I first ran into this individual on the Blog of Helios.


I made the offer to speak with him online about how he used to work for the Redmond Giant, and he accepted.  To prevent any retaliation against him by his former employer and current employer, he refers to himself as Sum Yung Gai online.  Through instant messaging I was able to speak to him on two occasions about his experience with one of the most controversial Corporations in American history.

Rewind in time to the early 1990's.  As an individual who was within bike riding distance of Microsoft, he applied for employement at the company upon hearing about an opening.  He was turned down.  According to SYG, "[They] said they needed 'someone really dedicated to computer science'. "  Another Microsoft employee found out about him being turned down, and thus called him in for an interview for a position in software testing and was hired after.

As a software tester, the following was required of him:

1. Fend for himself as they saw him as a big boy and that he needed to take care of himself.
2. Test software and find bugs: Windows 95 was one of his projects.
3. Let everyone else know how cool it is to work for Microsoft.
4. Work the twelve hour unofficial "half-day" workday.
5. Enjoy working for Microsoft.

Of this experience, Sum Yung Gai said, "It was heaven for a young geek like me. I actually got to talk to members of the Windows NT development team, face to face! When people would want to get rid of "obsolete" software or books (read: current to the customers, but we had moved on internally to the latest bleeding-edge version), I would grab it and study it. That's how I learned NT, the C programming language, networks, etc."  He learned more about computing, including networking through Microsoft.

Also, the developers were kept working by providing them with food, soda, software (even if it came from a competitor), and plenty of stock.  He stated that, "Microsoft handed out stock like candy to just about everybody, even, in several cases, the receptionists."  Any employee abuse was self inflicted as everyone was encouraged to make the stock price go up, which brings up the first issue.

When it came to the software maker's Operating System, he said, "Windows is not a product at Microsoft. It more approaches a religion. That part was kinda scary, actually. The fact that I liked OS/2 was definitely not smiled on, but I did my work well, so they grudgingly tolerated that."  Everyone from the software developers to the receptionists were mandated to sell Windows to everyone.  It is interesting to note that in his era, the receptionists even knew how to edit autoexec batch files and config.sys files as well as use memmaker.exe.

As with any religion, any mention of fallacies could potentially bring about accusations of blasphemy.  Microsoft was no different according to Sum Yung Gai.  He said, "I was there back when the WordBasic 'Concept Virus' was first written. The guy who wrote it foresaw the macro virus problem and told the bosses. He was shouted down to shut the hell up. So, he wrote Concept.  For this, he came very near to getting fired. Why? Because he had shown that there's an exploitable problem in our new lock-in tool, WordBasic (and its eventual successor, VBA). Our goal was lock-in--how to get people hooked on Windows. And *EVERYBODY* in the company was expected to further this."

Some bugs were not fixed, especially the Windows Metafile Vulnerability, which as it turned out, was an intended feature, and not just an ordinary bug, according to Steve Gibson of Seucirty Now.  It is important to note that a third party vendor had to step in and provide a solution while the rest of the world waited for Microsoft to respond to this threat.  For those not familiar with this vulnerability, an infected metafile would begin execution of programming code, which is a severe security risk in the IT field.

Instead of a vulnerability or a crucial bug being fixed, it was hidden away.  As an example, Windows 95 had a bug that would cause the entire Windows kernel to come crashing to its knees when certain instructions were given to the system itself.  It was a bug that Team OS/2 demonstrated often by placing a floppy disk in the demo machine and running an executable that disabled the virtual machine capability of the Operating System.  Without it, memory space could be overwritten by other programs, regardless what was in that space.  Instead of solving the problem immediately, many of the demo boxes had disabled floppy drives.

However, just like the movie Antitrust, there always comes a time when the gears in the mind begin turning.  Seeds were planted in Sum Yung Gai's mind during the controversial attempt to acquire the popular software company Intuit, the makers of the popular finnancial software Quicken.  He was shouted down by a higher up in the company after questioning the move.  The gears began turning more swiftly with the release of Microsoft Office 97, in which the file formats were kept secret, and template files (.dot files) were no longer compatible.  One more security vulnerability that bothered him was ActiveX.  He said, "ActiveX scared the hell out of me then (the vulnerability/virus issue) in 1996, as well as many others, and we were right."

