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Microsoft Demos Three Platforms Running the Same Game
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Engadget:
"Microsoft's Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox 360 with the Xbox gamepad. Interestingly, not only is the development cross-platform friendly, but the game itself (a simple Indiana Jones platformer was demoed) saves its place and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick up."
Funny thing about the "cross-platform" comment is the employee is admitting something that MS has tried to obscure from consumers: Their different product lines are not using the same OS. Techies have long known that Windows Mobile isn't anything like Windows desktop or their Xbox 360 OS. Whereas their competitor Apple is using OS X variants for their computers, iPhone/iPod Touch, and now the iPad, MS has tried to leverage the "Windows" name brand by putting it on different software in name only.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
God almighty, their code base is more fragmented than I ever imagined.
Even at the worst of the "UNIX wars", if you had to rewrite as much as 10% of your code to get it to run on (say) AIX, SunOS, and System V that meant you'd done a really bad job of isolating the platform-specific parts of your code. If Microsoft can't keep their code bases in sync when they control all of them and they have incentive to do so, they're really slipping.
There are a good number of people I know (including a few riflemen in the Marine Corps) who would most definitely disagree with your first statement. It's more of a matter of the ability of the shooter, not the accuracy of the rifle. The US Military has some highly accurate rifles, when put in the hands of the right shooter.