Archis's Blog

I’m back to Microsoft and having great fun here. Got a project that might change the way we compute (as always). It’s got the potential to change the way you think of your desktop.

It’s been fun catching up on all the changes that have taken place on campus since I left 5 months ago. IRC has been blocked by probably the network security team so no more utopia strategy discussions for me. I’ve joined a new Utopia Kingdom, by the way. After my last one broke off due to lack of time on part of all provinces, I took a break for a few weeks. Back in an inactive KD though (damn!). Will try to become the Monarch and bring the kingdom back on track.

There’s a lot of cool things I can see here. There’s something called as Office Live that’s being developed on the ground floor. Really brilliant stuff. Basically, the concept is to have your entire office being managed online. I don’t mean office automation like spreadsheets and wordprocessors (before you begin telling me how Google did it first), but your entire office IT department is handled by Live. Your corporate e-mail, payroll, employee tracking, domains, websites, etc. Literally anything you need to run a small company (around 10-50 people) is available with Office Live.

So small companies don’t need to spend anything on IT support staff or outsource it to anyone. The pricing is also very enticing. Right now the premium thingy costs around 60$ a month which is less then 5K rupees per month. Way less than what you’d need to pay an employee. Plus, you get your corporate outlook e-mail, calender, blah, blah blah…..

And if you have Microsoft Office, it will seamlessly integrate with your Office Live account and synchronise with it. Now that’s way cool. I think this link should take you there (though it may change. Just visit www.live.com and search for “Office Live” just in case): http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office_live/FX101754491033.aspx

As always, the first two floors probably have the Windows Mobile teams developing cool stuff for mobile users. Although, I don’t see any reaction here to the iPhone yet. I’ve been getting repeated queries about how Microsoft is responding to the iPhone, and frankly, I’ve got no idea. Microsoft will definately cool development environments to popularise the Windows Mobile. Everything here is on a need-to-know basis, but as an independent observer for several years, I think Microsoft might just “pull a VB” on the Windows Mobile. Remember what made windows popular over Linux a few years ago?

Visual Basic! You install it. Write code. Draw your UI just the way you like it. Go to Tools->Package and wallah! You can send a packaged self-sustained executable to anyone running windows anywhere in the world and it works! Frankly, I’ve been saying this for years and will keep saying this until Linux gives better development tools – Java was the only real threat to Microsoft, and not the C/autoconf/automake stack on Linux. Java went further than VB. You could write code, compile it, package it and wallah! It works on absolutely any machine in the world. PERIOD! It could be a mobile, a webserver, a desktop, or your car’s fuel-intection microcontroller. The code would always work! Now that was way cool.

I think what’s really going to decide the winner in the iPhone/WindowsMobile/EmbeddedLinux/Symbian war is how each of them will allow more and more applications to be written and deployed on their platforms. Ultimately, developers rule the computing world. You could have a great cool language and cool OS but if nobody except you can write a program on it, it’s not going to sell! I’m not too familiar with development tools for either of these platforms, but whatever it is, J2ME is clearly in the lead so far.

The iPhone may be cool at first sight. But if you wanted to add a feature and couldn’t deploy it to clients fast and easily enough, you might just end up recommending a Windows Mobile or more probably a J2ME mobile to your clients. And nobody can kid me that when someone builds a phone, they put in all the features a user would ever need. I’m planning to buy a cellphone and even if I’m willing to dish out a hefty 20K for it, I forsee myself wanting to write a lot of stuff to make it work the way I want it to work.

Linux has an edge in being open source. Everyone knows what makes it tick and can modify it. But the real challenge is in making it as easy as possible to really modify it. If people find themselves compiling too many tarballs and a whole deal of wierd libraries and non-compatible APIs thanks to ego-problems between different OSS groups, Linux will lose out bigtime – against a fixed reliable proprietary solution – it could be Apple/Microsft/Symbian/Sun/Whatever. What happened with Qt/Gtk or RPM incompatibility across Mandriva/RH/SuSE or the DEB incompatibility with Debian/Ubuntu, if repeated in the mobile world, would frustrate the developers in an already unsteady and unreliable and incompatible development-model.

Another cool thing recently to be released is Vista. Vista is definately going to try and “pull a VB”, with development going through a major paradigm-shift after VB6.0. In fact, old programmers like me will now be making ourselves useful in writing back-end code since the front-end code development is going to be astoundinly easy and makes it very difficult for me to demand a lot of money for my work. It’s going to drive down development costs once more.

Here’s something you don’t witness daily. I shall be working at Microsoft from Tuesday and my group is going to Linux Asia and I wanted to be with them. So just asked my boss casually whether I could attend it, thoroughly expecting a polite smile and a soft “Not really, it’s against corporate policy”. To my amazement, he pings me on yahoo messenger and tells me to go right ahead and attend it.

Now that’s really cool! It appears that so long as I get my work done, and I don’t disclose anything I do to outsiders, Microsoft has no issues if I go to Linux events and that too on working days.

If anyone else is planning to be there, that would be a good chance for us to meet up. The event is in Delhi and India Habitat Center on the 31st of Jan to 2nd of Feb.

