I don’t buy it
Reading the backlog in news and blog entries I found a post by a Microsoft employee originally posted on Slashdot. Out many things, he explains why Vista was delayed so often. Out of all those bold meaningless words statements, this one caught my attention.
We shouldn’t forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history.
The fact that Vista was delayed by several years won’t kill it.
- Microsoft is evil and so is Bill Gates.
- Free Software is so much better.
- Vista will take too much hardware resources.
- Linux is free!
- Windows is full of security holes.
Against the comments you can read on slashdot, none of these will cause Vista to fail.
The main issue is that the project was dead before ever starting. Going on for the largest project in software history is quite a bold move. If it were to save mankind or perform something else heroic, it would probably make sense. They will have to face it someday, their largest-project-mankind-ever-started does nothing more than burn CPU cycles. Not that these are valuable, it’s simply that an operating system has no value by itself. It does not allow you to perform your job better, especially since Vista is not exactly close to a user interface revolution. Take off all the eye candy and the end user does not get much more than with XP.
Great! They wrote a 50 million lines of code operating system! What do I get? Are there any advantages? Does it actually do anything more? No. They can spend as many millions as they want, architect their system to hell and fix all those circular dependencies in their system. They can have the best component model and be allowed to modify their universe by changing a pointer. It won’t make their software more useful. In the end, when you install Vista, you can’t do anything unless you install more software on it. In the end, what people want is that other software, not the operating system. What is Microsoft trying to build?
Their next release is a technical advance for them. Security might be a future for them, but for the rest of the world, it’s not a feature, it’s expected.
Think about it for a second. With all those resources deployed on a project, imagine what could have been achieved. They spent billions on a software that has no use by itself. The worst part is that it might still be a commercial success. I doubt they won’t be making any money out of this project, but it certainly won’t make it a success. It might be a success for shareholders and administrator, but for the software engineers behind it, it’s a complete failure since no goal was achieved. After years of development, status quo was reached. Don’t the developpers at Microsoft feel better when they are useful?