The Seattle Times writes:“Imagine this. One of the world’s most powerful monopolies puts 10,000 people to work for five years to create one new product. And nobody is really sure if anyone wants it. How’s that for a gamble?”
And what a great effort it is. Turns out it’s still vulnerable to MyDoom and Netsky. Brilliant work there guys. Probably $10 billlion dollars spent, at least 2 years late and it’s still vulnerable to 2-year-old Windows malware!
“Ballmer says Microsoft tried to innovate too much. So the company reorganized and tried to placate impatient consumers by shipping Service Pack 2 for Windows XP then rebooted the whole Vista effort in mid-2004. It’s hard to imagine exactly how much Microsoft flushed down the toilet.”
Ballmer’s only half right. The whole shebang was developed by marketeers and executives using Flash/Director to emulate what should happen long before an engineer wrote a line of code.
They didn’t try to innovate too much. That’s doing a disservice to their legions of dedicated engineers who were told to create real magic out of smoke and mirrors.
I hope every software company takes note.