Why Silverlight was destined to fail and my time as one of its custodians.

Sep 21, 2011 by Scott Barnes    39 Comments    Posted under: Microsoft, Silverlight

Silverlight “dead” is admittedly an overloaded term, and one that often gets a mixed reaction.

To me the term is simple, you’re in a doctor’s surgery and the doctor (me) turns to you and simply says “Sorry, you’ve got xyz months to live, it’s time to get your affairs in order”.

That’s what I’ve been predominately doing but I’m the kind of doctor who just turns to you though and says “Dude, you’re so dead… woah..man…sux huh….let’s get DRUNK!!!”

Death of Silverlight is sad, but at the same time good. Yes I said it, as for years I’ve sat behind this product watching it grow in an amazing ways across the globe. It went from this science project existence that I remember saying it wouldn’t last through tot his highly competitive technology that had both Microsoft and Adobe at each other’s throats over.

The war between Adobe ended though and over time the technology become somewhat a questionable approach to solving a whole bunch of issues within the .NET community.

So how did we arrive at this point? Here’s my mini memoirs of my time at Microsoft and in the Silverlight Product Management / Evangelism space.

It’s a long read, but take some time to stick process it all. I’ve left out a whole heap of juicy crap, simply because it would turn into a novel!!! And you wouldn’t believe me if I wrote it anyway.

The early days.

I’ve heard a few rumors on how Silverlight started, one was that it was done by a couple of engineers mucking around with the idea, others it was a Flash compete strategic move hashed out over a whiteboard one rainy Seattle afternoon and the legend / myth continues to grow each time someone tells me.

My first insight into Silverlight was back when I was fresh faced Microsoft Evangelist who after my first week was on a plane to Seattle, a city I’ve never visited but only heard stories about through friends who few years before went to start a small unheard of game called TeamFortress (like how I worked that one in?)

I was in town for a TechReady the infamous internal staff only version of TechEd but with less backstage pass access (yes to all you MVP’s out there staff also get as much attention as you do from Product teams, especially if they don’t know you).

Here I was one afternoon, jet lagged to the max half asleep and trying as desperately as I could to pay attention to WPF talks whilst hearing the idea of the potential plug-in version of WPF? I was pulled aside by a fellow Evangelist named Chris Bernard and asked what I thought of WPF/E? … I remember bullshitting my answer to something like “yeah nah its sounds all interesting” trying as best I can to maintain a bluff that I was in the know? – as you see I came from an Adobe background and had no clue about half the crap that was going on in Microsoft.

I then thought, I better get ahead of this product as if there was one chance in hell I can survive in Microsoft it was with a Flash like solution called WPF Everywhere.

I sat in a talk that was being run by one of the first Product Managers and a guy who I later would work with, Barak Cohen. Barak was walking us through the XAML + Notepad and with hints of JavaScript capabilities coming soon.

I remember sitting in my chair thinking “Microsoft are on crack if they think they can take Flash on with this? I mean what the hell is this? Flash 1.0?”. Barak to his credit took a beating that day from others in the audience who felt the same and trust me when I say that community people are no match for internal staffers when it comes to beating up product teams when they screw up – I feel community folks hold back where as staff, don’t.

He deflected the criticism and kept everyone focused on the notion that its going to be a faster solution in the end and it will become a world class product over time.

The art of war..i mean Evangelism.

Soon after TechReady I began hitting the pavement so to speak as an Evangelist in Microsoft and because I had this background in Adobe, I’d not only do my normal pro-WPF talks to the community at home but I’d start taking on more and more Adobe compete questions from staffers around the world.

It was clear my role was fast becoming more Adobe compete and less what I was given metrics around, something which got me in a lot of hot water with my then Manger Frank Arrigo. He’d refer to me as a puppy that everyone wants to play with but it was his job to always clean up the piss on the floor after all the excitement passed.

I’d be constantly in blog / comment skirmishes with Adobe staffers like Mike Downey, Ted Patrick and slowly after compete got thicker and thicker with guys like Ryan Steward and countless others.

I was in war-mode, I took no prisoners and I often look back on those days and just cringe. What a dickhead is something I often catch myself saying – and not just the embarrassment but also how easily I turn friends into enemies with my competitive antics.

You have to realize that being inside Microsoft I got caught up in the victory emails, ego driven trips you get. Every time I went for Adobe’s throat, I got rewarded like some rabid dog that was trained to kill but given treats afterwards?

It sent mixed signals within, half the people that knew of me wanted me fired while the other half wanted me promoted? It was the 15% that lied I should worry about was my joke often told? Again *(cringe)*.

I mean we would go at it via lots of background emails. I’d threaten them, they’d threaten me and it was all a very messy thing. We’d block each other’s brands from conferences and I’d constantly nip at their every move online to the point where the rage would eventually catch them out.

I’d find myself on Messenger with an Adobe staffer flaming each other and as they did they’d always give hints or let stuff go on what they were doing. I soon found that baiting them into a fight, often gave me insight into what their moves where and so I’d always get enough information to predict what they’d likely do next.

I’d then feed this back to Product Teams internally and that’s part of the reason we always managed to stay one step ahead of them when it came to announcements – it’s like we always had a better story at every turn. It was a pretty well-oiled plan if you ask me.

The first taste of Product Management.

