a second aspect, turn that into working code. MS seems to focus on people who can follow all the processes and as a second aspect, think about what they are doing. I think it’s obvious which structure is winning.

So today I went to the O2 wireless festival – except there wasn’t one – it’s next week. The guys are the gate laughed at me much as they should have.

Like most of the non-big-brother watching world, I loved the West Wing. When I heard that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was written by him as well I dived into that with much enthusiasm.
It was amusing to see how much Sorkin re-used from the West Wing. Bradley Whitford (Danny and Josh) was in both shows as is Timothy Busfield(Danny and Cal). A smaller appearance is made by John Goodman and Evan Handler. Matthew Perry headlines in Studio 60 but also had a few episodes in the West Wing.

Thomas Schlamme once again produces and WG Snuffy Walden does the music. The law firm Kari Matchett works for is the same law fim Rob Lowe worked for in New York.
This was all kind of amusing until I started watching Sports Night which is Sorkin’s first TV series.
It’s amusing but has many rough edges though you’ll recognise the obviously young Sorkins hand in every word, the camera work, the story structures and characters. Let’s go through them in detail:

• The Music is once again by mr Walden
• Thomas Schlamme once again produces it
• Now we have the venerable Joshula Malin playing much the same character he plays in the West Wing
• Felicity Huffman appears in the West Wing and is one of the main characters in Sports Night
• Teri Polo is a love interest in Sports Night and is Mrs Helen Santos in the West Wing
• Again the phantom Shearson law firm appears
• Unrequited love is a constant theme in all three series. The main stars all have a smouldering relationship that almost never happens.
• Greg Baker appears in the WW and SN but I don’t actually remember seeing him in either
• Timothy Davis-Reed appears in all 3 series
• Jeff Mooring appears in SN and WW but I’ve no idea who he is
• Ron Ostrow is in SN and the WW
• Ted McGinley is the somewhat slimy fiance of Dana in SN and appears in the West Wing
• William H Macy’s character goes off at some length in Series 2 about a guy called Farnsworth who invented television – Sorkin has a broadway play on called “The Farnsworth Invention”
• Minor SN appearance of Nina Siemaszko who also play Ellie Bartlett
• Also Lisa Edelstein appears in SN and the WW and for no reason I’ll mention House as well since I like that show

It’s clear I’m in danger of becoming some kind of obsessed fan so I’ll stop here and will only return to add things to this list when I see new ones. The good news is that when a Sorkin show gets cancelled, he clearly just carries on doing the same show in a new setting – luckily they all seem brilliant so I’m not complaining.

I’m looking at DevonThink Pro since every time you look for notekeeping software this one comes up. I’ve only just installed it but already it’s being quite cute.
When you start it up, it opens a web page to welcome you. You get to enter your email address and they’ll send you some tips on how to use the software for 3 weeks. After that, they delete your email address!
Obviously I’ve yet to see if they actually do delete it but assuming they do, the approach is really quite refreshing. They’re trying to help you do something, not sell you something (though they’re obviously going to try and do that at some point). Nice way to start your relationship witha new software vendor.

So I bought some tickets for the O2 Wireless festival. Stupidly I used the Ticketmaster site instead of going to Stargreen like I should have. First I get gouged for a “transaction fee” and then get charged £3 for ticket delivery on my electronic tickets. Usual incredibly annoying ticketmaster crap right.
Then they brilliantly email me a link to get the tickets. This link leads back to the website I was just on buying the tickets. Which then downloads a PDF.
Why did the website not simply download the PDF or email it to me? Whay was I charged £3 for electronic tickets? Why has someone not stabbed the head of ticketmaster?

