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2.1/ (Old) Microsoft vs Facebook. Vernal hot take alert 🚨🚨🚨: “(At Microsoft) I actually sat on the SOAP standards body and I thought about this thing that hopefully no one on the podcast remember is called the WS star protocols. It's like CORBA, but worse.” 😂😂😂
2.2/ Point of talking about this: “One of the lessons I mislearned when I first joined Microsoft was the way you got things done was you allocated 200 people to a project and told them to go and start doing some stuff.“
2.3/ He compares FB login project to Microsoft Hailstorm. “We (team of 3-4) basically had it working within maybe four or so months … Microsoft had 200 people working on this thing for two years and I'd never really exited the “spec phase.”“
2.4/ Lesson: “Strategy is important, but you can't be – you have to find a way to balance strategy with both simplicity and customer focus … Mistakes Microsoft made at the time were strategizing around what was in Microsoft self-interest“ rather than customer focus.
2.5/ Leadership needs to be disciplined about team size and avoid empire building. “It takes I think a really high-level of maturity in the leadership of a project to say, “I don't want any more people. Stop sending me people... Just going to build something with this team.”
2.6/ “You just end up with these dynamics as companies grow, where you think if you have an
important problem, you have to throw a lot of people at it… You end up with 200 people not quite knowing what to do.”
important problem, you have to throw a lot of people at it… You end up with 200 people not quite knowing what to do.”
2.7/ Mike then talked about mistakes he made at FB. My high level comment: I’m very impressed with how open Mike is about his mistakes in this section. It’s really good so I’ll do a bunch of verbatim quoting:
2.8/ “I think at the time, my approach was how do I fit these things together in a coherent way? It was a little bit like, I've got a bunch of ingredients on the table, let's figure out what soup I can make from them.“
2.9/ “As opposed to forget the ingredients on the table, what is the – who is the customer? What is their problem and what problem are we trying to solve? There's one these 10 ingredients that matter and then the other nine ingredients don't make any sense“
2.10/ “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out okay, there's these 10 puzzle pieces. What is the right way for them to go together? I should have just said ... let's ditch these seven or eight of these things are good in the abstract and I'm glad that they exist.”
2.11/ “They don't have coherence with everything else. Let's ... figure out something else because you end up playing the game with the pieces you have, instead of intentionally designing, thinking from first principles what games you should be playing.“
2.12/ Mike describes that a lot of the work in his orgs stemmed from a theory that everything is in the social graphs and that feeds should be thought of as a sort of database replication log of that graph. Then build platform, search, other services on top of that.
2.13/ “I think it was just too large a coordination problem. It would have been better to get the system to work really well for one use case and then move to adjacent use cases“
2.13/ Next tranche:
