Tian Bai

WLC is moving into the new office, whose structure diagram has just been distributed to us.  Coincidently, I read about the Bionic Office of Fog Creek.  Compared to Fog Creek, MS looks more like a traditional company, doesn’t it?

Joel Spolsky wrote a article "Choices = Headaches", in which he complains the bad design of the nine options, two icons and seven menu items, Windows Vista provided for users to leave their computer.  Actually, the purpose of introducing the new mode ‘Sleep’ (the leftmost icon) is to address this kind of complaints against WinXP.

In the Features for Performance, you can find that ‘Sleep’ mode behaves differently on laptops from on desktops.  It’s a good design.  The only pitfall is its name.  It would be much better if it’s called ‘Leave’, with a tooltip ‘Let Vista take care of it’.  Correspondingly, the menu can be named as ‘For Geeks’, with a tooltip ‘You are on your own’.

1. It’s beneficial to the project I’m working on.  My project heavily involves text manipulation, for which Perl was originally developed.
2. It’s beneficial to a PM.  Perl is efficient at building demo code to show prototypes.

It’s Kingword that pushes me to start my Perl career from such a poor script, a script less than 10 lines.  Before I upgraded from Kingword2005 to Kingword2006, I exported (one feature of Kingword) my NewWord list to a txt file whose format is defined by Kingword2005.  Then, when I tried to import them back to the NewWordPad of Kingword2006, it failed because Kingword2006 can only import txt files in a new format newly defined by Kingword2006.  It feels like the government persuade me to trade my gold for the currency, but some day later, the government issues a new kind of currency and the one I hold can not be used any more.

So I decided to fight against Kingword, by writing a Perl script transforming the old format to the new one.  I did and it works well.

Here, I’m talking about managing windows, not Windows.  Managing windows under Windows XP.

1. Choose several windows (say 3 windows) on the task bar, by holding the <Ctrl> key and clicking the window buttons.  Once a window is chosen, it appears pressed.
2. Right click one of the window buttons you chose, choose "Tile Horizontally" or "Tile Vertically".

• Satisfy customer early (continuous, frequent delivery of value).  – For ordinary users, does it really matter to get Windows Vista sooner or later?
• Welcome changing requirements, even late.  – This is the crucial point.  The products of MS are all GENERAL solutions/services/platforms, ie none is custom-built.  So, why is it necessary to subject to serveral customers’ requirements change?

• Customers and developers work together.  – Impossible to involve all customers.  Extremely hard to select representative visiting customers.

But things are changing, escpecially in the most dynamic product lines, eg Windows Live.  Products in these fields exceptionally need to "Satisfy customers early".

To me, the most attractive Pro of Agile Methods is: "working software over comprehensive documentation".

Last but not least, the MS Nighhtly Build Cycle is the heartbeat of the project.  There is a huge incentive not to break the build.