The Vista saga has two interesting lessons for the computer business. It raises, for example, the question of whether this way of producing software products of this complexity has reached its natural limit. Microsoft is an extremely rich, resourceful company - and yet the task of creating and shipping Vista stretched it to breaking point. A lesser company would have buckled under the strain. And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?
The Observer | Business | Why Vista will mean the end of the Microsoft monolith
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” A lesser company would have buckled under the strain” ……
“apparently outperform the smartest software company”
When will the main stream press actually represent the software market in correct terms. Microsoft buckled to produce windows 95, 98, me, 2000, XP….. It has long since lost being the smartest company in the software industry, if it ever had that crown.
All this goes to show is that Microsoft is still a dinosaur, and needs to evolve its operating system division. Not only does the open source linux community prove that other models can produce viable operating systems, but Apple confirms that a corporate entity can also do it.
It just goes to show that good design is more important than any amount of money that can be thrown at a problem. Maybe windows should die, and just become a front-end GUI to a solid unix base….
Comment by Steve 09.11.06 @ 12:55 pm