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Linked List: November 25, 2006

Saturday, 25 November 2006

Moishe Lettvin, who worked at Microsoft as a developer on the Vista team working on the shutdown menu Joel Spolsky complains about, explains how the Microsoft bureaucracy prevents good design from evolving:

So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

It’s worth noting that Lettvin now works at Google.

Choices = Headaches ★

Joel Spolsky has a good point, that the various ways of exiting your login session in Windows Vista are baffling (e.g. offering both “sleep” and “hibernate”), but his solution of reducing it all to just one “b’bye” button is a bit too cute. Why not just state the obvious, that Microsoft should’ve copied Mac OS X’s four commands: sleep, restart, shutdown, and log out?

Spolsky’s follow-up is worth a read, too.

The Spam Farms of the Social Web ★

Niall Kennedy’s investigation shows how a link spammer’s list of weight loss tips climbed the charts at Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.

Submissions for Leslie Harpold’s 2006 Advent Calendar ★

Leslie Harpold:

For the past five years , I’ve made an online Advent calendar. The first four years, every day has had a bit of zazz (aka the surprise) a personal memory and a link. Well, after four years, I was flat out of charming and/or funny memories, and asked the web to share some of theirs.

Pricing for Value ★

Chuq Von Rospach:

If you price things so they seem to have no value, people will treat them as if they had no value.