Recently an email came to light in which Bill Gates complains about trying to download some software from the Microsft website and install it. It’s from 2003 and everyone can identify with trying to do this kind of thing with XP at the time.
The web has taken much glee in gloating about unusable Windows. While this schadenfreude is fun, there is a deeper point here about how businesses fail to execute.
Other Gates complaints can be seen here. As a long time mac user I’m struck by how much insight Bill has here into reality. He understands exactly where Microsoft has failed and where Jobs has succeeded. His view of the download process are exact and he identifies everything you’d want to be fixed.
He’s not stupid or dense – he understands exactly what needs to happen to fix this stuff – and yet it never happened.
That’s the terrifying part – Bill had more absolute control of his company than almost any other enterprise I can think of. He turned the entire organisation on a dime when he wanted to address the Internet and arguably succeeded. His employees are lined up behind him and he had all the cash he needed. Yet he was unable to get this kind of thing fixed.
What does that tell us about modern business. I work at a large (100K+ people) company with much less flexibility than MS has. People often poke fun at it for being slow and unable to change. What does it mean for us if even MS can’t address basic stuff like this.
I think this is endemic in organisations who don’t obsess about it. Apple gets it right because Jobs maniacally insists upon worrying about this stuff; He surrounds himself with people who care about details (the head of iPhone software carries a jewelers loupe around so he can argue about pixel level changes on this interface).
So it’s possible, but you need to care only about that one thing. There is too much effort involved for Bill to follow up about changes to the Moviemaker download – and Bill is one of the most involved CEOs in history. If he can’t get it right, how badly do you think your company is dropping the ball?
Update:
Just read Bob Cringely’s column on Bill leaving. He alludes to this half way in when he talks about Vista and how no-one likes shipping bad products.
There are numerous examples of MS not knowing how bad things are. There’s a story about Steve Balmer (which I can’t find on the interwebs for some reason) trying to fix a neighbors computer and discovering that even the top MS tech guys could not remove all the viruses. A surprise to him but not to anyone else in the world. I can’t imagine that the same was true of Vista. Bill and MS let that out the door partly because they’d convinced themsleves it was good enough. But the delays (years of repeated delays) and the dropping of major features points to a company that knew the product wasn’t ready.
The only person I can think of in Bill’s league is Jack Welch (Potentially Carnegie and Rockerfeller but I know far less about them). I wondor if he had issues like this and how he dealt with them?

A few months ago I bought a Macbook Air intending to use it as my main machine. It replaced a venerable 5 year old powerbook which had served me well but was somewhat heavy and feeling a little long in the tooth.
One of the things I thought about was that the air has no DVD drive. There’s some fiddly wireless magic you can pull to get access to the DVD drive on another machine in the house and given the number of macs we have I thought that would be plenty. Still, at the store I kind of wondered if I should buy the $99 superdrive accessory. I didn;t and I’m really glad I didn’t. In 3 or 4 months of solid everyday use I’ve never needed to use a CD-Rom once.
Physical media is dead. Books are going vanish. Can’t remember the last time I bought a CD. I get my newspapers on-line (really I rarely read them then either – news if filtered and categorised and I only see what I want to see – willful ignorance). As it becomes cheaper to make everything virtual and give us access to it anywhere, what else will vanish?

I’ve never been a fan of cameras on phones – it’s clear now that I’m wrong about this just like I was wrong about many other technology trends: stand-alone point and shoot cameras will be replaced by the ones on phones in the next few years. I’ll probably take more photos as a result but it’s not a development I’m terribly excited about.
Having said that I am disapointed with the camera quality on my iPhone – most cell phone cameras are reasonably crap compared to my old Canon Ixus – some 5 years old and still taking perfectly great photos. As far as I can tell from my mostly disinterested overview, the Nokia N95 is one of the best camera phones available and it still looks crap compared to my very old camera.
However that does not excuse the abysmal quality of my iPhone camera. Daring fireball comments on a list of missing features in the new 3G phone and one is the camera which stays the same as the existing camera. I quite like to snap pictures of new contacts and add them to my address book but even for this rather arbitrary purpose the iPhone camera is crap – there’s no excusing this – they should simply leave it off rather than including it and just annoying me.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/06/tradeoffs

It’s so rare these days to use a business service and think “There’s not a single thing I’d change about that”. Today I had the delightful experience of using FedexKinkos to print out some A0 pages for a meeting I have Wednesday.
It started with their refreshing way of submitting your job – simply find the email address of the branch you’d like to use and mail them PDFs along with instructions. In my case the Chancery Lane branch is close but it turns out their large format printer was broken until Thursday – I found out when they called me about 10 minutes after I sent the email – this is a great way for a business to fail to deliver. I wasn’t put out since I could very easily then get hold of the guys in Mayfair and send my job over there. The mail got there about 1pm and I asked if I could collect the printouts at 4pm. No problem apparently.
At 4:30 or so I wandered into the Mayfair branch and there was my stuff – no account needed and no messing about with payment (granted it was only £21 but still).
Other businesses watch out – this was an exceptionally well executed transaction using all the Internet tools I have available to me on every computer I use. If you make it easy for me to give you money, I will.

Yves St Laurent has died aged 71.