Heads Roll As Microsoft Misses Vista Target

A reader writes: "Business version is on time, but the company won't make the key holiday consumer sales season. After another delay in the release of its Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft last week put a new executive in charge of future Windows projects and replaced several other managers. The changes are designed to better align Microsoft's desktop and Internet software teams and get products to market faster." There's also a NY Times piece that discusses why Windows has been so slow (to come out). Worth the reading.

Comments

Unfixable

[ozmanjusri]

I don't think Microsoft can salvage this. they've locked themselves into selling a monolith in an environment when a modular, easily and frequently updatable system is needed.

I'd love to see the major corps get behind a push to reimplement the Windows APIs (IE, Wine or similar) so all OSs could run Win32 executables. Then the big MS lockin would be over and we users could have some choices.

Mty suggestions

[MECC]

Find Dave Cutler, who MS hired along with a team to built NT:
From Dave regarding NT:

• "If any of you break this build, your ass is grass, and I'm the lawnmower." -- David Cutler to his programmers during the development of NT
• "I won't pollute it [NT] with crap!" -- Cutler to Bill Gates, upon being told that NT was to have an OS/2 "personality" as an alternative front-end.

Or, get someone with a trackercord of delivering a modern OS. Like Maybe Linus.

Or, hire Christopher Walken as a Project manager

Misleading Headline

[Aqua04]

I think the headline of the article is a bit misleading. From what I have read, I don't think "heads are rolling" at Microsoft yet. They have restructured, which they do about once or twice a year anyway, but the problem of multiple layers of general managers and layer upon layer of Vice Presidents remains.

If you read some of the postings on the minimsft blog, you see that Sinofsky has been brought in to streamline things, but the question abut what to do with all the legacy management overhead still remains.

They have so many people which they promoted up over the years that they'll need to figure out how to flatten the organization whilst thinking about what to do with all these people in middle management. That'll be the interesting question in the coming years, I think.

Dare I Say It...

[eno2001]

Netcraft confirms it! Windows OS is dying! ;P

Seriously, I spent some time last night reading through a Microsoft employee's blog discussing this very issue. While it might sound like big trouble in little China, it's likely to be well glossed over by their PR campaigns. Heads will roll at MS, but not the right ones. The big guys there will say that this was the work of either an "astroturfer" who doesn't even work for MS, or a disgruntled employee who really didn't have a grasp on the business end of things. In other words Ballme and company will be saying, "nothing to see here, move along".

As a side note, I found one of the comments on that blog particularly insulting. Someone had the audacity to say that Microsoft is becoming more and more like DEC. This couldn't be furthest from the truth. DEC was run by the engineers, meaning that the entire company was nothing but engineers. No suits. No business men. Just pure brain. That's why DEC's systems pretty much defined the phrase "just works". MS isn't even close. They tried and they got Cutler to design NT. But then they threw out everything that he had laid out in NT when they hit 2k for business reasons. If you want a great OS, you forget about business reasons. If you want to run a great business, then you need to accept that there will always be compromises and you'll always have a subpar product when compared to the output of pure engineering. Them's the breaks folks. That's why the FOSS world outshines Microsoft at every turn in terms of design and doesn't really make much of a dent business-wise. And it's why MS is so successful as a business but can't create an OS that you'd trust your life with.

Re:Why the delay?

[clbell]

Yes, it's a complete redesign from the ground up. That's why the same crummy registry concept is there, why the control panel looks exactly the same with many of the same icons, why dll hell still exists to some degree, why programs are still installed in the same way, why the explorer process requires 100MB vs 20MB in XP. The way apps are installed and managed in OS X is so obviously superior that MS would be stupid not to copy it during a complete redesign. Should I go on? A complete redesign, I HOPE, would involve streamlining code/operation and killing some of it's demons. Vista does neither. What MS have done is rewritten some of the modules and added a lot of new modules, which is why Vista has 15 million lines of code (or so) more than XP. It's a much more complex OS...and not in a good way.

Re:NYTimes Article Access

[Ucklak]

They don't have to backward compatible anymore. They are a frickin software company for one, #2, they own a fricking VM company (VirtualPC) that is responsible for Windows on the Mac.

They're claiming this 'backward compatible' mantra so that they don't lose the current corral of developers, from Tier 1, 3rd party, and fan boys.
If they change their OS so that backward compatibility no longer works, they feel they risk losing everyone to the competition, whatever it is.
Mac did it in 2000 and kept backward compatibility through whatever method it is that kept Mac Classic on all OSX's through the Intel changeover.

I was actually looking forward for the originally planned Longhorn with WinFS and such but not this Vista crap.
I stopped being a MS fanboy with the announcement of XP activation but I realize them for the juggernaut they are and I respect that.

I don't see why they can't come up with a new OS and include legacy support in VM mode. Today's hardware can handle it. Vista is just smelly trash.