Internet Explorer was an attempt to counter a "threat" against the Windows platform.  During the interview, he talked about the attack on Netscape.  He said, "Steve Ballmer was hammering on BillG about how the Internet could make Windows irrelevant. BillG wasn't getting it; he was focused on the Windows apps.  Then, BillG woke up and saw Java running on Netscape, which, of course, ran on many platforms, including our arch-enemy at that time, OS/2."  It started out as an HTML rendering application, but Internet Explorer grew larger with OLE 2.0, which became a great security concern as this former insider, along with other developers, had plenty of experience fighting viruses, and they saw it as another opening for virus writers, especially since for all intents and purposes from Windows 95 on, Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer were one and the same.

During the later part of the 1990's, Sum Yung Gai left Microsoft to finish his degree.  When asked how they felt about his departure, he said, "I went back to finish my college education, and none of us ever suspected I'd get into this GNU thing or Free Software. After all, OS/2 had essentially been beaten (remember Joachim Kempin's machinations--this happened while I was there, too), and 'Linux' was so geeky that Slackware was considered "easy" to install back then!"  The Redmond Giant had no clue what was about to happen.

He had an ephiphany and explained by saying, "It was after that point that I started to seriously wake up...especially after the MS Office 97 file format fiasco and the Halloween documents describing why."  Soon after, he began to try SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 and Red Hat Linux 5.2.  He was successful, and said, "I kept on with this command-line-based geeky OS and actually compiled my own 2.0.38 kernel...and it worked, much to my surprise! I found that, if you made Google your friend and yes, RTFM'd*, you could get a whole lot done. Now, you must remember that the very notion of compiling your kernel is ABSOLUTELY FOREIGN to a DOS/Windows person like I was. But once I did it, that's when it really hit me that I had control of my computer."

After the Business Software Alliance threatened Ernie Ball through the program of turning in users of "pirated software," and being fired at another job for deploying alternative solutions to the Microsoft platform, everything came full circle, and again, to prevent any future retaliation, refers to himself online as Sum Yung Gai.  He said, "But that doesn't mean I will be silenced."  When he found out about Ken Starks and how his current employer was threatened by the BSA, he said, "Yes...when I read about Chuck E., I remembered what the CIO of Portland Public School District did. It was very similar."

He was referring to Microsoft's letters to 500 school districts in 2002 concerning possible audits, unless they signed up under their Software Assurance and Licensing 6.0 program.  The response was less than friendly towards the Software Giant.  Combining such a controversy with the recent controversy pertaining to patents, he said in an e-mail, "What really galls me, though--but doesn't surprise me--is the recent patent sabre-rattling.  This is emphatically not the company I used to work for.  We never stooped to something this low back in the day. Matter of fact, if anything, we preached against software patents, because at the time, we didn't have any."

When he learned of the attempt to threaten schools, he redoubled his efforts with Free Software, and has since tried to convince others to adopt it instead of Microsoft.  According to this insider, Microsoft is afraid of Linux and GNU.  He said, "That's why all the patent saber-rattling. Microsoft has learned that it can no longer control who gets to play in the sandbox...and they're scared out of their minds...because they know what happens 10, 20 years from now. They see it. They know very well what happened to IBM at the hands of the clone makers when IBM failed to innovate in the PC space."

The fear from the Redmond-based corporation is that people who are actively sharing code are now able to match them feature for feature.  The Samba Team for example is able to allow people to share files across a diverse network.  Sum Yung Gai revealed an interesting insight when he said, "I also hear that there are several Microsoft engineers that would love to collaborate with the Samba team, but their bosses won't let them."  An inventive spirit, which was in higher supply according to Sum Yung Gai, is no longer present as the bottom line is seen as more important than quality.  In order to prevent a mutiny against the company, stock options are given out to all the developers, and any potential rebel has learned very quickly to keep their mouth shut.