The cause of Vista's delays
A guy who previously worked for Microsoft has some input on why it took so long to get anywhere. In short, there were just too many people, but from his blog:
To be honest, I am not very surprised by this. After XP, there wasn't much left to be added in terms of functionality; everything that you could need was already there. I am just waiting for the actual Vista launch day so I can see if my predictions are going to be correct: that Vista will be Microsoft's biggest flop ever.
So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. [...] By the way "feature" is much too strong a word; a better description would be "menu". Really. By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" was a couple hundred lines, tops.Continuing, he says the basic problem was that there were too many workers, and nobody was aware of what was going on anywhere else in the project.
To be honest, I am not very surprised by this. After XP, there wasn't much left to be added in terms of functionality; everything that you could need was already there. I am just waiting for the actual Vista launch day so I can see if my predictions are going to be correct: that Vista will be Microsoft's biggest flop ever.
