Wandering Thoughts archives

Microsoft has a problem

It's not the carefully spun death of WinFS, or even (as Cringley put it) that Microsoft has spent five years and five billion dollars not shipping Windows Vista.

Microsoft's problem is that ordinary people can't keep Windows machines secured. Spyware and other malware is rampant, compromised Windows boxes are perhaps the single largest source of spam email on the Internet, and anti-virus and anti-spyware software is now considered a basic requirement on machines.

(Anecdotally, it's already to the point where it's often cheaper in a small business or home setting to replace a cheap Windows machine rather than try to clean it of malware.)

This matters because home users and other areas with ordinary people are pretty much where the expansion possibilities are for Windows. The business desktop market is pretty much saturated with Windows products, especially in businesses large enough to be able to hire good Windows sysadmins (who can keep those Windows machines free of viruses, spyware, and so on).

(This does assume that the potential growth is in machines that connect to networks, as opposed to isolated standalone machines. I think this is a pretty safe assumption to make.)

People are not very enthused about buying machines that are a hassle, and the security issues make Windows a hassle. I also suspect that they make people dislike Windows due to the hassles, and people disliking your software is never a good sign. (For a start, it drops their loyalty.)

This also affects Microsoft's desire to have Windows running everywhere and on everything. Right now, 'Windows everywhere' means 'viruses everywhere', which is not a very attractive proposition.

Metrics considered dangerous

It's a general truism in software development that metrics are often dangerous, because people will naturally work to what you pay attention to (to summarize). If you pay attention to bugs closed, people close bugs; if you pay attention to lines of code written, people write code. The dangers inherent in this are hopefully obvious.

(In fact it happens outside of software development too; consider all of the schools that are busy 'teaching to the test', because various standardized tests have become so important.)

I've had the interesting experience of discovering that this effect works even on yourself, with personal metrics you do for your own use.

A while back I wrote a command to show a count of WanderingThoughts entries broken down by the category and the month they were posted in, because I was curious what the distribution would look like. But once I had this metric, I found myself looking at it and having it affect what I wrote about and when, especially towards the ends of the month as I ran out of time to 'even up' the month's numbers or write as many extra entries as the previous month. (Partly this is my own neurotic nature at work, of course.)

This isn't really how I want to write WanderingThoughts. While a variety of topics is nice, I don't want a drive for variety (and having 'enough' of each topic) to trump writing about whatever catches my fancy. (Down that route lies writing entries just because I need to make the numbers come out, and shortly after that comes doom.)

Since I've become conscious of this effect, I've tried to take steps against it. One of them is obvious: look at the metrics (ie, run the command) less often (although it remains a shiny temptation). Still, I haven't entirely been able to ignore the feeling that I am (for example) writing 'too little' about Python this month.

It's been a somewhat disconcerting to actually live out the truism myself, but it has given me a rather more visceral appreciation for its essential truth. And for how it can sneak up on you, despite the best of intentions.

Why charging for things is deadly at a university

There's a really simple two-part recipe for failing to create useful ubiquitous services at universities. It goes like this:

1. come up with an important service that should be ubiquitous.
2. fund it by charging its users.

The moment you start charging people for things at a university, you enter into a competition for their money. People start asking 'why should we spend money on this?' and 'why should we pay you for this?' and 'is this the best use for this money?', and you can't win that competition all the time.

(Some unit is always strapped for cash and will opt out. Some unit always feels that they can do it better than you, or just that their money is better spent on something that fits their needs more precisely.)

In short: because you've given people a choice about it, you invite them to not buy into the service. So much for ubiquity.

(Also, simply doing the sales job drains resources; you wind up spending at least some of your time selling people on the service instead of providing it.)

With central budgeting, you can theoretically give people money with one hand and then mandate that they spent it with the other. This probably isn't going to be popular (partly for reasons outlined here), plus it doesn't necessarily work all that well once you hit people with grant funding.

If something is important enough to be ubiquitous, the only way to go is to give it away for free. Don't try to fund it on the sly by charging people on a cost recovery basis; persuade the central budget authority that it's important enough to fund centrally.

This even applies to purely nominal charges; sooner or later someone will decline to pay, and you lose the benefits.

(Disclaimer: I am pleased to say that the University of Toronto gets this, and things like Windows anti-virus programs are free for anyone on campus (and funded through central budget funds).)

People are ordinary

Most people are ordinary, which means that most people are going to produce lame and boring results. Not through any fault of their own, but because they will be ordinary results, and we're simply just not very interested in the ordinary because there's so much of it. By and large we're driven to the exceptional, the rare; to what stands out.

Thus, the inevitable but often overlooked result of people being social on the Internet is a lot of ordinary, boring blogs, home pages, band sites, and so on. This is not because people don't have anything to say; people have a lot to say, as the growth of blogging shows. It's just that most of what they have to say is ordinary.

This holds true no matter how good people's output is. If everyone writes well, or designs good home pages, that becomes ordinary and we start looking for the even better. The quality bar is always set to 'better than the run of the mill', no matter how good the run of the mill is.

Of course a certain amount of people's output will be worse than ordinary, and some of it will be very bad indeed. And as the overall population grows, there will be more and more of the low end, because a rising tide floats all boats. (Then one of the minor effects of the Internet kicks in; as the absolute amount of something increases, it becomes easier and easier to accidentally stumble over it.)

Hence, it should not be surprising that much of what you find out there on blogs, LiveJournal, and other places where people share things on the Internet is ordinary (and occasionally horrifying). If anything, it's actually a good sign; it means that a lot of people are using the Internet to be themselves.

(As with PeopleAreSocial, I doubt any of this is original to me.)