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Why Vista Had To Be Rebuilt From Scratch
iliketrash writes "The Wall Street Journal has a long front-page article describing how Jim Allchin approached Bill Gates in July, 2004, with the news that then-Longhorn, now-Vista, was 'so complex that its writers would never be able to make it run properly.' Also, the article says, 'Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.' And start over they did. The article is astonishing for its frank comments from the principles, including Allchin and Gates, as well as for its description of Microsoft's cowboy spaghetti code culture."
One of the best books I ever read on the Microsoft code culture was "Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled The Future Of Microsoft" by David Bank. From the book, Jim Allchin is the Windows guy who quashed Brad Silverberg and the (relatively) innovative Internet team - although ironically he was an early advocate for getting TCP/IP support in Windows. He believed that all innovation in Microsoft should take place under the Win 2k banner and that the company should just keep making Windows bigger and bigger and bigger. Hmm, maybe it got too big.3 203151/qid=1127565487/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-0616 241-1101748
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074
Tristan Yates
I have a friend at university who was recently hired by Microsoft, partially for a quality control role. While this's a single case, and in no way can be extrapolated to the whole company, from what he's said, it's apparent that they're reusing a large amount of their codebase, with the dodgy bits either rewritten or modified and thoroughly tested.
As you said, there's no way in hell you can have a 12 month rewrite. But, with any luck (for the end-users), this will hopefully turn out to be more than PR fluff.
Not sure if this is what you were interested in, but I think Paul Thurott has some great lengthy and detailed articles, along with some interviews with Microsoft engineers for some insight in the stress, problems, and achievements with various large Windows projects, and also with pictures of their build labs and test machines.
For example:
Windows 2000
Windows XP SP2
Windows Server 2003
A disclaimer bias-wise is that Paul Thurott is a guy who wants Microsoft to do well, but he's not afraid of criticizing them harshly when he doesn't agree with their decisions, so I think it's still not a case with "inside stories" being too biased to be useful. He was for example the guy behind the quote that Windows Vista had the markings of a shipwreck after seeing Beta 1. Although he has had some missteps IMO such as saying Windows Me should be far more reliable than Windows 98.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
From what I read on the net, the code base used was that of windows 2003 server.
Mac OS X is not that modular. GNU Hurd is far more, and even GNU/Linux.
Mac OS X’s kernel’ not modular at all. It has conflated the Mach microkernel, which has already been abandoned by the Hurd for its bad performance, with the monolithic BSD kernel. The result is something just as monolithic as BSD, but much larger, more complex and slow. Linux is not as fast or simple as BSD, but still much faster than Mac OS X — and both are just as modular.
In contrast, the Hurd on the Mach is a little bit slower but much more modular, and the new L4 version has the potential to be much faster and still much more modular, because it is a true microkernel with multiple servers.
The Mac OS X GUI’s not modular at all X is.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
For the record, even though I only develop in a particular branch of Longhorn, I do have access to the whole source tree.