Microsoft is dead: 1 year + 8 people to develop Vista shutdown (and it still sucks)

[tw]

Originally Posted by mbpark

You're right. They've lost the way of innovating to make customers happy. They're looking at ways of removing your ability to do things and calling it innovation. Vista is just a first stage, and so is the Xbox 360 (and the Zune).

Somewhere in the middle of Vista development, Microsoft had a 'change of heart'. They began listening to the big security companies. That meeting is said to have gone on all night and into the morning. Microsoft made some fundamental changes in the middle of Vista development that granted security software deeper access into the kernel.

Don't know if that meeting was the result of new OS Development Group management or just coincided with that change. But Vista is MS finally addressing their security problems rather than patching and kludging solutions.

In that same light, could Vista appear on an iPhone clone? Not really. I believe OS Group management had so little grasp that size restrictions make it unable to accomplish what Apple can do with OSX.

Long ago, I believed breaking Microsoft into application software and OS companies would have been a good thing. I believe by not doing so, then bad management was able to survive in the OS Development Group. This original blog would simply be a symptom of that MS management problem.

It took a Vista fiasco to recognize the symptoms. But I do suspect the real problem lies with Steve Ballmer. He may be a ruthless deal maker, but he is not and will not attract people necessary to make innovation thrive.

It is rather interesting how Xbox 360 got developed completely independent of MS legacy products - complete with their own chip designs. I wonder how that happened - how Xbox got so much independence.