| Monday, September 26, 2005 |
13:41 - Bringing the cows home to roost
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112743680328349448,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
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Mark O. sends this revealing WSJ look into the inner workings of Microsoft, where they've had to develop new and unheard-of technologies just to deal with the unsalvageable morass that Longhorn became:
Mr. Allchin says he soon saw his fears realized. In making large software programs engineers regularly bring together all the new unfinished features into a single "build," a sort of prototype used to test how the features work together. Ideally, engineers make a fresh build every night, fix any bugs and go back to refining their features the next day. But with 4,000 engineers writing code each day, testing the build became a Sisyphean task. When a bug popped up, trouble-shooters would often have to manually search through thousands of lines of code to find the problem.
Mr. Gates's WinFS project was so troublesome that engineers began talking about whether they could make the "pig fly." Images of pigs with wings started appearing in presentations and offices.
And Microsoft's culture was facing a new threat. The mass of patches and agglomerations that made up Windows turned it into an easy target for viruses and other Web-based attacks. Mr. Allchin had to divert top engineers into the effort to fix security problems in existing versions of Windows. "The ship was just crashing to the ground," Mr. Allchin says.
The solution they came up with sounds pretty interesting—and the article seems geared toward reassuring readers (particularly those with MSFT in their portfolios) that Vista is actually on track and might just ship someday if we're very lucky. It sure does look like Microsoft's morale has reached a historic low, though, in these last few years of malaise and crippling bloat. Looks like this internal revolution has come none too soon for them.
UPDATE: Of course, it could be that Microsoft has gone completely out to lunch. Check out this ad that Chris found on Yahoo just now:
Uh... what?
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Brian Tiemann
