Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Rick Segal on Blue Mountain v Microsoft

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:2/23/1999; 7:32:00 PM
Topic:Rick Segal on Blue Mountain v Microsoft
Msg #:3189
Prev/Next:3188 / 3190

Rick Segal is a former Microsoft executive.

I was surprised to see you take a stance here that overlooks a whole bunch of facts and appears to make Blue Mountain the heavy in this.

First, and most important, Mr. Friedman's mail does a good job of giving the "sorry, we'd like to help but.." speech. The reality, Dave, is that Mr. Friedman is not being completely accurate when he uses phrases like "no way." As a former Evangelist and manager of an evangelist group, problems like this came up all the time. Bad code, major changes, etc, etc. In every case that I was involved with, copies of code could be obtained and given to developers. Happened all the time. And you can be sure that should an important reporter, market analyst, or large ($$$) customer, they could get it. If former employees can get it, hmmm.. No way takes on less of a creditable position. If they wanna, they coulda....

In the case of IE, I checked with some friends still at MSFT. Sure enough, there is a build tree and, sure enough, lots and lots of people are taking internal builds off that tree for testing and "shhh, here, don't say anything." While I might agree that doing a golden master CD and duplication, etc, is a pain and probably not worth doing, putting up a build that complies with the courts is not that hard (it exists), it is moved to servers all the time. We lived through this with the AVI incident, the Windows for Workgroups issue, OLE, MAPI, WinG, and tons of other "compiled fresh daily" type code sets.

IE is being built on a regular basis, I know, I asked about the builds. I think that rather then Blue Mountain Arts having to back off, Microsoft could clearly build some developer good will, issue a notice, and post an interim build. As a minimum, Microsoft could let the developers use the Release Candidates or some such. MSDN, Site Builders, etc, all are ways to get to the developer world.

Mr. Friedman probably did ask, probably got told to get lost, and got stuck with crafting an answer which is covering the tracks of an unresponsive group.

It has always been my position that as competition drops off, the big guy gets sloppy, lazy, ultimately unresponsive and arrogant. Making this out to be the fault of Blue Mountain and putting it on them to help, not sure that is either fair nor accurate.

As I now run a multi-million dollar company and in customer mode, I'm not sure you were being fair to a company trying to protect itself and the livelihoods of the people working there. It is regrettable that your project gets impacted but the grief should be pointed north to Redmond.

Rick Segal, President, Chapters Internet.

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