Friday, 03 September 2004 05:21:45 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
You probably can't actually answer this, but I'm curious what you mean: Attrition from people upset about feature cutbacks, or attrition from people who can't believe that the scope of their work expanded to include backward compatibility while their schedule got a (hypothetical) year shaved off it?
Friday, 03 September 2004 06:10:52 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Neither. I see attrition for a number of other reasons

(i) People who realize their technologies won't be as key as they once were being touted. Indigo and Avalon have gone from "pillars of Longhorn" to add-on libraries written in .NET. WinFS isn't scheduled to impact the client OS until Blackcomb when for a while it was supposedly the most key feature of Longhorn.

(ii) People who thought Orcas would be WinFX not Whidbey. Some of the rush of working on the .NET Framework was the thought that you were going to be building the next version of Win32. Well, now we've found out that that isn't the case and instead what we have done in Whidbey is most likely what will form the basis of WinFX. Working on v2 is never as sexy as working on v1.

(iii) WinFS folks who don't want to wait 3 or 4 years before they ship.

The interesting question is which people at Microsoft fall into any of the above 3 categories. Heck, I've asked myself if I fall into any of the above categories recently.
Friday, 03 September 2004 06:45:42 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
In my case it was none of the above. I know that it is hard to believe, but my changing jobs had nothing to do with the longhorn shake up. In fact, I find staying more attractive since the changes. Avalon's fate is more in its own hands than it ever was. It is up to the team now to make it happen and ship. While it still isn't a small team, it is smaller than all of Longhorn.
Friday, 03 September 2004 14:57:26 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
There's a fourth group of people I also expect to be moving over time as well but they're issues are tangentially related to the Longhorn changes

(iv) People who came to Microsoft to "change the world" but became frustrated with the inefficiencies of working in a company the size of Microsoft such as the bureaucracy and internal politics.

There are probably some people who it just slowly dawned on that they'll never get rich working at Microsoft. These folks would also be interested in moving but I consider the number of such people to be small enough to be negligible.
Friday, 03 September 2004 18:19:28 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
So where do you fall? Why'd you start at MS? :)
Saturday, 04 September 2004 19:43:00 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
If I were to guess I would say Dare is in (iv). I could be wrong though ;-).
Sunday, 05 September 2004 05:52:23 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
> If I were to guess I would say Dare is in (iv). I could be wrong though ;-).

The 'slow' part, or the 'never get rich' part?
MikeD
Sunday, 05 September 2004 05:52:30 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
> If I were to guess I would say Dare is in (iv). I could be wrong though ;-).

The 'slow' part, or the 'never get rich' part?
MikeD
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