I remember sitting in his office with Ryan Stewart (who at the time was a ZDNet blogger only and not the Adobe staffer we see today). Brian was briefing Ryan on what’s coming up next in Silverlight doing the whole public relations brain dump and I remember thinking “wow, this is way cool, I want to do that one day”.

Previous to Ryan’s meeting he also showed me Silverlight’s logo freshly delivered and I thought to myself “Wow, that’s a very different logo to what I was expecting, nice”.

We showed Ryan and he had the same reaction and keep in mind around this time we only just announced the name – the press went absolutely nuts btw.

Now Silverlight had a logo and I wanted in and I thought Brian’s team were rock stars at it all. Especially seeing Forest Key (Original Director for Silverlight) in full work-mode – awesome talent that guy.

Time to move into Product Management or get fired.

I think it was my 3^rd TechReady, I was online talking to Brian Goldfarb (Group Product Manager) on Office Communicator one night. He and I struck up a friendship as I’d often give him Adobe insights etc. and he’d in turn give me sneaks of Silverlight etc. as it was growing. He was online and he was too busy to talk one night, so I jokingly said “Well if you need another Product Manager, I’m keen” or something like that. I was joking as my wife at the time was deadest against Seattle move. We got talking and before I knew it, the joke was over and soon after arriving in Seattle, I’m doing the infamous Interview loop.

I went through my interview loop and meet some guys I mostly went out to drinks with, I remember thinking that if this was an interview then Microsoft really need to keep a better abstraction layer in place.

I first met Ian-Ellison Taylor, the guy behind a lot of cool ideas in Windows and I think for 2/3^rd of the interview I was asking him questions about his past more than he was me. I remember thinking “this guy is the guy!…the WPF brains trust!”.

It was Friday, I was sitting in the last interview – it was with Dave Mendlen, the GM of the entire group. He was Steve Ballmers former speech writer and was a legend within the company. It was an odd meeting, he asked me a lot of left field questions and one of them from memory was how I would market a product in an un-Microsoft way?

I remember telling him that rather than sprinkle the marketing budget into crap schwag, stickers and websites. Just pool the money together and give a car away spray painted with Microsoft logo, and that’s it the give-away.

He smiled, and simply said “congratulations, welcome to the team”.

I walked out to find Brian Goldfarb in the hallway smiling and saying something like “dude, this is so going to be awesome!”.

Now I just had to figure out how I was going to tell me wife that we are about to move to Seattle as I should point out, at this point I hadn’t told her I was interviewing for the gig.

Pack up your life and move to Seattle.

I eventually wore my wife down who just gave birth to our second child Emily, so there I was organizing my entire family to move from Australia to Seattle. My wife had never set foot in the US in her entire life, and here I was dragging her away from a promising career at Ernst & Young to work for $20k USD less than we were earning in Australia (Not including her wage either).

We arrived in the US, we spent a week or so at Disney Land to adjust to jet lag and I highly recommend everyone does that if you ever take a role in Microsoft from Australia. It’s a great way to ease into the reality.

I made a point of moving over in July, given it’s when Seattle puts on its greenest best foot forward. I remember Belinda and I just arrived at our corporate housing on a nice warm Disney movie style green day. Street was clean; it was and really is a beautiful place at that time of the year.

We dumped our bags and said right, first things first. Milk, Cereal and Bread – as Belinda was in full let’s start our life mode. Belinda grabbed Emily off me, we put her in the back of this over-sized ford explorer (Americans love big cars, this was a freaking tank) and we drove down the road to a local PCCC store.

There we were, in the isle of cereal just staring at all these foreign brands, some were similar to the ones in Australia and others were just weird!. I looked back and saw Belinda in tears, she didn’t say anything but I could tell it finally hit her – “we aren’t home anymore”.

I felt really bad that day as I knew that being on Microsoft campus for me was going to be an adventure but for her this was going to be a very difficult place to make a go of.

To Microsoft’s credit they sent what I call a “tour guide” to our house the next morning. This woman was amazing; she walked us around Redmond and held our hand for 48hrs from everything to creating bank accounts to showing us where UK/Australia food can be bought.

The downside is Microsoft fought us on temporary housing, as I said in my contract I wanted 3months housing paid but they only did 2months (not to mention the GPS for the car wasn’t included). I won the fight but yeah, I remember thinking this company is worth billions and we’re haggling over the rental of a GPS? Seriously?

First Day as a Product Manager.

The very first day I was on campus, I remember thinking – this is it, I’ve hit the peak of my career. If you thought my ego was big as an Evangelist for Microsoft, you hadn’t seen anything yet. I was about to work with Brad Becker, David Pugmire and Pete Faraday. These three guys were a group of guys that not only were smart but I actually looked forward to working with.

I heard this British voice bellow quite loudly followed by what I would describe as a nervous laugh, it was from Pete. Pete is the type of guy who is extremely smart at what he does, I mean this guy knows his shit and then some but he plays the “I’m just the dumb brit in the room, what do I know” card beautifully to the point where most people I know often think he’s an idiot when in fact he’s very gifted (later found he’s actually got a PHD in UX and was the first Program Manager on the Blend team).

I was told that Pete and I would be working closely together as he was the current Adobe compete guy for the team(s) and he was needed elsewhere. My job was to take over some of that role and help steer Silverlight down this path of greatness.

