Rui CarmoYes, Twitter is a waste of time.
But if it wasn't for it popping up just now with a rather cryptic note from John Gruber, I wouldn't have felt compelled to take a break from studying Mandarin (I'm doing a FreeMind mind map of idiomatic expressions and sentences), hop over to Daring Fireball (and hence to Tim Gaden's Hawk Wings) to find the Comes v. Microsoft site and spend an hour poking through the PDFs there.
Now, I know things like internal documents are always bound to be quoted out of context, that Microsoft is not exactly popular among the unwashed masses of the Internet and that stuff like this (PDF) is standard fodder in every organization that lets evangelism run amok (i.e., allowing it to turn into zealotry), but some of the e-mails are just... priceless.
Two things I'd like to state publicly, though:
- In the stuff I read so far, Jim Allchin comes across as a great personality. Even, balanced, well-thought-out reasoning, and a genuine interest in making things better.
- There are far worse e-mails, Usenet threads (well, I'm guessing someone is still using NNTP these days) and blog posts from other zealot camps every single day.
Ah well. Like some folk wrote back in the 386sx era, let him who is without sin() cast the first stone.