[mdlug] Cracks in the Evil Empire

[Michael Rudas]

-- Joseph Vartanian wrote:

> Garry Stahl wrote:

> > Vista-only titles cracked.

> A lot of people have been saying that Vista is just XP with a pretty
> new interface.  I've even seen several IT folks at work saying that.
> This is wrong.  There are many dramatic changes in Vista under the
> hood, but most of them aren't obvious to your typical user.
[...]
> Just to get you to maybe believe what I'm saying, think about
> this...Why would they need 6 years to develop this OS if all they did
> was to add 3D effect to the GUI and some DRM?

Because after nearly four years of development, they scrapped it all
as too tangled to build, let alone maintain-- and started over pretty
much (by all indications) from the Server 2003 codebase.  See
<http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/110354.asp> for
Jim Allchin's "I'd buy a Mac" speech from that time.  As I put it
myself at the time, "Microsoft is jettisoning features like furniture
from a blimp with a slow leak."  This turned out to be pretty much the
case.

Also, a LOT of time and effort went into not only the DRM stuff (and,
yes security improvements-- such as they are), but in tweaking and
back-porting the "Aero" interface so it would run
better-than-half-assed on recent Intel integrated-graphics chipsets;
this was demanded by Intel, as it would have otherwise exposed the
sub-par performance of their graphics hardware pretty starkly (Aero
would have been IMPOSSIBLE to use on default Intel hardware before the
revamp).  I can't even BEGIN to imagine how difficult THAT was.

Last, but certainly not least, is the impact of the "permatemps"
decision.  When the long-term-temporary employees won their lawsuit
for back pay and benefits to the tune of $97 million, Bill Gates
canned them ALL in a fit of pique-- a massive amount of knowledge went
with them; for example, Windows 2000 can no longer be built from the
source code, as knowledge of the compiler tweaks needed to do so left
with the permatemps-- some of them had been there for 12 years, and
regular employees had to pick up the slack (where they could).

-- Mikey