Brad my boss, used to be in a band that played support gigs for Hanson in the 90’s, so he’s one of these cool, calm and patient customers who just has this “I’m chilled 24/7” look about him. Brad is a very smart guy as well, too smart for Microsoft to be honest (he’s later left). His role was the Director of Silverlight as well, but It always seemed an honory title? Brad would be the tyhpe of guy who would spend a day sweeting over the right word selection for a marketing document of some kind.

Brad gave me my first task, it was to meet with a research company and we’d get a briefing on “Where do designers come from” as at the time we were looking into ways to drag the design audiences over to our products – given we all knew without the designer in the room, XAML as a concept is fucked from the start.

I sat through the entire presentation with this look of “Seriously, you guys didn’t know this?”. I turned to Brad and asked what he thought at the time, and he simply rolled his eyes and said “yeah but now we have it officially answered” – that was my first hint at Microsoft as its less what you think that counts its more what you know.

I went back to the office and caught up with David Pugmire – DaPug!. David’s just awesome; he’s the type of guy that if I were to assemble a team tomorrow to do some important work, he’d be my first pick. Very talented guy, used to work on the Windows Movie Maker team and totally gets what the developer audiences crave – he was and is still a guy who can predict the outcome(s) of what developers around the world are about to say often before they say it? Very software mountain sage type dude.

These were now the three guys I’m about to work with. I was super excited! J

How Silverlight gets planned.

I think it was my second week, but I was dragged into the first Silverlight planning meeting. I was really excited as now I got to be part of the decision process in the product. We walked into a meeting room, and in there were to familiar faces – Mike Harsh and Joe Stegman (whom I’d often visit or have drink with at MIX parties etc as an Evangelist).

Way cool, I now get to work with Mike and Joe, happy days ahead I thought.

In comes Kevin Gallo (Product Unit Manager) and Christian Schormann (Blend), and soon after that the meeting got started. We hashed out some discussions around at the time for some random features that I honestly can’t think of (Deep Zoom?). I remember thinking this isn’t a planning meeting? This is more of a schedule / project meeting?

Aren’t we supposed to whiteboard ideas and discuss what we plan on doing in the next 5years? What the hell is going on as it seems like all the decisions were already made?

Ok, must be a first meeting thing, the next one(s) will be like that, too early to tell.

Unfortunately, no that’s not how decisions around features were made; often what I would later learn was that in order to sneak a feature onto the list, you have to go black ops. You have to sit with guys like Mike and his team to stand a chance of getting stuff actually into the release pipeline?

We had no strategy or none that I saw throughout the entire time I was there? It was just a serious of tactical thoughts and mostly large customer or competitive reactions that got the ticket into the release schedules. If Adobe was doing X in Flash vNext, we would have to do X+10 to make It better and we kept a very close eye on them.

I’d often sit in a room talking about what Adobe was about to do and watch folks look at one another and throw questions like “we got that covered right? I mean ours will be way better!”.

I remember watching Scott Guthrie on stage at the next TechReady talk about Silverlight and then after the talk I went to say hi, he quickly showed me his upcoming blog post that he was writing. He wanted to get my thoughts on how it will make Adobe react? And besides the ego boost that the infamous Scott Guthrie was looking to me for advice I also got an insight into the blogging mind of Scott Guthrie.

I looked over the article and said something like “sure, I mean its all punch after punch now and these guys aren’t going to see you coming”. They didn’t either.

Silverlight Wins Gold.

It was around this time from memory we all were busy with the Bejing Olympics. This was a huge win for Silverlight we not only got to show our upcoming video muscles but we also stood a chance of getting our ubiquity numbers up as the press lately was dogging at our heels over it. Adobe was building a politically charged campaign around our issues in this space and so we really needed this win badly. So badly that Scott Guthrie was about to increase his family with the birth of his first child and all of us in the teams would jokingly question which was more important? Getting this Beijing Olympics shipped with zero bugs or his first born? (His first born of course). He was committed and it was one of those times that if you found yourself getting in the way of shipping Silverlight without perfection your chances of a career was slim to none soon after.

Silverlight pushes out yet another release; it was a very difficult one as it had a lot of upgrade issues / matrix of issues to be exact. None the less, we did our song and dance at MIX that year as well as pushed out Silverlight into the homes of millions of US residence.

Silverlight really did an amazing job, we had smooth streaming in play for the first time and I remember thinking how awesome it was to watch Australia in the Olympics thanks to Silverlight. As I’m in the US right? So all the TV networks only showed US events not Australian swimming etc – but via Silverlight I got to see it! So I was definitely drinking the kool-aid.

We managed to push Silverlight into over 200-300million homes (nobody knows in truth how many) and it was streamed on average for 20mins per home? Which to me was “so what?” – well to put that in perspective, on average most people don’t watch sporting events for more than 3-5mins around then as the bandwidth / costs were too high. They’d break it up with ads to generate revenue but more importantly it gave a perfect reset on upstream data (kind of a mini breather) – or so I am told.

Anyway it was a victory, we were all excited and it was also a very profitable venture for Microsoft and MSNBC (both parties made back their income and then also generated a profit to boot!).

Home for a visit, or is it?

