"MSFT chose to get slick 'marketeers'"
I wouldn't say that's entirely true.
With the recent layoffs from Apple, several thousand Apple employees got letters from Microsoft inviting them to join the MSFT team.
Also, in the early years, when Bill Gates new company was struggling, he asked his finance guy Steve Ballmer for more money to hire programmers. Ballmer was not receptive to th9is idea at first, considering that they should wait until they had more cash before trying to expand. But Bill was insistant. This was one of the few financial decisions that Ballmer claims to have conceded to Bill Gates for and it was also the best decision (from a recent Forbes article).
MSFT has since used the stategy of hiring as many programmers as they can to get the job done. This strategy has also spilled over to the vendor arena. Get as many people programming for MSFT as possible. The incentive is $$$. Those MSFT stock options are lucritive. The only drawback, you have to have a thick hide to bear the Bill Gates and his strong opinions. You virtually have to sell your soul to program his way.
To top it, a couple of Apple's top OS programmer had gone onto MSFT, and during the development of Win95, they had to take 30 programmers off of the MS Office for Mac department to help get Win95 out on time.
So, I wouldn't say they are lacking in the programming area.
My two cents.
-Bill HooFatt
P.S. I'm currently in the Win NT Core/Server Certification class and it's amusing to hear the MSFT Solutions guy apologizing for all of the problems when we covered the chapter on troubleshooting plug & play! All of the techies in there are also rather sarcastic about MSFT's software design logic, but we all agree, the money is good! |
