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> "We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation," he said. > What we take him to mean by this that instead o
by j_baker 16y ago
> "We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation," he said.
> What we take him to mean by this that instead of innovating Microsoft sought to make itself into the guardian of digital media - a sort of Internet copyright cop - by stitching up a DRM-infested monster.
That's a non-sequitur, and borderlines on putting words into Ballmer's mouth. I don't see any way to construe Balmer's quote as being about DRM.
- hga 16y agoYeah, that's really bad, any Microsoft watcher worth his salt should know that the "too big a task" they tried was a Windows rewrite on top of .NET. Perhaps a good idea in principle but .NET was too young at the time; in general their inital goals were was too much as well as too soon. That cost them a couple or so years and then put them under immense time pressure.
- j_baker 16y agoI don't think this is it. This was a research project that was undertaken with the express knowledge that it probably wouldn't be immediately useful. It was an attempt to see what components of an OS might be able to be moved to .Net. I'm thinking more along the lines of the "filesystem is a database" idea they had.
- hga 16y agoWell ... what was it that they did totally scrap two years into the project, restarting with a Windows Server code base? WinFS was part of the the general Longhorn set of projects, but I didn't get the impression it was inextricably linked to the Longhorn next version of Windows project.