I came home the same month Silverlight 3 was being released. I remember thinking it was going to be great to spend a month in Australia and releax (again, credit to Microsoft for giving me a month at home to work remote!). I was about to depart and thought I’d send an email to my old team mates back home that I was coming home – me the rock star Product Manager of infamous Silverlight! – and if they needed any customer visits or anything to book out my calendar.

Nothing.

I was a bit confused? Hang on we have Silverlight 3 being launched? And DPE Australia isn’t all over this? What the hell is going on?

The more I asked around the more I got told “It’s not on their metrics, so they don’t have budget/time to focus on it”.

I flicked an email to Brian and Brad with a big fat “What the fuck is going on, I demand answers” as by this stage my ego was not only massive but starting to really piss Brian and Brad off. They just shrugged it off and said there’s nothing they could do, it’s the way it works in Microsoft – unless it’s on someone’s commitments for the year (ie how we rated success/fail of your job was commitments / metrics on what you promise to do for the company – very stupid system) nothing was to be done.

I decided well, I’ll do a solo road tour myself then. I’ll jump on some planes and spend some of our own budget evangelizing the product across Australia.

That’s what I did; I flew in and spend the entire month talking about Silverlight and Expression Blend 3 and how awesome it was.

I had developer after developer walk up to me and just brutally beat the crap out of me verbally for things we as a team weren’t doing right and lastly why and how the release schedule was to aggressive.

“We don’t have time to even learn Silverlight 2 as it is, now you guys are doing 3? It’s too much!”

I also got slammed on design questions, mainly around how we sucked at engaging designers and lastly how Blend was a horrible product.

It brought me down to earth hard, here I was thinking “My product rox” when in reality it was great, but they needed and wanted more. The things they were asking weren’t radical either, they were the basics and we as teams were so far removed from reality I thought – that it was almost comical given it was a classic Dilbert cartoon unfolding.

I got back to Redmond later that month and just unloaded on my team with the data. They listened, nodded and then went about their business.

I thought maybe I sucked at delivering the news, so I tried again, and again. They got it, but in the end we were into our first re-org for the year and we actually lost sight of who was in charge?

The cracks began to emerge for me, I started noticing more and more how we as a team weren’t effective in our jobs. Brad was leading the charge on some really great ideas and approaches, but the moment he was within reach of doing something positive – a reorg happened.

Everything we were working on got put on suspend mode, we were giving our new marching orders and all the work would then have to be turned over to a new bunch of people to work on.

Building Microsoft.com Silverlight website.

It was around this time that I managed to convince Brad and Brian that we needed to bypass Microsoft DPE Division and go straight to the street evangelism. In that we needed to throw out our ideas around “Business Decision Makers” being the ones who decide to Adopt Silverlight and instead focus on the cubicle developer who makes the decision on behalf of companies (for me I hated the BDM theory, it never made sense? As all the companies I ever worked in, it was guys like me at the cubicle level that often made decisions around what to adopt and why… most of the time it wasn’t formal either!).

I put the idea on the table that if we can redo Microsoft.com/Silverlight in a way that sells our product(s) and a the same time we redo the demo-kit again but this time better, we stand a shot at really changing the perception of SIlverligtht and fixing some Evangelism level issues?

I put together the wireframes, sat down with a whole bunch of people across campus and put the ideas into play.

In the Expression team they had either idea; they were keen for a Band-Aid approach. They wanted to fix the problem of having Expression Blend vs. Silverlight website issues. As at this time we had two websites that didn’t were supposed to handle two audiences (designer vs. developer). Two conflicting and fragmented brands online, that had no business being separated in the first place? (Given Blend reported to a different org tree to Silverlight, it was a territorial thing).

I had to kill this idea and fast. I setup a meeting with John Allwright, Matt Powel and Jon Harris. I Put together the deck on my vision for the future and I then went to town on them. I mean I really just argued like a rabbid lawyer in a death penalty case.

I managed to shut their idea down temporarily, it wasn’t a nice meeting and I don’t expect a Christmas card anytime soon from those three for it. It wasn’t’ t personal I just knew in the end I had a very short window to get this site up to fix a lot of issues for a master plan I had around automating the Evangelism and re-connecting the brands under one roof (which given the political climate was not going to win people over).

Soon after that meeting, Brian pulls me into his office, gives me the wrap on the knuckles (Brian was an awesome boss, he and I later would fall out, but the amount of times he covered my ass over the years) and then set me on an extra task. He told me that he asked the guys ages ago for a Blog, and now he wants a fucking blog (he swore), not next week, not next month but today!. Given I had not only had design & development skills but also a popular MSDN blog (In the top 5% blogs in Microsoft w00t), could I whip up the design and engine for it?

Sure, I was skeptical of a Team Silverlight blog, but what the hell, why not he wants it and I’m sure he has a plan?

I spent a few days putting it together and left the blog in the teams hands to run. Nothing of course got done with it, nobody was on point for writing articles and when we did allocate someone in the weekly meeting(s) they’d in turn gripe about being busy etc.

Blog never made it online.

Brad later asks me if I could meet with the Expression Team as they have an idea about joining forces with Silverlight for the upcoming MIX announcements. As it was there we were officially going to come out with Silverlight 3 RTW and we wanted to make a bang with it.

The idea was to unite Silverlight and Expression teams under the one blog and trickle announcements, but the catch was the blog had to be redesigned with Blend in mind?

