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If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead? To me, this particular example does not argue f
by canterburry 16y ago
If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead? To me, this particular example does not argue for building it yourself, it just demonstrates re-use should have gone the other direction.
I do agree with the basic premise that if an available solution does not meet expectations, the benefit of re-use does not always outweigh the inadequacies, thus supporting the business case of building it yourself.
HOWEVER...
...there are far too many organizations who think their needs are unique and different when they really aren't. I think that is a more common reason why companies re-invent the wheel and then post-factum realize their needs really weren't so special after all and could have bought off-the-shelf instead.
What cracks me up even more is, when a company realizes that an in house built system could be replaced with an off-the-shelf packet, then they have to weight their in-house maintenance costs against going out and buying an existing package. This quite frequently comes out cheaper over time, so right after they build their shiny new enterprise app, it's discontinued and replaced by a bought system.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y ago"If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead?" Because Microsoft has cultivated a combative internal environment in which different projects fight for resources and maintaining a library for other silos to use would only serve as a liability. Source control (which, big surprise, MS handles via many in-house tools) would also become even more of a nightmare than it is already.
- bad_user 16y ago> Source control (which, big surprise, MS handles via many in-house tools) Why is it a surprise? They sell developer tools. They sell infrastructure. Actually it was kind of shitty on their part for not using Visual SourceSafe.
- snprbob86 16y agoRight on: Visual SourceSafe SUCKED. Microsoft used/uses a heavily customized internal version of Perforce called Source Depot. The entire company is being transitioned to the actual product Team Foundation Server, but the transition is very slow, and very painful.
- faragon 16y agoIn my opinion, they deserve that pain: TFS SCM is a big shit (Visual Studio is OK though, when using it with Git/HG/SVN). http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
- snprbob86 16y agoOh, I agree completely. TFS sucks. I personally use Git.
- meatmanek 16y agoReally? Svn? Subversion doesn't belong anywhere near Git or Mercurial, as far as classification of SCM software goes. It's much more conceptually related to CVS or Perforce.
- dfox 16y agoTFS SCM is Subversion.
- faragon 16y agoUnfortunately, it is not. TFS has source control built-in, which is slow and buggy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server
- nostrademons 16y ago"If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead?" It's quite possible they were specifically optimized for Excel. Particularly with compilers and widget libraries, you can get much better performance and ease-of-use if you know the precise usage patterns.