Microsoft is dead: 1 year + 8 people to develop Vista shutdown (and it still sucks)

[Undertoad]

This blog entry from an ex-Windows developer describes how it took an entire year to develop the shutdown feature for Windows Vista.

I repeat, let it sink in... a YEAR to develop SHUTDOWN. SHUTDOWN. Where you tell your system to stop doing things. You might consider that in the old days, it was an "off" button and took seconds to operate...

You might also consider that orderly shutdown was, at one time, supposed to be the reason why Unix/Linux was incompatible with everyday computer users.

(This Joel on Software entry describes how and why Vista shutdown sucks, and how it really should operate.)

The tale might be tedious for people who haven't been developers, but most people will recognize the basic situation. The people who want and need to do real work are utterly preventing from doing so by A) layers of bureaucracy, and B) a technological tangle of code and developers, where things have become too complicated to manage successfully.

First he addresses the layers of bureaucracy:

So that nets us an estimate -- to pull a number out of the air -- of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 19 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team -- after a year -- there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

Then, the software development tangle, which results in a delay of months upon months to integrate new code:

...there are far too many developers to access one central repository. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.

So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.

Any developer who reads this knows... the end is nigh. The Windows practice of throwing every last little thing into the OS (to maintain its dominance) has now led to its practical demise.

They're gonna have to start over again. Future versions of Windows for desktop computers will have to be revolutionary to compete, and will be incompatible with past Windows in the same way that Win 95 was incompatible with Win NT -- there will have to be a wholesale rewrite and and entirely new approach. If they're smart, the new approach will be modular and standards-based. If not, buy Apple stock and switch yourself to the free alternative.