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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?" Because Microsoft has cultivated a combative

"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 ago
  Right 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 ago
    In 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 ago
      Oh, I agree completely. TFS sucks. I personally use Git.
    - meatmanek 16y ago
      Really? 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 ago
      TFS SCM is Subversion.
      - faragon 16y ago
        Unfortunately, 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