Posted on 03/26/2006 4:49:30 AM PST by twntaipan
TechWeb.com (03/24/2006 3:04 PM EST)
Microsoft employees writing to an anonymous blog are calling for the heads of high-level company executives -- including Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin -- after the double delay debacle this week when the Redmond, Wash. developer shoved its two most profitable products into 2007.
On the Mini-Microsoft blog, which is maintained by someone who identifies himself as a Microsoft employee and goes by the nickname "Who da'Punk," an entry tagged "Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!" has accumulated over 325 comments from in- and outsiders.
The blog was a response to the Tuesday announcement that Windows Vista would not ship in new PCs until January 2007. Thursday, Microsoft added Office 2007 to the delay train.
"Who da'Punk" got things rolling Tuesday with this entry:
"After Allchin's email went out I imagined all the L68+ partners from the Windows division gathered together and told, 'You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We've had enough of failure and we've had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight.'"
Others commenting on the blog quickly took up the cry.
"[steve] ballmer: fired!
[jim] allchin: fired!
[brian] valentine: fired!
we cannot ship our OS. this is not a joke. if we don't take some radical decisions, the company is over."
And:
"Ballmer has presided over the fall of Microsoft. [His] days are numbered."
And:
"Accountability should start at the top. My commitment was to deliver on my component. Allchin's commitment was to release Windows . . . . and he failed to deliver."
But while the Thursday reorganization of Microsoft's Platform & Services Division shuffled several executives -- notably Steve Sinofsky from a position in the Office arm to head the Windows and Windows Live group -- no one was handed their hat.
Or were they?
Jim Allchin, who broke the bad news Tuesday and was set to retire after Vista was delivered, seems to have been put out to pasture months earlier than expected, said a source close to Microsoft. "Read what Johnson said very carefully, " he said.
In a leaked memo sent to some Microsoft employees Thursday, Kevin Johnson, the co-president (with Allchin) of the Platforms & Services Division, wrote "As part of the next step of Jim's transition, we discussed when it was appropriate to move his direct reports to me, and decided that this organization change was the right time."
But even as some on the Mini-Microsoft blog wished for Maria Antoinette-style retribution, other employees defended the decision, if not the people who made it.
"Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's embarrassing," wrote Robert Scoble, a company technical evangelist, on his Scobelizer blog. "But I'd rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product."
"I certainly agree that lots of mistakes were made all the way up and down the chain," wrote another anonymous Microsoft worker. "But this is the right thing to do. In the longer view, 2, 3, 5 years from now...this will have been the right call.
"Put it to you this way. At the end of this year, do you want Vista? Or do you want XP SP2 ME? 'Cause it's god****** impossible to deliver Vista by August...but we sure as heck can give ya XP SP2 ME any time."
The internal reaction may grow even hotter if, as some analysts have predicted, Microsoft delays Vista and Office more than once.
"Microsoft's given itself some leeway," said Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch, on Friday. "As far as selling season, January might as well be July."
Thursday, Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, also bet that Vista will be delayed again, and that the second (or third) time, the pain would minimal. "The next delays won't hurt as much," said Cherry.
But by the venom let loose on Mini-Microsoft, that's not a done deal.
WindowsNT had a new kernel, but was still a legacy OS. I think the idea of a clean break is a completely clean break, like the move from OS9 to OSX: top to bottom, the guts are different.
Of course, what I'm really saying is that Windows needs a unix core...like that would ever happen.
One the main selling points of Windows OSs has been it's legacy compatiblity of older software hardware.
Of course, that does not mean an OS cannot be built from a new kernel from the ground up and provide an software emulator for older software and games.
What, and fundamentally change Microsoft's entrie business model?
(Sorry, couldn't resist the cheap shot...)
I don't want to sound like I don't think Vista is in trouble. But that "rewrite 60%" story can't be right. That would take years. I think perhaps what they meant was that 60% of the .dlls needed rewrites somewhere within them.
If Vista needs a 60% rewrite, Microsoft is profoundly in trouble.
Vista is going to be a "Friday" car.
Heh!
The fresh rumors are that the problems with Vista are in the multimedia end; and/or that the entire thing is a disaster barely cobbled together into a functioning beta.
The latest build has no digital audio.
Also of note, last night's twitcast had Leo Laporte reporting that Allchin had planned to retire at the end of 2006, after the release of Vista; but with Vista's release being pushed into 2007 sometime, Allchin is going to retire at the end of 2006 anyway.
Contrary to popular opinion, Gates hates shipping late. There comes a time when you gotta stop fixing bugs and just ship the product.
Which means that Vista probably still has some serious issues.
I read that whole thing a couple nights ago. Absolutely amazing stuff.
Does that mean the users can expect the first service pak to be a "Monday" car?
LOL
Today's NYT (I hope this excerpt isn't too big):
Remember that Steven P. Jobs came back to Apple because the company's effort to develop an ambitious new operating system, codenamed Copland, had failed. Mr. Jobs convinced Apple to buy his company Next Inc. for $400 million in December 1996 for its operating system.
It took Mr. Jobs and his team years to retool and tailor the Next operating system into what became Macintosh OS X. When it arrived in 2001, the new system essentially walked away from Apple's previous operating system, OS 9. Software applications written for OS 9 would run on an OS X machine, but only by firing up the old operating system separately.
The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows.
"Microsoft feels it can't get away with breaking compatibility," said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. "All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that's a very painful thing."
It is also costly in terms of time, money and manpower. Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.
And Apple had the advantage of building on software from university laboratories, an experimental version of the Unix operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University and a free variant of Unix from the University of California, Berkeley. That helps explain why a small team at Apple has been able to build an operating system rich in features with nearly as many lines of code as Microsoft's Windows.
I think the words "software bloat" is not a strong enough a term for this.
Aw heck, that's a different article I think. A good one, though, from yesterday.
Your article is almost two years old.
Oh, yeah. I'm sure that 2 years have resulted in Linux getting less bloated. LMFAO! /SARCASM
Two years ago, they were using a much slower kernel, for one thing. Also, the hardware sufficient to run smaller OSes like linux distros is far more affordable now than then.
If you want to really have a good LMFAO!, just try comparing the bloat of Fedora to 50 MILLION LINES OF CODE.
Running Fedora is going to require at least 256MB. Running Vista is going to require at least 256MB of VIDEO RAM.
Go sell crazy somewhere else, nobody here is buying.
I gotta go with you on this the Indian provided code I have seen is fine sophomore level work but thats about it..
Oh, did I say Vista?
I'm sorry, I meant Windows XPsp4, also known as Windows 6.0 (or would that be Windows 5.3?).
I hate 'Operating Systems'!
Does that make me a bad person?
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