"especially wrt collaborative editing" - The office web apps got real time collaborative editing a couple of months ago [1]. I've used it and it works quite well.
That's good to know, thanks. I haven't used it myself. I have used the collaborative editing in Google Docs, and it's done well enough that I don't see a whole lot of room for improvement, but I certainly wouldn't deny the possibility that Office has reached parity in this area.
I highly recommend enabling the two factor authentication feature. I got my account targeted by some botnet and was breached several times regardless of how ridiculous my password was. Of course, this all stopped the moment I started using two factor auth.
I've got some Chinese IP trying to log in to my account every 4 or 5 days at the moment it seems. Prior to that, it was a Japanese IP every few days for a couple of weeks.
WP8 has been gaining momentum [1]; brushing it aside is a mistake. I also wouldn't count out WinRT. Surface 2 and the Nokia Lumia 2520 have received relatively favorable reviews. I don't expect their sales to double overnight or anything like that, but I expect they'll increase steadily throughout 2014.
Ugh sorry to throw this at you (nothing personal) but here's how I see it...
Full disclosure: OP, long term Microsoft customer, ex MSDN premium sub, ex-registered gold parnership, 25 years working with Microsoft software and ex MCDBA, MCSD, ex WinPhone user (710, 820). Hey I even have a book on DOS signed by Gates from a 1990 PCUG meeting I attended.
Note the number of ex'es above. Even people like myself with vested interest have given the whole platform the finger due to the amount of crack smoking going on in the last couple of years.
Realistically, this is what it looks like to us. Not just me; this is the talk around the gum tree amongst the sector in the UK:
1. WinRT is an utter failure and is going to die. Even Microsoft is pretty sure about this now[1]. We've been telling clients not to even poke it with a 20 foot long stick becuase our stuff doesn't work on it (we have a desktop/COM broker that talks to our web app). It's a support nightmare. People just think they're getting a cheap PC. Instead they get a laggy bastardised half-finished OS which sometimes throws the desktop in your face with a copy of Office that is pure sufferance to use.
2. I've said positive things about WP8. It's not terrible. However WP is only selling because the handsets are low priced compared to the competition and aggressive marketing. Regardless of sales, I doubt a single penny of profit has turned up yet. Not only that, a lot of us devs who would possibly build something for it are put off by the whole buy/sell crack smoking, the fact that WP7 users were left in the shit and the completely closed nature of the platform. Also, mummy darling and Vicky Pollard still want an iPhone as do I because it's just nice [2] and not some lump of soulless plastic farted out of a tellytubby.
It's only my Unix/Linux wizardry that has kept me sane all these years.
I actually went and played with one in the Apple Store a couple of days after release. At the time I was still using my Lumia 820. They feel about the same so I agree.
However consider the 4, 4s, 5, 5s. There's nothing like that for WP.
They also stipulated that Microsoft's app be an HTML5 app, and not a native app (which is what the iOS/Android clients are), for no reason I was able to discern or theorize at the time. And thanks to deficiencies in the Windows Phone web engine, that proved impossible to do effectively.
They also refused to provide whatever information was necessary to allow their native app to display ads appropriately.
Basically, regardless of how Google explains their position, it really feels like their goal here was to prevent YouTube from being easily/effectively accessible on Windows Phone devices. Or at the very least, they had zero interest in getting WP owners onto YouTube.
They stipulated that the player use HTML5 so that it could show all of their ads and overlays correctly. That seems pretty reasonable.
Microsoft couldn't have just the player in HTML5 because their embedded webview can't play video -- which is where the stories of "Google wanted the whole app to be done in HTML5" came from.
IMO an embedded webview should be able to play video, or Microsoft should have been able to get something together just for youtube.
The 'no image capture' story is not true. Apparently there was some bad information given out by an Instagram public rep. See https://twitter.com/zpower for more info.
I think opponents of stack ranking generally overlook this fact. Yes, it's terrible if you have a 5 person team, but the data becomes more normal as you add more people.
Sort the members of each group of 5. Then take the bottom performer from ten groups and sort them. Take the bottom five from ten such groups and sort them. Fire the bottom ten.
