Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption

anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."

This is good.

Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.

Re:This is good.

Get a grip, hippo, they dont mean your kb.ms thingie. They mean the INTEROPERABILITY docs, which you will NEVER see in a website such as your msdn.

Fair and balanced

From TFS:

"...Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."

In this day and age of increasingly biased reporting, it is nice to see that Slashdot continues to present an objective, fair, and balanced approach to covering the issues.

Scuttlemonkey could work wonders for the Middle-East peace process!

Re:Fair and balanced

Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux. As far as I know, they've never even pretended to be a fair and balanced source of IT news. Have you noticed the borg icon that's used for MS stories?

Re:Fair and balanced

I tend to think of /. as Taco's blog instead of a trusted IT news source. That explains just about everything.

Re:Fair and balanced

Slashdot is about as unbiased and balanced as Fox News.

Microsoft has been responsible for some really enormous fuckups and wrongs in the world of computers. They have some utterly nasty business practices that really are anti-competitive. They did, at one point, have a virtual monopoly, though that is crumbling naturally due to market forces, as more and more people in the market discover just how shitty Vista is, and how good Linux and OS/X are in comparison. That's only part of their monopoly (the other part being their office products, and that will come in time).

The thing being... for all their evils and wrongs, there's been a few good things that have come from them. And while I freely admit to being an idealist, I do like to think that the evil profit-mongering is limited to the upper echelons of the company only, and that at the lower ranks, you find people who really are trying to make the best product they can for computer users.

Re:Fair and balanced

Or maybe, just maybe, Slashdot is fair and balanced, and Microsoft really is a nest of black-hearted villains.

"Fair and balanced" is probably never going to mean the same thing to two different people, especially your husband/wife/SO/etc.

I am not a big fan of Microsoft, all of their products had crippling bugs or limitations in them when I first started exploring there (Applesoft BASIC, PC DOS 2.0, etc.). I took a look at Microsoft Windows and OS/2 when they were first released and was unimpressed.

However, I have been impressed with Unix and its descendents since I first encountered them in college. The big Blue and Green books documenting Version 7 Unix were useful for everything Unixy at the time and I've always like the multiuser/multiprocessing aspect of the system. System V/R2 was a disaster on the order of Microsoft Windows XP (so I've read, I only used Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 for about half a year and it was only less stable than System V/R2 with patches), but it was released two decades earlier and since has all the problems worked out.

The Unix model, as first designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie has withstood the test of time as no other software project ever has. They killed the proprietary O/S model on minis and mainframes. They killed the idea of non-portable OSes, though Microsoft has resurrected that idea. They so excited the minds and hearts of programmers that dozens of reimplemented spinoffs were done ... and survive to this day.

On the other hand, Billg spent more on his two recent TV ads for an O/S that few want to buy than Thompson and Richie made in their lifetimes. Sigh.

It's a step...

Documentation unfit. Awesome.

Now what about the software?

Man...

When will this unjustified persecution of undocumenting coders be stopped!? If I can understand 15 layers of recursion with pointers to 8 dimensional arrays and no documentation, you should be able to as well!

All code is self-documenting...

For coders, at least. Documentation is for auditors.

Re:All code is self-documenting...

For coders, at least.

If that would only be true. Documentation usually lists _intended_ behavior, not actual behavior. When code is self-documenting it is documenting the actual behavior, or at least, partially.

Sure

Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."

And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.

Re:Sure

True. Only the other day I was bitching about the crappy documentation on a piece of code, and I was the one who wrote it!

Programmers are always completely oblivious as to what will not be so obvious to someone else or themselves several months down the line. At the time you;re writing it, it's quite clear that the routine will do exactly what you want it to do at that moment.

Bad summary

Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."

Irony

There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).

Re:Irony

IANAL, because I have two more semesters of law school to complete. Before that, I was a computer science major.

Your mistake is that you are comparing legal code to software documentation. However, the more apt comparison is to compare legal code to software source code, at which point your analogy fails. While they aren't widely advertised, there are plenty of secondary sources (such as legal encyclopedias) out there that make law accessible to a layman.

In the land of the blind...

Scary thing is, I've always found their doc decent... relative to other companies. This judge needs to attempt to assemble some of the more ornate IKEA offerings - she'll have a new appreciation for MSDN/Technet...

Re:In the land of the blind...

As the article says, Microsoft documents the things they want you to know very well (more software for Windows == good), so it's not like they have a corporate culture of crap documentation. What they don't do is document things they don't want you to know, like formats and protocols, because that would allow you to use non-Microsoft software somewhere (== bad).

Since their documentation is obviously biased, they're in trouble again.

badarticletitle?

Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.

What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.

Contempt Charges?

But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003.

Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?

Seriously?

I've read lots of MS Documentation over the years -- white papers, APIs, and just general guidelines for things.

It's damned good documentation. It may not go to the border of 'special olympics' readers for Apple users, but for the majority of developers that are working on 'interoperability' the documentation is quite good. Not amazing, but the irony is still lost on me that a lawyer decided somebody else's documentation was bad.

Have you ever read the way bills are introduced into law? Jeez.

Re:Seriously?

I have spent so many hours in the MSDN, despaired of undocumented function-parameters, undocumented functions, missing cross-references, horrible code examples, etc. etc. etc. - In the end I trashed ALL projects, that I needed WinAPI documentation for...

she had/has no clue who she is up against

The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.

Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.

LoB

Slashvertisement

Article submitter:

anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)

From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)

writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]

Nice try!

It's a two way street.

If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.

And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?

I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.

Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.

Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...

what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?

Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.

Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.