Sunday, March 26, 2006

shame: smarthouse throws an ID-10-T error

I'm guilty (as some of you are, I imagine) of a wee bit of schadenfreude over the recent news from Redmond that the consumer flavor of Vista won't make it into the dirty hands of the unwashed masses until early next year. A few more weeks for QA is understandable, and given the heat that MSFT has taken over security, even forgivable.

PMs like to commiserate over stuff like this, because g-d knows there's enough suffering to go around. Since I'm one of those unfortunates who gets to make ship/don't ship decisions, I understand why products get delayed. In the case of this particular product, a March announcement of what amounts to a three week delay around November wouldn't normally raise any eyebrows.

But when stuff like this gets printed in response, I have to shake my head in disbelief. Not at the ability for sources to lie, but for the lack of understanding some "journalists" have for how big software gets manufactured.

Mr. Richards, if you honestly believe that 60% of the consumer Vista code has to be re-written for an early 2007 launch (not to mention the late 2006 RTM), then you must believe that in lieu of smart people MSFT employs vast hordes of Ring-Tailed Lemurs banging away with their opposable thumb-free paws at keyboards, and that after discarding the inevitable texts of Hamlet, they take whatever code the lemurs write and ship it.

Come on. You know full well that you don't re-write 60% of an operating system in under a year. You don't pull in developers from hither and yon, hand them shovels, and let them start digging you out.

If you've got an axe to grind with MSFT, try again, and try harder.

(In case you were curious, it is well-documented that Ring-Tailed Lemurs code in C#; Chimpanzees are old-school Cobol fans, and Gorillas are too proud to code in anything other than LISP.)

No comments: