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Canonical Close To $30M Critical Mass; Should Microsoft Worry?
ruphus13 writes "Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, claims that the company is very close to the $30M mark, at which point, they will be a self-sustaining company. While people feel that this should not worry Microsoft, the real question is whether a 10,000 person effort on a failure like Vista can actually be the paradigm of a long-term strategy. From the article: 'Microsoft had 10,000 people [the article is unclear whether these were all developers, or administrative and support staff were factored in] working on Vista for a five year period ... huge profits in any given year can mean relatively little five years on. Canonical's self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening — but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft's development process really is.'"
The real culprit here is Microsoft's full acceptance of Agile as a valid development methodology. While for small projects, or projects that can be delivered to a real-world testing environment (like web applications) Agile works great, for large applications with many individual teams working on disparate parts of the system, Agile is simply no match for the classic Waterfall methodology.
You don't get singleness of purpose and unity of design by letting each team work out their parts on their own. That requires architecture and design and a top-down approach.
Expect to see Microsoft move back towards tried and true development methodologies. Many of their smaller projects will probably stick with Agile, but the large products (Windows, Office, etc) will no doubt move back to Waterfall.