Doug Ross @ Journal

Easter Eggs, Part Deux

Loyal reader B wrote me the following note in response to my earlier article regarding the Alpha Five version 1 Easter Egg.

It's interesting that you wrote about easter eggs. As an end user and gamer I love them. As an IT professional, I hate them. Since it's clear that you understand the end user "cool" aspects, I thought I'd talk about why I hate them. True story: Back in '98 I was in CITY DELETED for the COMPANY NAME DELETED quarterly meeting. At each of these meetings we have the CIOs of each of the various operating units in for a meeting to discuss new technology trends, standards development, and security. At the time I was the security architect for COMPANY NAME DELETED. As part of each meeting we invite a strategic vendor to come and talk about their roadmap/vision. At this particular meeting Microsoft presented on the upcoming Windows 2000 release. They gave a very impressive presentation on how MS is now linked to open standards like Kerberos, LDAP, etc. They talked about how secure their new system is going to be. They talked about how they have made major improvements in their QA processes and how we should trust the next version of their OS. I was interested in easter eggs at the tiem because I had recently discovered the Excel Flight Simulator egg and was really wondering whether having stuff like that in their products effected the stability and security of the product itself. I asked the MS guys from Redmond about the eggs and wanted to know if they underwent the same rigorous QA process as the rest of the product. Since they had just gotten done talking about their new process they had to state that, of course, the eggs underwent the same QA process and we can be assured that they wouldn't impact he security of the product. Mind you, it took me a good 20 minutes to get them to admit that the eggs existed and were sanctioned by management. The CTO at the time, C, a spicy, southern gentleman, was beside himself. Keep in mind that this guy is all business. COPMANY NAME DELETED as a whole, was having huge problems with performance and capacity on their corporate systems (largely MS-based). Then the vendor comes in and tells you that with every product of theirs that you install, they have included seceral hundred k of unnecessary code. If you multiply this times the thousands of users that COMPANY NAME DELETED had, it adds up to real costs in disk, tape, memory, etc. It was enjoyable watching the MS reps dance and try to justify why they allow, and in fact endorse, the inclusion of easter eggs in their products. Not only do they exist, but MS knows about every one of them and QA checks them. This final point is something that I have a hard time believing. My point at the time was that they might do better to spend some of the easter egg QA time on making their products more secure and bug-free instead of checking the eggs. In the end their justification for allowing it was to stay competitive in the market for developers. You see, other companies allow developers to include easter eggs in their products and if MS didn't allow it they would be at a disadvantage when trying to recruit good coders. All in all I have to agree with C. It's bad business. Products are there to meet a specific market need, not stroke the ego of the development teams.

Yo, our egg occupied a total of 17K and was QA'ed by me. Nuff said.

Actually, I'm not saying I disagree with you. Especially if we're talking about Microsoft's products. But since Alpha's were rock-solid from both a security and a stability standpoint ;-) ... there's no reason the development team couldn't engage in a little value-add fun. Consider it the Alpha Bonus Pack.