None of this changes the fact that since Microsoft Office 2000 (and to a lesser extent, Windows XP), these core packages are essentially “done”.

Since then there have been no major improvements that are either compelling reasons to upgrade or demanded by all customers.

What are the major feature improvements we’ve seen in the past 8 years? XML support? SharePoint support? (Both of these are half-baked in any case!) Don’t even get me started on the ribbon — a classic case of a solution looking for a problem if I’ve ever seen one.

So really, Microsoft should just charge people $50/year for access to “Feature Packs” and build off the same core. If that’s not enough money, Microsoft should be investing in the next big thing rather than just moving the deck chairs around and trying to extract huge amounts of cash from selling the same product over and over.

No matter what development model Microsoft uses, I don’t believe they will ever be able to build a compelling upgrade for either Office or Windows from this point on — well, at least without largely dropping compatibility such as when Apple moved from OS 9 to OS X.

The market for desktop operating systems and office software is now very mature so it’s not sensible to go to the other extreme – just letting the engineers (or, far worse, the managers) have their heads and then not considering whether the product will sell until the end.

Tel_’s comment makes my point. If they’d talked to the customers they’d have soon learnt that what MS had in mind as “Trusted Computing” and what customers had in mind were quite different things. And again, talking to customers would have told MS that IE was a PoS that needed urgent fixing – if they didn’t fix it someone else soon would.

Good points about things being “retroactive” requirements — a market need nobody knew existed until the solution did. It’s given me some ideas for a ditty on requirements engineering.

As a business Microsoft has been struggling for years to grow explosively like it did in the old days. The massive profit margins they sustain mean they can afford to spend years and years hammering away at a market in an attempt to break into it. Consumer electronics is a big market and Microsoft wants the kind of platform-controlling profits it makes on Windows and Office.

It must really piss them off when Apple effortlessly segues from music players to mobile phones, though on the other hand the Xbox is far more successful than the Apple TV.

As a side note, Google has become like Microsoft in this respect. Their central business is advertising; that’s where all their money comes from. Nothing else is really turning a profit worth a damn. So essentially they’re busy squirting money at anything that moves in the hope of breaking open a new growth vector. Hence forays into green-tech venture capitalism, phone platforms, browsers … it goes on and on.

As I noted in the article, engineers had no say in the featurelist of Vista, it was driven completely from the top with no regard for practicality or polish. And even then senior management couldn’t have everything they wanted.

Microsoft dumped heaps of development resource into what was supposed to be their household gaming and set-top box. To some extent it has paid back, in as much as they have opened some decent competition in the console market. On the other hand, so many companies have dreamed of conquest in the set-top box market and it’s a tough one to make profitable with big costs, narrow margins and fickle consumers. Microsoft will never get real dominance in the gaming and console market like they have done with PC desktops, so they will never be able to milk this one hard for revenue.

Meanwhile, fighting on the console front left them short of troops for the business desktop front and largely sacrificing their already weak server position. Plus, DRM and “Trusted Computing” got a harsh reception from the customers (remember customers? the guys who pay the wages) so they had to water down the transfer of “closed platform” technology from the X-Box to Vista (note that Vista was originally designed to be almost a totally locked platform).

Microsoft also expected their dominance in the browser wars to be much more comfortable than it turned out to be. No one expected Firefox to make such an impact (least of all Microsoft) so once more they had to swing resources back to browser development where they had planned for that to be all finished up already.

Just a few reasons why neither the engineers, nor their immediate managers were directly to blame for Vista’s lateness.

In response to derrida, being driven by user requirements in a high innovation field is often a mistake because you miss the things that people didn’t know that they wanted because they had never thought of them. Whoever stated a user requirement to develop Google? After all there were reasonable web search engines already. Altavista for example, started by a few DEC engineers purely as a showcase for the new DEC super-fast Alpha processor chip, aspired to index the entire world wide web – come to think of it, there was no user requirement stated for that either.

In fact no product manager or marketer would have had a bar of either one as they were both designed to be given away

An even simpler example: mobile phone text messaging capability. That was never stated by product managers as a fundamental user requirement, but today there are millions of people round the world who use their phone for little else.

(2) Actually, the “nagging” of Vista when trying to execute stuff, even as Administrators group member, is one reason why I’ll be dual booting my new laptop rather than completely SuSE-ifying it. It’s the first MS OS I’m even moderately happy with.

(3) The new plan, if carried through, is a GOOD thing. Mind you, it can stall inventiveness (just imagine how stuffed things across many operating systems would be if McIlroy hadn’t kept going on about pipes and a simple notation… even ken and dennis were underwhelmed when the idea for inclusion of simple pipes in unix was proposed).

(4) “Dont count this wily giant out yet.” Naaaa… never discount the effectiveness of a monster advertising budget!

Contrast this to the 1980s and 90s, when everything the world knew about Microsoft development practices was in a few books and a handful of articles.

So in a sense they’ve adopted two big things from the opensource world: a transparent developmental process where outsiders can easily see into proceedings, and a continuous integration approach per-feature (though they’ve had the first half of continuous integration for some time — they call it the daily build-and-smoke).

Doesn’t the new structure risk the final product ending up with bullet-proof features which the customer doesn’t want? Having the ship room entirely at the end seems to me to eliminate an important customer feedback loop.