Posted on 09/22/2005 10:05:39 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
REDMOND, Wash. -- Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows."It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly.
The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software.
Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.
Mr. Gates resisted at first, pushing for Mr. Allchin's group to take more time until everything worked. Over the next few months, Mr. Allchin and his deputies would also face protests from programmers who complained he was trying to impose bureaucracy and rob Microsoft of its creativity.
[snip]
Mr. Gates's WinFS project was so troublesome that engineers began talking about whether they could make the "pig fly." Images of pigs with wings started appearing in presentations and offices.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Google? A competitor to Microsoft? Uh, not by a long shot. If anything, Microsoft has been able to compete with Google on its home turf (Internet search) while I have yet to see Google produce an operating system or business software tools. So far, Google has yet to produce a Second Act, while Microsoft has a long history of producing new products (and a few duds -- anyone remember "Bob"?). Yet Google's market cap is 1/3 of that of Microsoft. Yeah.
The Microsoft solution to a serious competitor is to buy them and ruin them from within.
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