They had already hired an agency to do the design, so it was just a case of taking that design and putting it into the blog engine that I was using.

Not a problem I thought, so I met with the agency and saw their final designs.

I asked the account lady, “Cool, so this is just a draft right, I mean when will you guys have the designs ready to look at?”

She looked at me, then the others and with a confused expression “What do you mean, this is the final design”.

I’m sitting there looking at what I can only describe as the shittiest looking design on earth with a $30,000 USD price tag attached to it thinking not only did we get screwed, nobody is awake to catch it?

I politely left the meeting – and went home that night to design it myself.

The design I came up with was around the them, get back to basics? In that we lost sight of Silverlight & Expression Blend’s core soul. We have a product that centers on User Experience but everything we were putting out to the market was to “corporate” or “serious”. We needed to make it fun and exciting, go back to the days when Sivlerlight + Skateboard video was the way we entered the market – we needed to get our mojo back.

I shopped it around the next afternoon to the teams, they were hesitant and after some probing it wasn’t the design I came up with, it was the budget that it would take to fix their marketing theme(s) to match it.

“Oh if that’s all your worried about, that’s fine, fuck it, I’ll do it. I have desktop publishing / design background from when I first started out, I’m sure we can whip this together”.

I remember getting a surprised look from most of them followed by a skeptical “yeah we need this to be from agency quality though”… keeping in mind they just unloaded their entire budget on an agency who just basically failed.

I went to Brad/Brian and put the convince in place, Jon Harris also backed me up and we went about putting together the elements that we had gotten from X-Plane Poster that was made into the blog.

I felt we had a brand now that showed an element of fun, experience.

It was around this time that Blend team were being knuckleheads, I mean these guys were just getting on my last nerve. We’d have arguments around every single minor detail and the crap they came up with for the blog was just dumb. Things like “Can we make a post and add text later, but go live with the post?”

WTF?

Brad saw that I was getting highly emotional at this stage; he was trying as best he could from me ripping their heads off and reigned me in. He told me that we needed to focus on the website redesign and we needed the Blend team for this.

Later that week, Brad organized a meeting with ZAAZ to help us with the website as the manager in charge of Sivlerlight video – Steve Sklepowich was skeptical that a mere Product Manager like myself would know what was needed on a website.

Brad broke that news to me, I hit the roof but he just told me that in the end, we had to play nice with Team Steve as the site also affects them.

Fine, so I went into the meeting with ZAAZ thinking great, yet another agency who’s about to pull the wool over this teams eyes.

ZAAZ did their whole pre-sales meeting, they talked about structure and approaches to the design with a strong focus on marketing data – as little did I know that the actual meeting was originally there for them to talk about how they can help us understand the website stats we have on the current site(s).

They won me over, and I walked out of the meeting with Brad/Brian saying that I think they could do a great job with the stats etc. maybe even the site redesign?

ZAAZ got the redesign gig, and I was shocked but initially fine with it.

That is to say, the first design they threw out there was very metro at the time. It was actually not bad; it was very basic but at the same times a little weird in design execution. Flat, not really a User Experience I’d click “wow” buttons on?

Whatever, anything is better than the site we have so I like an expecting father waited in the delivery room for this baby to arrive.

It was late, and I mean really late. The initial designs not only took a radical departure but they were getting horrible, to the point where the site itself was something that FrontPage users would laugh at.

ZAAZ oversold and under delivered and now this entire website was a cluster fuck. Not only did it not meet a quality bar but we were going to go live with it as well as-is.

$300k USD and then some down the drain.

It failed, and the site went live broken and just really poorly done. We kept quiet about it and tried not to put too much attention on the URL.

You’re now in Team Steve.

I was pissed off by this stage, my entire master plan for uniting the brands of Blend/Expression and arming Street Evangelism got sucked out by my own team’s internal politics. It was a devastating blow for me, as we were so close but yet so far!.

Came to end of year reviews and Brian sat me down and asked if I was ok? That he noticed I was just this toxic ball of rage lately.

I thought fuck it, I’ll let him have it so I just unloaded on him. Told him how unhappy I was with the teams politics, that we spend more time talking about greatness and less time working on it. That we often are so caught up in our dumbass ivory tower theories that nothing is getting done and how I want things to change.

I told him that Brad was to weak, he needed to step up and am more assertive and lastly that he shuts his own team out of important wins too much. (I later realized that Brad kept us all mostly in the dark, because in the end that’s how he managed to get stuff done. As the moment he confided in anyone the ideas would either get stolen or shut down? So over time he just learns to background thread it).

Brian did something that I honestly didn’t see coming, he later moved me into Steve Sklepowich’s team. A guy I barely knew but was in charge of the video side of Silverlight?

Fine, I thought maybe I can get a fresh perspective and start something new in this team?

It was around my third team meeting before Steve told me that he plans on fixing the ZAAZ screw up that Brad made – (FYI, it was actually Steve who screwed it up and not brad, but he hung Brad out and he did a good job of it too).

He wanted to win an Emmy for the site was his words. He wanted it to be a site that others would look to and think “That’s an awesome Microsoft site”.

I like this guy’s thinking, ok so what do you need me to do? Should I start gathering agencies? Why don’t we engage agencies like Big Spaceship or larger well known Flash experience based brands like that? Go big or go home.

