“Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind’s history now threatens to also be the longest,” Philip Su blogs. “I managed developer teams in Windows for five years, and have only begun to reflect on the experience now that I have recently switched teams. Through a series of conversations with other leaders that have similarly left The Collective, several root causes have emerged as lasting characterizations of what’s really wrong in The Empire.
“Ask any developer in Windows why Vista is plagued by delays, and they’ll say that the code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process,” Su writes. “But that’s not where it ends. There are deeper causes of Windows’ propensity to slippage.”
“Deep in the bowels of Windows, there remains the whiff of a bygone culture of belittlement and aggression. Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth,” Su explains. “Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.”
“There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many vice presidents, in reporting structures too narrow. When I was in Windows, I reported to Alec, who reported to Peter, to Bill, Rick, Will, Jim, Steve, and Bill,” Su writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Too many cooks in the kitchen is the overall problem with the entire “Wintel” hegemony. Several outfits make the hardware, more often than not on razor-thin margins, another tries to make the OS, another one makes one peripheral, and so on, and none of it works together smoothly. Big surprise.
Su continues, “We shouldn’t forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history. The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully. The solutions to these challenges are certainly not trivial. An interesting question, however, is whether or not Windows Vista ever had a chance to ship on time to begin with. Is Vista merely uncontrolled? Or is it fundamentally uncontrollable?”
Full article, once removed by Su and now restored (explanation in full article) here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “DreamTheEndless” for the heads up.]
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Related articles:
Computerworld: Microsoft Windows Vista a distant second-best to Apple Mac OS X – June 02, 2006
Mossberg: Apple’s end-to-end model beats Microsoft’s component model in post-PC era – May 10, 2006
Why Windows Vista continually slips
Now if it would just fall and can’t get up.
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And yet, Windows copies Macintosh.
Hmm…
Why Windows slips?
MS almost single handedly defined BLOATWARE.
Vista is their ultimate statement of hugeness.
Millions of lines of legacy code down in the bowels of a massive lumbering beast.
Mmmmmm, sounds great, I want some of that…. NOT!
Why does Vista slip?
It’s all those banana skins Monkey Boy throws around after he’s had a good chow-down…
I’ll go with answer two, Mr. Su, to your question.
I need to read another article:
WHY AAPL STOCK CONTINUALLY SLIPS
There is no reason
Apple solved this problem of old, buggy code by just wiping the slate clean and starting with a new OS base. Why can’t Micro$oft do the same thing?
Music to my ears
Bill doesn’t want to be around for the fall of the empire
Rick,
Here:
Cramer: ‘I have never seen a systematic, multiweek bear raid like I have on Apple Computer’
Lou —
Microsoft already did, once, with Windows NT 3.5. Completely new OS from the ground up. (I know a source working at Digital at the time that says Microsoft simply bought the core of an experimental new version of VMS and put the Windows look and feel on it; whether that’s true or not, the hand of Dave Cutler is apparent in it.)
Then in NT4 they made it look like Windows 95. Windows XP, as you can find if you dig into the right About and Properties panels, is Windows NT version 5.1.
They probably ought to do it again, but from what it sounds like their problems are not really technical but managerial. The sales guys are running the company.
“Deep in the bowels of Windows…”
Thank you, MDN for not putting a picture of Steve Balmer after that line… (Though, it’d be hilarious)
I agree with SU and MDN’s take on this one. It’s simply a beast that’s gotten too big, with too many trying to control it’s destiny, all the while being chained to the Past. Microsoft cannot afford another “Revision” of Windows. Once Vista ships, if it ever does, it simply must copy Apple one more time, and break completely with it’s past in order to move forward. Have a “classic mode” for more recent legacy apps, but for God’s sake Redmond, you have to tell people still running Windows95 to put the past to rest and move forward.
The question is…can they?
i think vista articles have replaced iPod articles on here, as far as slow newz days…
Ollie:
Thanks.
Thats why Warren Buffet make his wealth from.
What a world.
MW: Grat, like in “Mac OS X is great” or as in “Apple is a great company”
Why Windows slips?