If Google did it, they'd call it MapReduce and it would be the coolest thing ever.
How do you know the data becomes more normal as your add more people? Especially if you are performing the rankings independently on each individual.
If you feel like your company is hiring against a certain set of high standards, are your employees at the low end of the 'normalized' curve holding you back as much as the people at the high end are pushing you forward?
If we put it this way, you answer your own question: :-)
>> How do you know the data becomes more normal as your add [data points]?
That said, yeah this is crazy.
The worst problem with stack ratings is not what it do (firing people which don't work out will happen, it is often good even for those fired).
The worst problem is that it destroys team culture as it is described at Microsoft: "if you're in a too good team, switch or you'll be fired." It gets hard for managers to build good teams when the individuals even have an incentive to sabotage each others. And so on.
Edit: The first part had a ":-)" on it. I think that is not interesting, compared to the idea of being in a team with people that have motivation to screw their team mates over. Like being in prison or playing the Paranoia RPG (an orc in Sauron's army?)
Any Stack ranking using a Bell curve would be dumb. Nobody I'm aware of does that. Most curves look more like a Chi Square Curve, which is far more top heavy.
You don't get anything like 'normal' without scores of samples. Any small (<50?) group is going to deviate significantly. Which means stacking is abusive to somebody.
You need something more quantifiable than that when you're running a giant organization... Your approach would absolutely work in a startup of 20 people or less, but try that in the 10,000+ man Operating Systems Division at Microsoft and you'll run into some crazy logistics problems.
Managers squabble over the best developers. They fight to transfer their worst developers to each other, and don't let talented developers go work on other projects that interest them.
Every group gets the same number of raises, regardless of their performance, or effective developers in poor groups get nothing.
Stack ranking sounds like a shitty system, without a doubt. But I don't think you can have a well grounded opinion until you think about the issues it's trying to address.
Let managers release under-performing developers to "the bench", where they can be picked up by teams that need some new blood. People on the bench are cheaper to "hire" than people from outside, so managers have an incentive to prefer picking them up.
Managers don't "let" developers do anything. They have to actually have leadership skills (or enough budget) to keep their good engineers around by choice. Effective developers on poor teams find more attractive offers. Sometimes this will involve bonuses or raises. Sometimes this will involve more influence over product direction.
Obviously some sort of ground rules are needed (significant others on different teams, no kickbacks).
But then people won't do it. You have to force security update installs. There's really no better way around it. I think you have 2 days after the updates install to before it forces you to reboot. That should be enough time right?
Perhaps a better question is why a reboot is needed in so many circumstances. Windows users have been trained to accept reboots as normal over many, many years. We used to need to reboot after every single application install. Very few OS pieces should actually require a full reboot instead of merely restarting a process or two.
Windows cannot delete/replace files, that are open. That's the cause of most reboots, it will replace them before services or apps that use them start again.
Not that I'm apologizing it's behavior - it was a design decision that Windows team made in the past, when it was deemed not important and worth reduction in complexity. Now just it comes and bites them back.
>Windows cannot delete/replace files, that are open.
Not exactly. Its up to the application which opens files to control whether the file can be modified externally. It can do this in two ways. (1) Open the file in some FILE_SHARE_* mode and let the OS sort it out. (2) use opportunistic locks that will detect external access and then let the app decide how to react - anti-virus programs use this when they are scanning files.
>That's the cause of most reboots, it will replace them before services or apps that use them start again.
Actually the cause for reboots is much more mundane. Files replaced on disks means new programs using those files get the new version, however, processes which are already running keep using the older version in memory and are thus open to being exploited by bugs that are already patched.
On servers, things are a bit different. To prevent downtime you can 'hotpatch' the update and thus avoid the reboot.
Linux doesn't solve the problem either, with the ability to replace open files. It just means you run into potential compatibility issues if you modify a shared lib and then two processes try to perform IPC that might rely on false assumptions (I believe this is exceedingly rare in practice) and to update kernel components, long-lived services you still need to restart them.
You can perform hot updates to a system but it can be complex and there are a number of restrictions on the types of updates that can be done.
[1] http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/11/06/c...