His response to that was simple – I don’t know you, I’ve never worked with you before so all I need from you is to keep the sharepoint site up for this project. Your job is to check in basically word documents for us and leave the hard stuff for the rest of us.

I’ve had 15+ years of experience on the web, ranging from building some of the largest branded sites in Australia to the most complex logic commerce driven sites. I’m riding the Junior bench on all these ideas that he stole from not only Brad (my old boss) but also me?

Where did he think the entire strategy came from?

I thought, what an asshole.

I went into Brian’s office and asked him to move me back to my old team, this guys a lunatic. Brian asked me to be patient, to give him time and that I could learn a few things off Steve.

Fine, I spent the next few weeks writing meeting notes, listening to these clowns grapple onto the notion of how a website is built. I remember thinking “oh my god, not only do they not know anything about websites they don’t even have a strategy at the moment”.

I’d chip in with corrections here and there and try my best to steer them away from yet another month of “strategy meetings” that wouldn’t go anywhere.

I grew simply bored. I’d come into my office, hang out with a few guy son the floor and I’d slowly start taking 2-3 hour lunches / coffee’s. I’d even come in late around 11am and finish around 4pm with mostly lunch / coffee’s taking up my time.

Nobody even noticed.

Microsoft Gold Star.

I was sitting in my office one afternoon, feet up on the desk, reading a few research papers I’d managed to scoop of our research area at Microsoft – Was a neuroscience paper on human interaction, awesome findings!.

Brian walks in, has this look of “wtf are you doing” followed by a request for an urgent issue. Turns out the Azure marketing team had got an agency to do a campaign site, but the agency put the site on Php and Linux server. Brian needed me to fix this and put it over into .NET urgently as it was a favor for a colleague of his.

I quickly scrambled, got the site, within that afternoon I had moved it over to a Microsoft friendly site. IT was pretty easy and then I went back to reading and doing absolutely nothing.

Three weeks later, Brian calls me into his office and hands me an envelope. I admit, I thought I was being fired as I’m thinking “holy crap, he finally caught me slacking off”.

It wasn’t my termination papers, it was a $7k USD check with equal share options. I just got handed a Microsoft Gold Star award for my bravery in the line of PHP to ASP Fire?

I laughed. I know why Brian did it, it was an all up thank you for my effort to date and it was his way of saying look we can fix shit around here, just give it a chance thinking.

I laughed because I know of three other guys who worked their asses off daily, like these guys were getting severely beaten by ASP.NET team, Silverlight management and so on, who did 10x the work I did, and nothing. Not even a thank you – in fact they got punished for not being team players! (yeah because they were to busy doing their teams homework!)

I admit, it made me feel good. I felt a renewed sense of energy and went back to my team and started getting more proactive about my role. If they want me to be a the sharepoint bitch, fine, I’ll be the best one ever.

I sat down with Steve and told him that I wasn’t happy with our arrangement, that I wanted to take on more and that the path he and Jon Rooney were on was foolish. It was a hard meeting, but Steve figured he’d give me a shot.

The Fallout.

Steve set me on at ask with the site redesign(s) etc but then later pulled it. No reason, I barely even got started but then he just pulled out of the deal we made. To this day I have no idea what his issue was, but that for me was the 1000^th cut.

We then clashed, I mean I would sit in the meetings and just poke holes in his theories, embarrass him in front of the other team(s) and just constantly highlight how much of a jackass he was – it was actually quite easy to do.

Brian noticed this wasn’t being productive and he did his best to give me other tasks to focus on outside the team to keep Steve & me apart. One of these tasks was to work through a problem with Web Platform Installer, and how its numbers weren’t as high as they should be.

I teamed up with one of the coolest guys in that company – Michael Bach on Web PI. Michael was given the ask of owning the Next Web Strategy, and he was told to redesign microsoft.com/web to which I may add is actually one of the best “pre sales” sites on Microsoft’s domain.

We set about working on the issue and we did solve it, it was trivial but the result was positive and Michaels boss – Lauren Cooney, got her pats on the back as a result of it.

The reality Silverlight was doomed.

Despite this minor win, Steve though was an asshole still, so he gave me this weird task to do a Market Situation Analysis on Silverlight?

This was basically a weird task as when you do a Market Situation Analysis on anything you first have to do a whole bunch SWOT/PEST documentation but you also needed it to tie directly in with whatever your strategies were for the product.

We didn’t have a strategy for Silverlight, nobody in the company as far as I could tell did. We just were 100% reactive!

I fought Steve on this daily, as I kept reminding him that during the course of his rise to Director Silverlight did it ever occur to him that he maybe sit down and write a strategy for Silverlight? Or where this thing is supposed to be in 5years etc.

We fought and I eventually told him to shove his job and resigned form Microsoft. I resigned for two reasons, the first was that Steve was an asshole to work with and for but with Brian in the room I’m sure I could of waited Steve out and moved the following fiscal into a different team.

The real reason was that I knew I was wasting my time with Silverlight. I mean, this product had no future and it was clear that this product wasn’t going to have one until someone sat down and thought this product through for more than a fiscal year.

My wife and I were struggling to keep our marriage intact so it was a case of stick it out with a shitty boss, no strategy for a product I cared for and lose my wife/kids or just go home and start over fresh.

I went home.

