An observation on the presentation of criticism
Why so grumpy?
Regardless of the content of criticism, its presentation is inversely proportional in harshness to the perceived humanness of its target.
When you criticize what you perceive to be an opaque corporate wall, it is easy to get unnecessarily harsh and negative and ranty.
When you criticize what you perceive to be humans and their work, you may have exactly the same things to say, but you present them in a manner that is more balanced, more respectful/-able, and probably more useful.
(Well, many of us do.)
Probably for this reason, Microsoft gets more flak per unit of suckiness than other software companies.
Nobody is ever suckiness-free. Minimizing flak means both:
- minimizing suckiness
- and minimizing FPUOS (flak per unit of suckiness) — by decorporatizing your image as hard as you can
(Yeah, decorporatize is a word now. 127 results on Google say so.)
I suspect blogs.msdn.com was the best move Microsoft ever made to improve their image among developers.
Of course, releasing a stable, usable SCM would be an even better move. I hope TFS SP1 turns out to be that move.