Mechanics probably need to replace the clutch or the fly-wheel. I bet that would help. You might also want to check the brake pads – MonkeyBoy loves to ride ’em…
That’s a golden opportunity for Apple. I hope they’ll have the guts to take some risks and steal market from MS. Bootcamp is a step in that direction. Let’s see what’s next.
People get cranky over the fact that they can’t run their ancient Classic games and apps natively on OS X – or at all on a MacIntel. You don’t hear much complaining about a new version of OS X being a year late. Microsoft is saddling itself with the need to run decade-old software on a three-generation-newer OS. There’s a price to be paid for this – particularly when that older software … cheated a bit in how it did things. If Apple coded an “oops” into an OS and someone took advantage of it, rather than coding their app ‘right’, they might find their app broken at the next revision. Not at MS.
This is good for some folks, bad for others. It’s an increasingly deep level of Hell for anyone trying to update/improve the OS while maintaining backwards compatibility. Soon, Microsoft is going to have to start from a clean sheet of coding paper and discard anything not designed this century. And even some of the stuff from THIS century. They may continue to use .dll style code and other ideas that “seemed good at the time”, but many should be re-written if only to enforce the perception that “bad old code is GONE“.
maybe they should have “classic” OS and develop or acquire a new piece of software on which to build/re-build their OS. Kinda like Apple did years ago.
Hmmmm, interesting question raised. But I think that the answer is more simple than Microsoft can allow it self to think.
Old computers (old, old, not just last month
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At somepoint, Microsoft ought to split into two divisions. One supports older code, doing updates to help protect aganist viruses, etc. The other has a NEW operating system for current computers. Simple, clean, fast. you know, like Apple OS.
The problem, I think, is that Bill Gates just cannot bring himself to admit that they took the wrong turn.
I heard one of his recent speeches. He is still thinking of software to do little things, things a programer would like. He misses the fact that it has to be, repeat HAS TO BE seamless and easy cause programers are not in the majority. Vocal yes, just not in the buying majority.
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JMHO
Norm
after reading the blog and many of the comments (assuming most if not all are MS employees) it’s no wonder the company is having an identity crisis. I am truly amazed that they have no concept of reality – they are so wrapped in their world that they cannot conceive how people truly use computers.
it’s sad, truly sad. regardless of how i feel about the evil empire (or anyone else for that matter), MS really had an opportunity to change the world, but they are more concerned about marketshare and making a buck – basic philisophical difference between them and apple.
steve was correct 10 years ago with his “we are in the dark ages of desktop computing” and we still are to a degree. reading that blog truly exemplifies that MS doesn’t get it.
peace out.
As for the “clean slate” for Windows NT. That was, what, 15 years ago? No, they didn’t buy code from DEC, they hired away the guy who wrote the code. Which may be why there are more lines of code in anything derived from the original NT than in nearly any version of VMS or Unix. This is significant when you note that VMS and Unix have always been Enterprise Class operating systems while NT has always been touted as an OS for the Desktop.
By the way … they did their best, back then, to get as much by way of Microsoft apps as possible to run on the new OS. They may have started with a “clean slate”, but they cribbed a lot from existing code.
Vista may take longer to build than the pyramids of Egypt! I wonder if the Vista Software retail box will make good sarcophagus’ for the management teams at Microsoft when Vista flops?
i think the most telling statement in the article is that it takes 24 hours to recompile and link (old-timer words = build for youngsters) windows in a development environment. when you are trying to write and debug code this 24 hr. delay was annoying in the days of punch cards and batch processing and waiting for your printout. today this is just an impossible hurdle to overcome with the increase in software complexity. regardless of the number of levels (50 or so) in vista, taking a day to build a development version of any software would spell disaster and almost certain failure.
SUV code — ever see one of those monsters try to take a highway off-ramp a little too fast? They roll over very easily. The off-road, survivalist stance is a joke. Ever see Windows try to take a turn fast?
Microsoft, 20th century technology for the 21st century. These guy are either incredibly senimental about legacy code or totally incapable of developing something better.
I was grumbling the other day about TValue, a financial modeling program that no longer runs on Mac. It brings the legacy support argument home.
My solution was to unsheath an old XP box, and work up one amortization. After duking it out with XP, I went back to my Macs feeling okay about the trade-off.
Wiping the slate clean every decade feels right!
XP has really grown long in the tooth.