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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."
Because much as /. knocks them this is the sort of thing they can manage, astonishing turn arounds.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
And Linux is what exactly?
A highly structured and organized operating system developed under the instruction of a central authority, no doubt?
Don't be such a hypocrite.
Not only does it explain a lot, it's been glaringly obvious for more than a decade. Everything Microsoft has done since before the days of Windows 3 has smacked of design-by-committee and a painful lack of consistency. Everything in Windows has always had the smell of being designed and implemented by dozens of groups that had little or no communication with each other. I'm surprised they managed to release code at all, however buggy and insecure, with the development model they were using.
It will be interesting to see if Vista demonstrates an improved level of quality due to this new process.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You know, when I read the article, I was thinking: This sounds almost exactly like how Linux is developed, except that all the authors aren't employed by the same company. Who would have thought that the Open Source development model would be the same as that at Microsoft?
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Don't be such a hypocrite.
The difference being, Windows is touted as a professional OS built by professional coders, upheld to a high standard, etc, etc, etc. Simply put: People expect more when they have to pay for it. Microsoft has constantly criticized projects such as Linux, because the code isn't built by a central authority. Now we learn that Windows is made pretty much like Linux. I think criticizing Microsoft for this is definitely justifiable.
I'm sure the root cause of cowboy coding is in Microsoft's quest for being able to put check marks in feature boxes so PHBs can pick MS software as having the most "features." Back in the 80s there used to be a number of standalone outlining applications and high-quality outliners embedded in competing word processors. Then Word got an "outliner." That this "outliner" never worked and still doesn't work to this day is irrelevant. It enabled MS to put a check mark in the outliner feature box and eliminate user's arguments that they need a non-MS product because they need an outliner.
Checkbox marketing -- about the only way to market when non-users make purchase decisions -- drives software companies to bolt-on features without regard to consistency of or destructive interactions between features.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It's astonishing because nobody does it anymore, it's few and far between. It's gotten to this level and hardly anyone has noticed. Nowadays if you ask hard hitting questions they will just find someone else to be interviewed by, an interview that will have better PR results. With companies buying or owning media companies, they can just choose some of their own and build themselves and their empire up. A better question to ask is what incentive is there to do a hard hitting interview, for both the interviewer and the interviewee? Both want to perpetuate their jobs and positive PR but it requires criticism.
There's just one more lesson Microsoft needs to learn from Longhorn/Vista: Don't start promising features and showing Powerpoint presentations to the press until you understand the scale of the project.
I love Google, because they rarely promise something and don't deliver. Actually, they rarely promise something. It just shows up one day and it's elegant, clean, and fast.
90% of the comments I've read so far are either entirely or partially "omfg... microsoft suks!". However, read the entrie article, and you are faced with an interesting siutation.
Software always has to strike a balance point... between features, quality, cost and timing. All software does (sans Duke Nukem Forever). Microsoft has been very good at getting product out there with the feature sets people want (Microsoft is also very good at manipulating folks into getting folks to want what they are able to deliver). Now, they are at a cross-road. Continue their current coding model, and get the next couple versions out there (relatively) inexpensively and quickly, or bite the bullet, and try a new way that will make them competitive for serval versions.
Seems like an easy choice. But here you have thousands of developers who style is being crimped. Software engineers generally want to write code, not have constraints placed on them. Add to the fact that Google is gobbling up the best and brightest, and suddenly you wonder: If Microsoft forges forward, do they lose even more of their best engineers. They may have a better model for code depelopment, but will they have the best coders to move forward with?
Which leads to the final question: Does Microsoft really need the "best and brightest" anymore? If so, do they need as many (percentage terms) as they used to? Their products are mostly in the mature stage. Can a few intellectuals keep the ship moving forward. Despite what groupthink on Slashdot may indicate, 90% of coding is not revolutionary, or even evolutionary.
Just some things to think about and watch for over the next few years.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Everyone works AT microsoft. Everyone comes in at 9 to 5. Its a lot easier to manage "a bunch of little programs" when all the developers are on the same campus. Its a lot harder when the developers are all across the globe, with different schedules, all stitching together their communication with /no central management authority/ to make sure everyone can communicate effectively. People who are reading this without thinking will say "Whats Linus, if not a central management authority?" OK, find a piece of code you dont understand in the linux kernel, written by someone who speaks a language you dont understand. Go ask Linus to facilitate getting that guy to explain his code to you. See how far you get. Nowhere. Now try it at microsoft, asking your manager.
One would think that because of this, Linux would be a mess, but we've seen the opposite is true: For projects to continue to evolve rather than quickly die off, they require _rigid_ structure and sane, intuitive modularity to support the OSS development model. Projects that turn into spaghetti code too fast just fizzle out and never make it into my slackware distro. While at microsoft, they have this whole management system that makes it easier to support spaghetti code. OSS has a much more brutal "natural selection" process that is constantly favoring modular, readable, easy-to-learn code bases.
Plus, spaghetti code is not fun, so hobbiest programmers arent going to waste their time with it.
Thats why so much OSS software is structured so well.
Why stick up for big business?
Well, I'm hopeful they can nail things down and get them stable, but their focus doesn't seem to be on quality first. I think it was Rik van Riel who said that it was perfectly okay for only 1 stable release in 3 to actually be stable. I kid you not. I'd link it for you, as it's in my old comments. Unfortunately, I can't get to my old submissions, as I don't pay Slashdot anymore. So you'll have to find the quote yourself. lwn.net definitely has it somewhere in their archives.
:)
It's worth pointing out that the whole move of Linux into the server market was accidental. It was always being written as a desktop Unix. It just happened to be so amazingly robust that it made a dynamite server, and took over a good chunk of the internet. That'd be a good book title, "The Accidental Server". Unfortunately, the development model never changed to match the actual use of the system.
The reason I started using Linux to begin with was because it didn't ever break... it didn't have as many features as Windows, but it just never, ever, EVER fell over. The 2.2 kernel was probably the most bulletproof piece of software I've ever run on a PC. 2.4 never got to the sheer solidity of 2.2... on good hardware it's quite robust, but I saw a number of machines where stressing it would lock it up after a few days. (from the kernel messages, it looked like it might be bugs in the (different) network drivers.) 2.6, relatively speaking, has just been a disaster. They won't leave it alone long enough to let it stabilize... they insist on jamming new code into every release, and dropping old releases very quickly. (the new 2.6.X setup.) So I can't get my bugfixes without new features if I want to use a vanilla kernel.
People, of course, instantly bash me and say 'you're stupid, you should be using a distribution kernel'. I'm doing that now, even though I liked rolling my own, but I shouldn't have to. The dev team's attitude seems to be 'ship it and let the distros debug it'... which, as far as I'm concerned, is waving one's hand in the air, hoping that someone else will fix it. Linus' kernel should be rock-solid. It's the center around which the Linux universe turns. Their new attitude means that both Mandrake and Red Hat will have to spend time fixing the same problems, possibly in incompatible ways. And it means that programs may run on Red Hat, but not on Mandrake or vanilla Linux, or some other variation on that. There needs to be a gold standard, a One True Linux. We don't have that anymore, and I think the inevitable result will be to balkanize the community. Without that central kernel, switching from one distro to another, particularly with commercial software like Oracle, becomes much chancier. You'll end up with vendor lock-in... Oracle will run only on Red Hat's kernel, so you're stuck with Red Hat's distro. That's not supposed to happen with Open Source, but it looks nearly inevitable if we can't get a stable kernel at the center.
Wow, that was quite a segue. Sorry about that.