Infovark

As long as I’m picking on Microsoft for releasing developer tools before they’re fully baked — a cornerstone of Microsoft strategy, according to Joel Spolsky — I might as well take a swipe at their laughable not-quite-a-wiki.

At the bottom of most pages on MSDN is a section called “Community Content”. It’s the Microsoft’s way of encouraging participation from the developer community. Ever since Steve Ballmer skipped onstage chanting developers, developers, developers, developers, Microsoft has tried to recapture the attention — and most importantly, the talent — of the independent developer community. Most of those developers have long since fled to other platforms. Most of these alternatives are open source, meaning that they’ll accept contributions from any programmer with a good suggestion.

This is important, because before most good programmers get their first job, they’ll begin contributing to open source projects. It’s a way to gain experience and confidence, while helping to build their resume. Once they enter the working world, they’re likely to stick with the open source technologies they know. Microsoft is painfully aware of this, and not quite sure what to do about it.

Hence the Community Contribution section on MSDN and Microsoft’s recent open source initiatives. It’s their attempt to bring back the magic and infuse their technologies with teh awsum. While they’ve done a great job with CodePlex, and there’s a healthy Microsoft blogging community of consultants, partners, and independent developers, Microsoft suffers many of the same difficulties switching to an Enterprise 2.0 mindset as other large corporations.

So, you’re a developer, and you’ve found an oddity — possibly a bug, definitely a surprise — in one of the .NET framework’s gazillion objects. Naturally, after exhausting all other avenues for help, you found yourself (shudder) actually reading the documentation on MSDN. Unsurprisingly, it makes no mention of the quirk. You think to yourself, hey, maybe I’ll leave a note using this Community Content thingy. So you click the “Add new content” link and see the following screen.

How many problems did you spot? OK, the image is a little small. I’ll enlarge and highlight a few things.

First, if you’re trying to encourage participation, never, ever, say that this is “not the right place”. If someone wants to make your website better by adding detail, let them. If it turns out that the contribution is not relevant, you can always edit, move or moderate it later. And if you must point out that another forum or communications channel is more appropriate, at least be so good as to provide a hyperlink to it. This is the web, after all.

Second, don’t scare your users with legal threats. They won’t work. The nice users won’t contribute to your site out of fear, and the obnoxious jerks will post whatever they want anyway. It’s self-defeating.

And did you spot the third, final problem? This one’s tricky.

There it is: I’m already signed in to MSDN. They know who I am. I’ve agreed to their terms and conditions once already. They can ban me from the site if I don’t behave. Or they can leave my inappropriate post right where it is, so that everyone will know what an obnoxious jerk I can be. This entire page is nothing but a waste of time.

I could have said something incredibly useful. But hey, I’ve got important things to do. I don’t have time to read through another Microsoft EULA, thanks. Instead I’ll just get back to work.

Joel Spolsky posted an hilarious rant about storage in the cloud. You should read it. I’ll wait.

Joel is upset because the software industry heavyweights are chasing the dream. You know the dream. It’s the dream of every management consultant, technophile and (in Joel’s words) architecture astronaut. The dream comes in many different guises. In various times, in various places, the dream has lured many to destruction — or at least to waste gobs of money and years of effort.

I call it One System to Rule Them All.

It’s the utopian idea that with enough effort you can craft an all-encompassing solution for a vast array of problems using a single, perfect framework. This year’s flavor of the dream happens to be storage in the cloud, or perhaps the belief that click-based advertising can fund everything. A few years ago, solid, respectable banking types had subscribed to the dream of the New Economy. A real estate agent once assured me that house prises in Northern Virginia never fell.

Well, never say never.

Godel’s incompleteness theorem says that all but the simplest mathematical systems will fail internal consistency tests. Most grand theories contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Most organizations of significant size will have hybrid system architectures. No single office suite, operating platform, or synchronized filing system can accomplish everything. One size doesn’t fit all, nor should it. Vive la différence.

ReadWriteWeb, (the most impossible web site to actually say aloud), carries a great article this morning on Zappos – an online shoe company that has dived, boots and all into Twitter.

The tweets of every Zappos employee, including the CEO, can be found aggregated on the company web site.

I think this is a really inspired piece of thinking. Twitter allows me to see that the company is made up of people — real people, with thoughts and feelings, and senses of humor. It allows a transparent view into the company, which tells me that Zappos must actually trust and value it’s employees. (Hey — It even made me want to write this blog post about them).

There was a time when the most important thing a CEO did was to constantly present a “professional business” approach to the community. Zappos’ CEO, on the other hand, is apparently having troubles getting his pants to stay on.

Is that going to hurt sales? is it going to be ‘bad for business’?

Nope. In fact, I bet it does just the opposite.

(Dean and I are so busy right now, that we don’t update as much as we should, but you can find us on twitter too - we’d love to hear from you!)