Microsoft Developer Explains Why Windows Kernel Development Falls Behind

New submitter mha writes "In a response that truly seems to be from a core Microsoft developer, we are told about why Windows kernel development continues to fall further and further behind that of the Linux kernel. He says, 'The cause of the problem is social. There's almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world. ... There's no formal or informal program of systemic performance improvement. We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business. See, component owners are generally openly hostile to outside patches: if you're a dev, accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry (due to the need to maintain this patch and to justify in in shiproom the unplanned design change), makes test angry (because test is on the hook for making sure the change doesn't break anything, and you just made work for them), and PM is angry (due to the schedule implications of code churn). There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team. You can always find a reason to say "no," and you have very little incentive to say "yes."'"

Comments

Long story short...

[korbulon]

People at M$ only innit for the money. Microsoft's got good people no doubt, but I am reminded of line from Chef in Apocalypse Now: "They lined us all up in front of a hundred yards of prime rib. Magnificent meat, beautifully marbled. Then they started throwing it in these big cauldrons. All of it. Boiling." That's Microsoft: boiled prime rib.

Re:Long story short...

[techno-vampire]

(why is it that nearly EVERY time a linux kernel upgrade resulted in either hours of debugging or reinstalling the distro (easy to do but a pain in the ass, especially on a mission critical system).

Maybe because you don't have enough sense to keep more than one kernel installed? I have three; the current one and the preceding two. That way, if a kernel upgrade breaks something, all I have to do is boot into the one I was using before and go on with my life. And, in fact, that's the default in the two distros I'm familiar with (I use Fedora, and my sister uses Ubuntu.) and I'd be a tad surprised to find that the only reason your boxes don't do that is because you "knew better" and changed it.

Re:Long story short...

[Austerity Empowers]

Great rant, except that over 75% of the Linux code contributed is contributed by paid corporate employees that are simply doing their job

I know, my little company has two such people. They're interesting to work with, they have the free will of contractors, the job satisfaction of doing what they'd be doing anyway, they are untouchable because my company cannot succeed without linux street cred and they're well respected in their communities. They care about our company, to be sure, but when we got our second round of funding, and it came with strings attached and a new set of management hell bent on offshoring design, they told them to fuck off, in those exact words, in front of the entire company. They didn't get fired or forced out, unlike four of the software engineers we have on our proprietary management OS who also refused to cooperate. Those guys lived and died by the idiocy of our suits, they are slaves.

Linux devs who get paid by "the man", who have the community support required to make them influential, but the corporate support required to put the food on the table are in a great position. They do not reflect the majority of engineers working for private industry. Their "boss" is the community of people who contribute, who deal with their patches and understand the quality of their work. The company is simply paying them to influence by design, and they're irreplaceable. This is an example of a model that really works. Free men work harder, smarter and longer than slaves.

Linux however is the exception, not everything can follow this model. As I said, management who can learn from this will be rich. The rest will merely scrape by.

Re:your mom is fat

[Anonymous Coward]

its because of her genes though

The quality of Slashdot trolling has gone way down recently.

And the retraction

[caywen]

Sounds like the guy was just frustrated and venting. Lots of us do that sometimes, and this one seems ready made to please the slashdot crowd. But do read the retraction the guy posted.

First, I want to clarify that much of what I wrote is tongue-in-cheek and over the top --- NTFS does use SEH internally, but the filesystem is very solid and well tested. The people who maintain it are some of the most talented and experienced I know. (Granted, I think they maintain ugly code, but ugly code can back good, reliable components, and ugliness is inherently subjective.) The same goes for our other core components. Yes, there are some components that I feel could benefit from more experienced maintenance, but we're not talking about letting monkeys run the place. (Besides: you guys have systemd, which if I'm going to treat it the same way I treated NTFS, is an all-devouring octopus monster about crawl out of the sea and eat Tokyo and spit it out as a giant binary logfile.) ...

