“The Master Domain will control the entire organization. An email system never has more than a single Master.”
“So, where do the user accounts reside?”
“They all go into various Slave Domains. You can have as many Slaves as you want.”
Dead silence. . .
“What?”
Masters and Slaves
The year was 1989 and along with other members of WordPerfect’s elite email support team, I was being briefed on the architecture of the next version of our email program. (WordPerfect Office 3.0.) The developer who was explaining the design to us honestly had no idea why we were stunned to silence. At WordPerfect, like many software companies, programmers didn’t talk to customers. That was the job of Support.
In software development, especially in the late 1980’s a “master/slave” relationship was well understood and really not noteworthy. It simply defined a one-to-many relationship, where the “one” was the dominate system. However, what the developer was explaining was not just the architecture, but the nomenclature that our customers would need to define. He was suggesting that we tell our customers to create a system that they would see as resembling the Antebellum South.
It was actually Richard Bliss, who readers may remember as the one who told me “Now Would Be a Great Time to Shut Up,” who came up with the terms that ultimately got adopted.
Master => Primary
Slave => Secondary
It conveyed the same relationship without risking alienating our customers, and inviting lawsuits.
Assaulting eMail Servers
An insensitivity to racially charged terms wasn’t our programmers’ only gaffe. Once we got the system set up and running in our lab we noticed that the Connection Server (CS), a kind of “traffic cop” for routing email was committing lewd acts on our other servers. The CS had to check if a destination server was online before it attempted to move files. Naturally it “probed.” And it had to log this information to the screen.
That may not sound bad until you realize that email administrators often gave their servers personalized names, such as cartoon characters. So, the CS log screen showed
>>Probing Bambi
Again, this might not have been catastrophic if the CS server didn’t try to restart an offline mail server.
>>Probing Bambi
<< Bambi is down
>>Upping Bambi
I don’t remember what we got them to change it to. I think it might have been
>>Checking Bambi
>>Restarting Bambi
You can read an excellent history of GroupWise, written by my friend Willem Bagchus here. I’m not sure Willem ever forgave me for leaving WordPerfect and going to work for Microsoft.
I love working with developers and engineers, but they do sometimes need a filter between them and customers. That filter is supposed to be the Program Managers. But, even PMs can be guilty of picking the wrong name.
Microsoft’s Beavis & Butt-head?
After leaving WordPerfect in 1992, I went to Microsoft to support Microsoft Mail as they readied the first version of Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft, like most software companies, uses codenames for their products while they are in development. Apple, for example is famous for naming their new versions after big cats. Microsoft has been through many themes. “Chicago” was the code name for Microsoft Windows 95, for example.
The PM typically gets to pick the name. Microsoft Exchange server and the email client were codenamed “Beavis” and “Butt-head, of MTV fame. Developers could talk about working on “Butt-head.” Testers could report, “I’ve got a problem when Beavis loads and there’s not enough memory.”
The concept worked great. . .
. . .
. . .You know there’s a punchline here, right?
The concept worked great until we got close to the release date. Microsoft invited in the IT world press to show them the early versions of their new email program. They naturally wanted to showcase the cool stuff that the product would provide and keep people from switching to Lotus Notes, or WordPerfect Office (shortly before it was renamed Novell GroupWise.)
Imagine their embarrassment when they had to endure press stories talking about Microsoft’s new email system “Beavis and Butt-head.” (Not surprisingly I cannot find links to any of those old stories. This was before the Internet really took off, and Microsoft, I’m sure would be happy if that chapter never makes it to the net.)
That was the last time PM’s got to pick their own names. Microsoft designed an internal tool that all product names had to be vetted through. But, the damage had been done.
The real lesson is don’t let the developers name things customers will read and always vette your codenames.
“Temporary” names seldom are.