Steve made this site as I was leaving  – http://www.thetirefire.com – Yet another $200-300k USD spent…. seriously.

Coming home.

I went home to Australia, started with Readify and it was doomed to fail, I wasn’t into the job and I was still walking around with a huge chip on my shoulder with Microsoft. I was definitely a pain in the ass to work with around then (Sorry to Readify’s CEO Graeme Strange). I was a UX Specialist for the company but the gigs I would walk into were horrible.

They were horrible because I would meet with developer teams who built this large Silverlight code base and then at the end of the project expect me to redesign the apps to be beautiful? But not touch any code?

I was now living in my own little Microsoft purgatory, as I spent the last year of fighting with staffers and doing everything I could to fix the problems like the ones I now faced. Yet, now I am living the pain I knew I had a cure for over and over?

It was just karma biting me in the ass.

I left Readify and decided to go it solo, setup RIAGENIC and work on my own contracts. I started slow but within 3 months I was pulling in around $100,00 AUD in billable work. It was like stealing candy from a baby, all I had to do was fix broken Silverlight/WPF projects and it was easy?

I was now making profit on the stupidity of Microsoft’s inability to teach the masses how they should build projects with their technology. It was a weird thing to experience as not only was I seeing this from enterprise customers of Microsoft, but I was often called in by Microsoft to also help the fix screw-ups they were making internally for both products they were working on or customers they were working for?

I in the first two years of RIAGENIC made approx. $600,00 AUD from WPF/Silverlight broken projects with a few greenfield ones (Not to mention it was Global Financial Crisis times!). I literally paid my house with that money (I’m broke now btw, but I’m almost mortgage free lol).

For me, it was also time to slow down after working 12hr days and bumping into the same crappy project after another mixed with more and more stupidity from Microsoft – it was just time to take it a bit more easier.

The HTML5 / Silverlight are dead leak.

I was asked by a friend of mine in Seattle if I was open to some remote work. I said sure, and began working on a Silverlight based project for the Windows team. It was some stupid 3D rotating cube problem they were having and so I said fine, if they pay I’ll do it – I’m that much of a Silverlight whore.

The company and I kid you not, was for a brand named – ZAAZ.

I just laughed, the one company that screwed a perfectly good idea up and here I was, about to do a contract for them.

I increased my charge out rate by $20.00 and hour just because I knew they were in a bind and secondly they owed me!

We began work, we iterated over the phone a lot but in truth it was really hard and filled with latency and I was also admittedly double booked as well.

I thought I needed to go back to Seattle to sort out some bank account issues and figured it would coincide with this contract, so I brokered the deal that I’d pay for flights back to Seattle for a week if they pay for accommodation?

Both parties agreed so I flew into Seattle and while I was in town caught up with some friends from Microsoft.

I ran into the Brad, Pete and David and Arturo! We talked some shop around what they are trying to solve today and how the families were etc – very light hearted convo.

I was in a meeting with Arturo when I get an email. The email is from a person I won’t name, but asked if I was keen to catch-up today while I was on campus?

I said fine, and meet with this person.

We started to talk about Silverlight and he was trying to gauge what I already knew so far, I didn’t have a lot of details at this stage as I really didn’t care about what Silverlight 5 was going to have as in reality any new features they were going to add had to be ground breaking and more focused on the workflow before I’d give a shit anyway?

He then told me about Windows 8 plans. I mean he put it down on the table, and just unloaded. He told me about how HTML5 was the major focus and that Silverlight was being switched off. I sat there thinking this guy is full of shit but I’ll listen anyway as what if he’s right?

We talked for a good two hours before I just left the room feeling deflated. Steve Sinofsky’s team were about to do some heavy deletion and this is not cool!

I had to verify this information though but I had to do it in a way that wasn’t obvious. I meet up with some others that I knew on campus and I’d start the convos with “So, HTML5 huh” mixed with a big grin.

You have to understand inside Microsoft a secret is only as good as those who are confident your in the dark about them. Once you persuade them “ I know as well” the flood gates open and open fast. Meanwhile I didn’t have the information and I was bluffing!

Sure enough the more people I talked to the more they confirmed the original meetings theories, Silverlight is going to die and WPF is dead right now.

I finished out my contract with ZAAZ (Actually I did as little work as possible – fuck you ZAAZ, signed me). And was sitting in a LAX Qantas lounge (after having a brutal flight from Seattle to LAX).

In the lounge I’m thinking about HTML5 and Windows 8. It doesn’t make sense!! This is stupid? Wtf would they do that to Silverlight? It was always an odd product but why kill it?

I tweeted about it all, frustrated in part but also keen to break the story so I can learn more from others reactions.

Journalists picked up on it and by the time I landed in Brisbane the next day (yes it takes forever to fly home) I had text messages, inbox was filled with “WTF BARNES!!” . I hadn’t honestly realized people paid attention to my tweets, but sure enough I had attention now and I am slowly but surely breaking the IE9 release secrets along with Windows 8!

I even got an email from Brian, that said:

I don’t know what you are trying to accomplish – but it’s not helping us but in fact is making life for me pretty miserable. I just thought you should know that.

Ouch, I thought. I can see how exactly guys like Brian are probably being kicked in the head for the leaks even though they had nothing to do with it. In fact I have and always made a point of not asking my old team mates questions like this as – I like them, and secondly it’s too obvious to assume they are the ones leaking? – Yes Steve Sinofsky, you thought wrong dumbass.

