Or so it would have us believe
AN ARTICLE in the 23rd of September edition of the Wall Street Journal gives a step by step account of what went wrong at Microsoft and purportedly why its CEO Steve Ballmer fashioned a major re-organisation at the firm into three divisions.
It claimed that in July last year, Jim Allchin told chief architect and chairman Bill Gates that Longhorn was so complicated that developers wouldn't be able to make it work properly and suggests that he always thought that. Allchin is only 53 and is retiring at the end of next year and it's hard to read the Wall Street Journal piece without thinking that the British newspaper formula "friends of Jim Allchin said", meaning Allchin himself, had a hand in the ideas included in the piece.
According to the article, Allchin has always been a proponent of the writing of disciplined code and disdained "the fast and loose culture" of PC software. It claims that Microsoft made a documentary about the introduction of Windows XP for its launch in 2001 which Allchin ordered to be burned.
That didn't stop the now Steve Ballmer, a salesman born and bred, declaring to an army of British hacks that "Windows XP was a better OS than any that had gone before" and that it was "inherently more secure than previous operating systems Windows had developed", as we reported in the INQ on the 26th of October 2001.
We had our doubts - confirmed when for a while it seemed as if the inherent insecurity of Windows operating systems could cause a crisis in government, commerce and trading by allowing worms of various types to easily topple corporate networks.
Corporate IT managers who voted with their feet by hanging on to relatively stable Windows 2000 deployments must have breathed a sigh of relief after the litany of security problems with XP caused Microsoft to do serious fire fighting last year. Closing the stable door after the horse has bolted? Maybe.
And so to Longhorn, or Vista as we now have to call it. "Friends of Allchin" appear to have told the Journal that 4,000 software engineers working on Longhorn found it an incredibly difficult task to bolt together disparate pieces of code to make a future OS that "would fly". Indeed, according to this piece, Microsoft software developers started to include pictures of pigs flying as a metaphor for Longhorn.
Allchin apparently summoned Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivasta to put together a map of how these disparate parts of various versions of Windows and no doubt various incarnations of DOS worked together. That map was 11 feet wide and eight feet tall, according to the Journal, and looked like Sim City with lines going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
So that made Allchin suggest that everything be thrown out and Microsoft start again on a new code base, even though Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were dead against it, in August last year.
After all, Gates had told an audience of high fliers at the Etre conference in Berlin the October before that Microsoft Longhorn would cost as much as it did for the US to put a man on the moon.
Strivasta approached Dave "DEC" Cutler late last year asking him to support the move towards sound code writing and Cutler told 1,000 engineers that he backed Allchin's plans.
Longhorn, according to the Journal, is now on track to release a revisited body of Vista code assembled more or less from scratch. One wonders why it didn't think of such an approach years ago. Bill Gates told the newspaper he wondered why it hadn't taken the approach before.
One also wonders whether the delay in implementing sensible ideas in code writing is because senior executives at Microsoft get too involved in micro-managing projects, and rather than having "vision" and foreseeing future obstacles and problems, just react and close doors after the horses have bolted.
Microsoft's track record on this front speaks for itself, whether you cite Netscape, the rise and rise of Google, and the firm's blind insistence on fighting an antitrust action rather than doing what Intel did in the late 1990s, and anticipating it instead. Flying pigs aside, Microsoft might wish to recall that Pegasus sprang forth from the bleeding body of Medusa, when her head was cut off by superhero Perseus.
The INQuirer
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