Found via Amber Rhea…via Yelladog
I don’t read the Wall Street Journal much, so I’m not surprised that I missed their September 23 article about Microsoft’s self-slaughter of their much-touted and (supposedly) highly anticipated operating system called Longhorn, which looks something like this.
But the news is starting to filter out through other outlets, such as Slashdot, ZDNet, and Smartoffice News, which says this:
Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.
Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program. But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates. Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers – the latter horrified about security problems.
Scrapping Longhorn is all for the best. I mean, really, do we need yet another bloated version of the same ol’ same ol OS from Microsoft? I don’t think so.
I suspect that eventually they’ll produce an operating system that will be worth a damn, and when they do, I’m sure it’ll seem very familiar to me. Then again, maybe not. This is Microsoft after all, and they’re not used to thinking differently.
You never know…but I’m not going to hold my breath.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s been said that if you want to know what Microsoft is going to be doing in 2-3 years, look at what Apple is doing now.
It’s also been proposed that Microsoft change their slogan to, “Microsoft: Bringing You Yesterday, Tomorrow.”
Hahaha! I’ve heard stories (you often do, living up here in MS country) about the way MS employees actually work (or don’t). It seems all the horror stories about working “60-80 hour weeks” is actually because the programmers slack off a good deal of the time, and then have to push their noses to the grindstone at the 11th hour to make the deadlines. No wonder the code is a convoluted mess!