It's like anything else, the more you use something the harder it gets to stop using it. Maybe it's because that thing is so enticing that you become mentally addicted to it. Maybe it's just that you use it for so long that it becomes a habit and habits are hard to break. Maybe it just becomes your mental model for how something should function so everything else that has different model seems wrong. Whatever the reason it's hard to quit...
With drug or alcohol abuse people are sent to detox where they are taken off of the drug completely until a physical addiction can be broken (my naive interpretation). With cigarettes people are given patches or gum to ease the dependence by slowly lowering the amount of nicotine that someone requires. With other things that are inherently good where people just want to change their behaivor, any type of approach can work, but the change still difficult...
Hi, my name is Mike, I work for Microsoft, and I'm a Google-aholic. I've tried to quit many times but have been unsuccesful. There are a lot of areas where I am addicted to different degrees: Search is what put Google on the map, I use there search almost exclusively as it has been the superior seach tool on the internet and I search a lot; Maps have become an essential tool on the web and I typically find myself using Google Maps; You're reading this post on blogger which is a Google property, my family blog receives much more attention than this blog and has become an essential part of communication with my distributed relatives; Many other Google products are part of my daily life including Picasa, Google Earth, iGoogle, GMail, and Google News.
I've always tried to be a good corporate citizen at the places that I have worked. When I was at Sun I used Solaris and Linux on my desktop. I used OpenOffice/StarOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Java, Netbeans, everything OpenSource, everything not Microsoft. I even got many in my own family to use these same products. I was on the Scott McNealy bandwagon and supported what we did at Sun.
When I joined Microsoft a couple years ago I had to learn how to use Windows and Office and Outlook and Internet Explorer and Visual Studio and all the other great products we have at our disposal here. But it's only been recently that I've begun thinking about the other "software" I use and how my actions impact the strategy of other divisions at Microsoft. This has led me to check myself into Google Rehab where I intend to ween myself off of competitor products over time.
I'm starting with the big one: Search. The first intervention was to replace the default search provider in Internet Explorer with the Live search provider. At work I've replaced it with an internal tool called the Live Search challenge which takes a search query and sends it to Live Search Beta as well as Google and displays the results side by side. (I said I was doing this slowly). I've tried switching my search provider before but was seriously disappointed by the quality of the results on Live or MSN, but the new Live Search is greatly improved and the results are much more relevant these days.
I've also started distancing myself from Picasa. Microsoft recently made available the Windows Live Photo Gallery that, quite frankly, is a much nicer tool than Picasa with far more features. The one problem that it has is that it is a little more difficult to post pictures to my Blogger account, but Windows Live Writer fixes that. And an eventual migration from Blogger to Live Spaces will also solve that. An interesting aside here is that Microsoft is the one that provides that better interop story in this case, with Google products only supporting their own properties, likely because there is no market for Windows Live Spaces, but interesting none the less...
I'm not sure how things will go. I'll try to keep you updated. I may fall off the wagon here and there at some point, but hey, it's a journey.
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Attempting to make sense out of the chaos that is the software industry.
2 comments:
Why not just use what is best when you have the option? There are certainly areas you have to buy the entire cow - with Visual Studio you are embracing the MS software development model and it wouldn't make much sense to drag in something like Java/Eclipse (assuming it was better than C-sharp for the point). It seems to me that you should take advantage of the best option when it comes to technologies, like search, that are easy (technically) to move between. Software is moving into more-and-more areas of our life, and it is not realistic to expect MS to have a quality product in every one of these areas.
Either way, I think its cool you moved from one half of the world to the other and learned a whole new stack of development tools. What is even cooler than that is knowing you work for a company that actually makes money!!!
Part of what I was attempting to say was that "what is best" is very commonly based on what we are used to (I'm sure there is a whole field of psychology around this). I'll admit that in the past I have found that Live search was not as good as Google. The relevancy of the results were not as good and the quality of the content that was returned in the results were not filtered for scam sites like bait and switch sites. This has what has driven me away from Live search in the past. Now I've decided to give it another try using the Live search. Over the past few weeks I've been very happy with the improvements that have been made and am beginning to get more used to some of the other features that are in Live Search. There is a lot less to "get used to" in a search site, than say a mail client, or a blog, or a image editing package, or a software development stack. Most competing products in the technology space are very similar with each having its own strengths and weaknesses, so becoming familiar with a competing product will typically allow me to be just as productive as the other.
Clearly the motivation for me to change to something like Visual Studio/.Net from Eclipse/Java was driven by my job change. That is tru for most developers out there, they get to use what their job requires them to use. Most people have the choice of something like a search engine or personal mail client. So for me the motivation to make the switch to a new searc/mail/blog/whatever product that I am not comfortable with is purely about dogfooding the products that the company I work for creates and to stop supporting the competition. I did this at Sun and am trying to do it at Microsoft now. There is a very open environment at MS that encourages people to try out other products (very different feel than Sun). There are people here running Linux or using Macs. There are plenty of people that use Emacs and VI. and so on. One of the nice things about working at Microsoft is that you get a lot of feedback on the products you are developing, both from the outside world and internally. There's nothing like having millions of people using your software very quickly. I feel like one thing that I can help out with is to provide feedback to the teams on the things that I like and don't like about the products I am trying to use. Hopefully, as my time in rehab continues, I'll be able to help improve our products.
For me many
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