John Bayko
Posts: 13
Nickname: tau
Registered: Mar, 2005
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Re: Where's the Bottleneck?
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Posted: Oct 9, 2007 5:23 PM
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A few reasons.
The strategy ever since Windows was first introduced was to leverage products to support each other, even at a loss. That was initially not a problem because the "eco-system" (or "hairball" as former Sun CEO Scott McNealy called it) consisted of all new features or products designed to integrate, and could be done quickly and without care for design or compatibility. Now, however, those old poorly thought out interfaces have become a liability to further change, requiring backwards compatibility to undocumented interfaces while trying to add new technology and better interfaces, and somehow wiring up all the existing ones to be able to access the new ones.
Sony is kind of in this same boat, delivering some real clunker products in the past decade or so in order to support other company technology, rather than go with the best available technology.
Along similar lines, Microsoft code is generally not cleaned up or replaced, it's just added to, leading to a maintenance nightmare. Newer projects don't have that, so things like .NET development tools are proceeding fairly quickly. In comparison, Vista would have killed a smaller company.
Fighting that, the security initiative requires basically digging through all that legacy code, and every badly designed legacy interface, and making sure every call is safe, as well as auditing all new code to make sure it doesn't make unsafe calls either. I understand there is a "layering initiative" to try to refactor old code, or at least control the chaos of new code, but it's done on an "as needed" basis, so will take a while before it pays off.
Related to the "ecosystem" strategy was the strategy to enter all profitable and popular areas of software. I don't know if the intent was to choke out the competition, but usually Microsoft would do so, either buying an existing product and slashing prices, or introducing competitive software at a similar low price (usually because it wasn't initially good enough to demand higher prices) and relying on that and its reputation to squeeze out competitors, or bundling the software (sometimes initially, sometimes forever). Without competition, there was no pressure to deliver new products.
Without pressure, managers were free to "shoot for the stars" with unrealistic features. Vista is the best example, with the amazing file system, mind-reading management features, and self-programming software dropped like anvils when the decision to do more than play around with fun concepts to see what implementing them was like was made. Some C#.NET features are looking a bit like this. Also, a lot more time can be spent over-designing relatively simple things without a real delivery timetable - Microsoft has made an art form out of delivering late.
Related to that is the "vision thing", in which new ventures are scaled at billions, rather than millions. Smaller ventures are not considered, even if they have potential. The X-Box is a successful example - not yet profitable I think, but getting there - but MSN is a failed example - I think they're on the sixth thing called "MSN". The Zune looks like another example, but I can't tell if it's headed for success or failure yet. But these are all copycat ventures, not new ideas.
Google is almost the opposite - trying everything it can in small amounts at first, to see what they can get to work. They have lots of cash to burn, like Microsoft, but are more likely to hit on the next big thing (search, web mail, maps, and ads have taken off so far).
There's also the developers moving to management positions. Usually they aren't good at it, meaning Microsoft not only gains poor managers, they lose good developers.
And finally, they are the status quo. Changing the environment risks upsetting all the things they're successful at, in the same way that PCs were resisted by the mainframe and minicomputer makers of the past. Microsoft seems to have some good collaboration technology to oppose internet based applications, but it's closed technology, and the people who have the freshest perspectives and newest ideas are outside the company. Only when everyone can play with that sort of technology will the really innovative applications be discovered, so even though I think web-based applications are generally terrible, they're a rapidly advancing terrible, as opposed to stagnating good technology. This fear of losing control is also preventing really new products from coming out of Microsoft.
There are probably other things I haven't thought of here, but I think those are the major points.
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