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Why the long road to Vista?
January 31, 2007
On January 30, “Microsoft finally offers consumers Windows Vista, the version of its operating system that's been gestating for five years,” writes Scott Rosenberg in the Washington Post. “When Microsoft's engineers started this project, U.S. troops hadn't yet invaded Iraq,” and “Google was still a relatively small private company…Why did it take the world's biggest and most successful software company so long to revamp its flagship product?”
And why, early in Vista’s five-year path to fruition, did Microsoft executive Jim Allchin write, “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft”?
Says Rosenberg, “Vista's tale is not just a headache for Microsoft's managers or a source of delight for the company's legions of critics…The sad truth is that Microsoft's woes aren't unusual in this industry. Large-scale software projects are perennially beset by dashed hopes and bedeviling delays.”
The reason, says Rosenberg, is that “unlike computer hardware…software isn't rooted in the physical world. It's still written, painstakingly, line by line and character by character; essentially, it's all made up. Software straddles the wide-open realm of the imagination…And so far, it has proved uniquely resistant to engineering discipline.”
Posted by Rick Nelson on January 31, 2007 | Comments (0)