Re:And the retraction

[SomeKDEUser]

It is because of people who think like you that there is an isotherm of truth in companies. The grunts know. The middle managers suspect. The upper echelons are completely out of it. Eventually, the company drowns in its own shit.

It needs not be like that: this dev did a great and good thing for MS: it made it impossible to ignore the truth. The truth was always there, knowing it changes nothing, except that you can now work on it.

Incidental rant: private sector companies are much better at covering up the shit than public sector ones, thus the myth of private efficiency. But in reality, it is all about people like you who cover up the shit -- whereas in the public sector, you always have some incentive to uncover the problems: you can always blame your predecessor for political gain.

Re:I regretted submitting this story immediately.

[ShanghaiBill]

It is no big deal. It is a non-story. Everything described is not "Microsoft", it is human

Yes it is a story, and it is interesting. Of course it is human nature, and all organizations have these problems. But successful organizations overcome these problems. Organizations that don't overcome these problems fail ... except for Microsoft. What makes Microsoft so fascinating, is that it is only successful because of some early chance opportunities that allowed it to establish customer lock-in, and this has allowed it to succeeded despite being utterly dysfunctional. Microsoft has not only failed to overcome these human problems, but has wallowed in levels of backstabbing, empire building, and technical incompetence that would have destroyed any less endowed organization. Anyone interested in organization behavior should look at Microsoft as a fascinating outlier that breaks all the rules, yet still survives.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy runs Msoft

[buybuydandavis]

From Pournelle's web site:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

  First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

*** Finding a way to effectively deal with bureaucratic capture of institutions is probably the number one human problem.

Re:NTFS

[hairyfeet]

What is wrong with it? Fuck what is wrong with any of it? The Linux guys can laugh at the registry and shit but ya know what? I can actually patch Windows and not have the drivers shit on by devs that don't give a fuck about anything but "works for me!" I have a machine in the shop I'm retired after NINE YEARS of being my netbox...NINE fucking years. That is TWO service packs and probably over 4000 patches and NOT A SINGLE DRIVER BROKEN, not a single one! hell you can't even update Linux without the wireless or sound being shit all over.

When you can show me ONE distro, just one, that can pass "The Hairyfeet Challenge"* then you have something to brag about but until then Linux will stay last place for a REASON, because normal folks aren't gonna deal with dead wireless, sound, graphics getting screwed, and a million other pains in the ass because linus the arrogant ass torvalds thinks he is fucking smarter than every OS designer that has ever lived and can't build a driver interface that works.

*.- For those that don't know "The Hairyfeet Challenge" simulates the typical 5 year cycle of your average PC, we take one random laptop and one random desktop out of the pile, we install ANY distro release from 5 years ago and we update it to current. Wanna guess what happens when you hold Linux up to just HALF the Windows lifecycle? it DIES, it DIES HARD, it shits all over its drivers and by the end you'll be lucky if even 30% of what was working at the start is 100% functional at the end.

We all know what the definition of insanity is and that is the Linux driver model, 20 god damned years of forum hunts, googling for fixes, shit breaking in Foo+1 that worked in Foo and kinda but not really being fixed in Foo+2 before its fixed in Foo+3 only to have something else shit on. Its 2013 guys, that shit is NOT gonna fucking cut it which is why the ONLY gains after 20 years has been Android where a big corp gave a finger to the devs and brought some sanity to the driver model.

If you want the masses to accept you then you are gonna have to stop taking shit sammiches from Torvalds and demand he fix it or step down for somebody who will. Don't you DESERVE better? Do you really think so little of yourself and your community that "free equals shit" is just fine and dandy to you? I mean MSFT has released an OS more hated than Vista, ME, and Bob rolled together and you are gaining NO SHARE...if that doesn't slap some reality into you then i don't know what will. Hell at this rate Win 9 could be "Win Goatse in smell-o-rama" and it would still sell 60 million copies because while it would smell terrible at least the fucking drivers would work.