I’ll be at Microsoft, Hyd between 16th January and 16th May. So will be absent from the Pune scene for a while.

An admittedly wierd title to begin with. But as a freshly baked computer science graduate, one has to tolerate a lot of lunch and dinner meetings with people attempting to show you your purpose in life (or rather how your grand purpose in life has something to do with working for them). If you’re the soft-spoken kind of person that I am, you find it increasinly difficult to say no – naturally all their offers are great and the money is good, but then what exactly is it that drives me to leave the lakhs of rupees of offers and go for a Ph.D.?

Yesterday, over a meeting related to a startup that some of my friends are planning (me included), the discussion moved into my transition from the open source world to Microsoft. Well, the one thing that got me pissed off at the FOSS people was the stagnation, repetition, and incessant bug-fixing. There was no excitement, no research, no risky ideas that could either take me to bankruptcy or make billions of dollars, and no desire to experiment. Unless its been done before and tried and tested by a proprietary company, they won’t do it. Before you start giving me the shit about the features that Linux has but Windows doesn’t, I said “proprietary software” and not “Microsoft”. Solaris, Unices and various other OSes have had features that Linux now boasts of. Even the SELinux architecture had to be given by the NSA.

Then we had the standard FOSS guys crying over their problems. That’s when I had enough! “I wish the world was more ethical”, “I wish people knew that _we_ know what’s best for them.”, and so on……

And that’s when I realised why the Microsoft world was so attractive to me (and we immediately hit upon a business model that we’re going to incubate from June onwards – loads of money is being guaranteed by a certain group that shall remain nameless right now). It’s the troubles and problems and the fun of _solving_ them! Microsoft is a very adaptive company – a *very* adaptive company indeed. They’ve gone from operating systems to mobile devices and everything imaginable in between. And they don’t cry about problems – they embrace them. People at Microsoft are happy that the world doesn’t work the way they want it to work. That’s why they have a reason to exist. That’s the key to being there.

If Shivaji Maharaj were born in a free India with a perfect justice system and a great law-enforcement mechanism, he would have been bored and become a nobody. There would be no reason for us to have recognised him. Afterall, what would he do? It’s a perfect system already. Thank god he was born in an era when the British were taking over India from the east and the Moghuls from the north. There was tyranny, hypocrisy, injustice and crime. That’s why we recognise him. That’s why he existed. To solve problems. Without those problems, Shivaji as we know him would not exist. He did more than just drive away the British. He established a *civilisation*. Be brought rules, regulations, guidelines, standards for taxation, trade, religion, etc.

If Mahatma Gandhi had gone on living in England as a lawyer, he would never have known about South Africa or the conditions back home in India. If Indians were tolerant and truthfull and non-violent, he would have been redundant. If the blacks in America had been the same, Martin Luther King Jr. would have been bored.

Without the millenia of discrimination within the Hindu caste system, Dr. Ambedkar would have been just another guy out there.

It was these problems that made these people who they are. Without problems, we would never have had a need for such remarkable individuals, neither would we have cared if they ever existed. Imagine if there were a very truthful and honest person living in India while the Pandavas were ruling. We have no knowledge of such people, and they have nothing to do. The world was perfect – and kind of boring. If Duryodhan had never been the bad person he was, we would never have read Mahabharata. It would be pointless. The Pandavas would have no need to fight the legendary battle on Kurukshetra and India would have had no epics to speak of – well, no exciting epics at least.

I used to feel pissed off about the sucky software industry that it is today – there’s no use denying it – the software industry deserves much less credit than the media attributes to them. Everyone, yes EVERYONE is a hypocrite. The openly non-ethical ones and the self-declared ethical ones. Everyone’s manipulating the common man to further their own ends. Information Technology has not yet delivered on it’s promise to help the poor creatures that are committing suicide due to lack of support. If anything it is increasing the monetary divide that has plagued India for centuries.

However, we must be proud that we are in a profession full of problems. That’s what separates the Mahatma Gandhis from the commoners. Don’t blame the problems, be happy that problems exist – because that gives you a reason to exist – as a problem-solver. The world sucks! It’s true! And it’s a good thing. Now we have a chance to change it. We can make it better. We have been given a gift. A gift of opportunity. You could have been born the son of a King and inherited a kingdom. But it would have been boring and pointless. We’ve been given the opportunity to build our own kingdoms, the way we want them to be!

So the next time you feel like blaming the world, blame it and be happy about it. Because you have the opportunity to change it. In a perfect world, you would have been bored. I know I sound a bit like Don Juan, but I am a big fan of ‘Man and Superman’.

I recently noticed a friend who was depressed about why she should be born at a time when these problems exist. Her logic made sense, “Why are some people born in a good atmosphere at a good time and why do some people get to be born in a crisis?” The answer is simple. God loves some people more than others. Some, he gives direct wealth and fortune and comfort and inheritance, and we never hear about them. The others, he loves deeply and gives them problems and problems and even more problems to solve. And we remember these people for centuries to come.

So remember to wait a moment and thank God or whatever supernatural entity you believe in (like the Force), the next time you face a serious crisis. Becase he is giving you the opportunity to be remembered as the one who solved it!