[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[Nix]

On 7 Feb 2007, Christopher Hunter spake thusly:

> On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 00:14 +0000, Nix wrote:
>
>> On 5 Feb 2007, Pete Ryland verbalised:
>>  I think it's a conspiracy.
>
>> Never assume conspiracy when you can assume incompetence. 
>
> The truly competent programmers left Microsoft about six years ago.
> That's when "marketing" took over the whole show.  

I guess they took on a lot of incompetents when they started expanding
really fast (the downsides of the one-big-campus approach: how many good
people are willing to work in Washington, or *any* one place?) and then
when their stock stopped rising and they became unable to use that as a
carrot, they started haemorrhaging good people.

>                                                         Their CVS is a
> joke (my brother worked there and will happily vouch for this)

>From what I've read it's much worse than that: the mega-cascading hack
so that you can commit something and only find out it conflicted *weeks*
later.

>                                                                and there
> is a huge amount of wasted duplication of work.  

See above :/

> There is nobody there prepared to "roll up their sleeves" and get on
> with getting the ancient rubbish replaced, or there is nobody left there
> with the ability to get these essential things done.

Or there's too much bureaucracy to fight through to do it. Big company
sclerosis took a while to eat MS but it looks like it's well and truly
done it now.

> Believe me - contrary to the marketing nonsense, Vista was thrown
> together in under a year.

What were they doing for the rest of the time, then? I'd think it more
likely that they were working full-time, just *exceedingly*
inefficiently.

>                            There is still buried BSD code in there, and

Well, duh. The stuff gets everywhere, and why remove it if it still
works?

> it's no longer an operating system, it's more a badly-written computer
> game!  

Computer games are known for their bit-banging lowleveldom. MS's
problem, as I understand it, is the opposite: way too many mostly-
unnecessary layers of abstraction.

-- 
`In the future, company names will be a 32-character hex string.'
  --- Bruce Schneier on the shortage of company names
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