MIT OpenCourseWare Now Online

peter303 writes "A sampling of MIT's OpenCourseWare selections appered online today. The courses cover a full range of departments, but only a couple apiece. The material ranges ranges from just syllabi and calendars to extensive on-line course notes and interative demos. To succeed, OpenCourseWare must also be an advantage to MIT faculty and students, as well as the outside world. I think this may be possible, because it gives a uniform appearance and access point for online material, plus tools to build these."

Comments

Funny?

[ivanandre]

Anyone (preferably the moderator) can explain to me why in the hell was moderated FUNNY?

Does Microsoft's Defense Team Write This Stuff?

[guttentag]

Have a look at Daniel Jackson's Software Engineering lecture notes. He begins talking about the importance of good design and then cites Netscape as an example. He claims that the reason Netscape lost the browser war was because of poor design. He makes some valid points, but its interesting that he declines to factor in Microsoft's illegal use of its monopoly and even claims that Netscape's determination to remain platform independent was also partly responsible.

This sounds like Microsoft's commonly-touted line: "We didn't drive them out of business. Their incompetence drove them out of business." Is he teaching software engineering or business? He should stick to the former, because he's either inept or well-paid when it comes to the latter.

1.4.1 The Netscape Story

For PC software, there's a myth that design is unimportant because time-to-market is all that matters. Netscape's demise is a story worth understanding in this respect.

The original NCSA Mosaic team at the University of Illinois built the first widely used browser, but they did a quick and dirty job. They founded Netscape, and between April and December 1994 built Navigator 1.0. It ran on 3 platforms, and quickly became the browser of choice on Windows, Unix and Mac. Microsoft began developing Internet Explorer 1.0 in October 1994, and shipped it with Windows 95 in August 1995.

In Netscape's rapid growth period, from 1995 to 1997, the developers worked hard to ship new products with new features, and gave little time to design. Most companies in the shrink-wrap software business (still) believe that design can be postponed: that once you have market share and a compelling feature set, you can "refactor" the code and obtain the benefits of clean design. Netscape was no exception, and its engineers were probably more talented than many.

Meanwhile, Microsoft had realized the need to build on solid designs. It built NT from scratch, and restructured the Office suite to use shared components. It did hurry to market with IE to catch up with Netscape, but then it took time to restructure IE 3.0. This restructuring of IE is now seen within Microsoft as the key decision that helped them close the gap with Netscape.

Netscape's development just grew and grew. By Communicator 4.0, there were 120 developers (from 10 initially) and 3 million lines of code (up a factor of 30). Michael Toy, release manager, said:

"We're in a really bad situation ... We should have stopped shipping this code a year ago. It's dead ... This is like the rude awakening ... We're paying the price for going fast."

Interestingly, the argument for modular design within Netscape in 1997 was driven by the desire to go back to small team development. Without clean and simple interfaces, it becomes impossible to divide up the work into independent groups.

Netscape set aside 2 months to re-architect the browser, but it wasnt long enough. So they planned to start again from scratch, with Communicator 6.0. But 6.0 was never completed, and its developers were reassigned to 4.0. The 5.0 version, Mozilla, was made available as open source, but that didnt help: nobody wanted to work on spaghetti code. So Microsoft won the browser war, and AOL acquired Netscape.

This is not the entire story, by the way. Platform independence was a big issue right from the start. Navigator ran on Windows, Mac and Unix from version 1.0, and Netscape worked hard to maintain as much platform independence in their code as possible. They even planned to go to a pure Java version ("Javagator"), and built a lot of their own Java tools (because Sun's tools weren't ready). But in 1998 they gave up. Still, Communicator 4.0 contains about 1.2 million lines of Java.

You can read the whole story in: Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie. Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft, Free Press, 1998. See especially Chapter 4, Design Strategy.

Note, by the way, that it took Netscape more than 2 years to discover the importance of design. Don't be surprised if you're not entirely convinced after one term; some things come only with experience.