5 ms·

Probably what happens when no one's in charge and the legal, backwards compatibility, etc. teams have veto power over the UX people. See also: (re: windows vis

Probably what happens when no one's in charge and the legal, backwards compatibility, etc. teams have veto power over the UX people. See also: (re: windows vista shutdown UI) http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

iigs 17y ago
It's nice to see a concrete example of the "design-by-committee" that MS is accused of with windows. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. This is terrifying. It sounds like the Windows development process is about to collapse under its own complexity.
- dandelany 17y ago
  While I agree with you, I'd be interested to know if there are any 'intelligent' solutions to this problem. You can't possibly just have thousands of devs checking into one central SVN repo, can you? Any idea how Apple does it?
  - dcurtis 17y ago
    Apple has less than 1% the number of developers working on OS X than Microsoft has working on Windows. Im sure the problems are a lot easier to deal with.
    - dandelany 17y ago
      Interesting. Do you have a source for those numbers? I can't seem to find data about this anywhere.
    - pedalpete 17y ago
      That is very interesting. I am sure both companies break their teams into smaller units of 5-20 people. But the structure of that environment might be quite telling. What are the cross-sections that the dev teams work under? Who reports to what sections, what does this group feel their job is vs. that group? etc. etc.
  - iigs 17y ago
    Sorry for not following up sooner. Honestly I wonder if distributed version control systems, as currently being heralded by the open source community, might not be the answer. If you remove (or augment) the hierarchy with lateral connections perhaps you can solve some of these problems. Of course DVCS for something as highly targeted and heavily secured as the NT code tree would open a firestorm of other potential attack vectors, but it's worth it for MS to explore those problems. Regardless of the technical solution, this may represent the biggest challenge that MS to date has ever had to solve -- figuring out how to scale their agility has been the key to success so far and there are obvious signs that this might be a local maximum. For the good of large scale tech I hope they can crack it.

iigs 17y ago

It's nice to see a concrete example of the "design-by-committee" that MS is accused of with windows. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. This is terrifying. It sounds like the Windows development process is about to collapse under its own complexity.

dandelany 17y ago
While I agree with you, I'd be interested to know if there are any 'intelligent' solutions to this problem. You can't possibly just have thousands of devs checking into one central SVN repo, can you? Any idea how Apple does it?
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Apple has less than 1% the number of developers working on OS X than Microsoft has working on Windows. Im sure the problems are a lot easier to deal with.
  - dandelany 17y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a source for those numbers? I can't seem to find data about this anywhere.
  - pedalpete 17y ago
    That is very interesting. I am sure both companies break their teams into smaller units of 5-20 people. But the structure of that environment might be quite telling. What are the cross-sections that the dev teams work under? Who reports to what sections, what does this group feel their job is vs. that group? etc. etc.
- iigs 17y ago
  Sorry for not following up sooner. Honestly I wonder if distributed version control systems, as currently being heralded by the open source community, might not be the answer. If you remove (or augment) the hierarchy with lateral connections perhaps you can solve some of these problems. Of course DVCS for something as highly targeted and heavily secured as the NT code tree would open a firestorm of other potential attack vectors, but it's worth it for MS to explore those problems. Regardless of the technical solution, this may represent the biggest challenge that MS to date has ever had to solve -- figuring out how to scale their agility has been the key to success so far and there are obvious signs that this might be a local maximum. For the good of large scale tech I hope they can crack it.