David, Brad, Pete and Brian are way to paranoid these days to even say hello via email/chat for fear somehow they are being bugged by Windows 8 Gestapo! J which sux, given I enjoyed our chats (which rarely talked about Silverlight anyway – we had other things to talk about ya know?)

Here I was armed with a little bit of info, about the future of Microsoft. Once the story broke, more information began to trickle in and everyone who’s got an axe to grind at Microsoft suddenly found my inbox useful.

I became a proxy for people who also weren’t happy with Windows 8 decisions and before you know it, I’m having chats with Journalists off the record highlighting areas of interest and pointing at topics they should investigate more.

WPF as dead, Silverlight was next and HTML5 was ear marked for the future.

Windows 8 launch.

I sat this month at home, watching the Windows 8 launch and just giggling. It was stupid to do that, but for me it was a huge weight of my shoulders – finally the world now gets it.

Here we have a product, windows showing its true colors, Silverlight is in there but its got a really small footprint and the real focus is on metro-style apps that are built on HTML5 concepts.

Its doomed to fail and will eventually just like I knew #WP7 would fail first few rounds with consumers.

Reason being?

No strategy. There is no strategy here folks, just like Silverlight it’s all tactical reaction(s). The machine is still working in the same way It always has and despite the potential for greatness, I just can’t see them unhinging form their internal bickering and axes to grind.

There are too many Steve’s in the room, too many political infighting and lastly there’s not enough bigger picture thinking.

Windows 8 is just a grab bag of ideas stolen from competitors and rebadged under the marketing rants of words like “reimagine”.

Everyone who has an interest in Microsoft is eating up, and it will be semi-successful don’t think it won’t but it will never be an iPad or iPhone moment. It will never really be that Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 moment.

There is just too much legacy in the room and despite my dislike at the execution of the ideas on the table; I still think the potential for a strategy here is something that could change Microsoft for the greater good.

Summary,.

Today, I sit here and write all this for one reason. Silverlight is dead not because it was a bad technology, not because it was to popular for Windows 8 team to let live etc?

It died, because of moments like these. Where a guy like me, can sit here on a little blog like Riagenic and just tear the company a new asshole only to watch it spread like a cancer.

I took no real joy out of pointing all of this out, to me this product and other products like it have the potential to change the way in which we interact online/offline.

I am likely going to die in a few years, so for me, I’d love to experience a vibrant digital world that I’ve spent majority of my adult life working in. I’d love to sit on the couch with my son and just play with a digital experience that makes most CG driven movies look like a really badly made 80’s sci-fi movie.

We are being held back by situations like Microsoft face daily internally. The company has some extremely gifted people but they are constantly being suffocated by morons who shouldn’t be in the positions they hold?

Apple seem to get shit done, they seem to push the industry beyond its comfort levels. They put out a touch tablet that is locked down. We all cry foul because we want Silverlight or Flash on it and they in turn tell you without flinching to fuck off.

They have disrupted the industry beyond what anyone has really expected and so everyone now is racing as fast as they can to outpace them and to flip the whole conversation around as being “look, apple are copying us now!!!”.

A guy I worked with Joe Marini, tweeted about Nokia phone he was excited to hold in his hands. I like Joe, he was a nice guy and I have a lot of time for him and to see him get fired over a bullshit tweet about Windows Phone 7 and Nokia?

They should be firing Brandon Watson down, for failing to market the stupid phone not firing the guy who spent most of his days highlighting the positives associated with the product?

That’s my point in the end, Microsoft spend most of its time pushing the potential out of the way to make way for mediocrity?

This is my last negative post on Microsoft, I’m over kicking the puppy but I felt it was important to put my history with the brand on the table so you can see where I’ve come from and why I kicked the puppy (Microsoft).

It’s not about grinding an axe? That was done long ago.

No, it’s more to do with a case of encouraging you all to hold these folks accountable more, put their feet over the fire a couple of times a month and ensure they can help us the human race actually get behind a “I’ll do what Apple does with extras” mentality.

Compete is important but it’s the last refuge for those who can’t innovate.

If Windows 8 is to be the future of Microsoft, fuck it, I dislike it initially but I’m in. If I have to design my way out of this crappy world of experience, so be it. I’m going to now spend majority of my energy in evangelizing metro principles and start teaching people more of what I know? As I seem to have a niche here and its worthwhile showing others the total amount of my knowledge and seeing what comes of that?

I maybe full of shit but I seem to have a few people waiting for my designs lately so there must be something in that? If not, cool.

Mark my words, Silverlight dying isn’t the worst thing in the world – what’s coming up next, now that’s the one you really going to find out whether or not Microsoft actually have a strategy or is it just the same shit rehashed again?

Riagenic.com will be shifting gears, I’ve decided to switch this site over to more of a fresh approach, Microsoft UX Principles / Design focused etc.

My goal is to teach developers how to design. I think it can be done!

Thanks for reading.

Related Posts:

• Steve Sinofsky: Windows and the Web and me?
• Is Adobe’s new HTML5 Edge tool Expression Blends replacement?
• The mission to land a .NET developer on Jupiter.
• UNEDITED: My thoughts on Windows 8 announcements
• Silverlight is dead, dead and dead.

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!