p2p news / p2pnet: There’s an amazing post on the Microsoft blog on why Vista is going to be late.

Keenness on the parts of Bill and the Boyz to make sure only the very, very best reaches users?

Nope.

They found something new they absolutely had to add to make Vista as near perfect as possible?

Nope.

What, then?

"When a vice president in Windows asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit," says philipsu, a former Windows manager of five years standing.

He goes on, "The answer to the question is deeply meaningful to them. It’s certainly true in some sense that they genuinely want to know. But in a very important other sense, in a sense that you’ll come to regret night after night if you get it wrong, there’s really only one answer you can give.

"After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team’s key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don’t-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules. Turns out they’re actually great project managers.

"They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to ‘figure out how to make it work.’

"The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy - and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. ‘You’re smart people. Find a way!’ This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. ‘Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. Vista by August or bust. You got it, boss’."

There’s more. Much more, and you’ll find it all here.

Meanwhile, " This was originally posted a week ago, and yanked of my own volition," says Philip at the beginning of his blog. "What followed was a firestorm of speculation about how The Man beat me down, etc, which is completely untrue. Now I repost this back, only to quell the speculation."

And at the end, "Are Vista-scale software projects essentially uncontrollable by nature? Or has Microsoft been beset by one too many broken windows?"

(Thanks, Dino)

Digg this story.

Also See:
Microsoft blog - Broken Windows Theory, June 14, 2006

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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