[svlug] MICROSOFT VS LINUX

[Ze'ev Maor]

On Mon, Nov 02, 1998 at 09:27:40AM -0500, Charles Peterman wrote:
> But Ze'ev's comments, while funny, point back to our blind spot.  Its not
> Microsoft, its the model that M$ follows, that indeed every commercial
> developer has tried to follow.  They don't have the worst developers in
> 9000 parsecs.  What they have is a competitive model which requires, let
> me emphasize that, _requires_ that competition be barred at the lowest
> possible level.  Hence the heinous API's, the UI built into the engine,
> etc.  Belittling M$ engineers at this stage is pointless and utterly fails
> to acknowledge their contribution.   

I bag to difference, while I wish I was mistaken (6 years ago M$ was my only
platform), my assumptions as to the experties level of M$ programmers/software
enginneers aren't my own. Having read Microsofts' Steve Maguire's - Writing
Solid Code - (sounds like a silly name for a book published by Microsoft
isn't it??;-), I realized this is truely the situation within M$. Mr. Maguire
was hired by M$ to shakedown the software development devision, which was
deteriorating at a frightening rate. Whole projects were being canceled due to
unreasonable amounts of bugs (these were only the bugs discovered by M$, before
the product was actually shipped and yet another handful of bugs would
probabely have been discovered by the actual users).

	The thing was, they had this quality assurance department, who's job
was to stress test the software, which is why the programmers figured they
could leave as many bugs as they wanted, counting on the debugging devision to
find them all, when a buggy product was shipped the developers would say: "Why
didn't Testing (quality assurance) find that bug before we shipped?" and
Testing said in turn: "Why did you put that bug in the product in the first
place?". The quotes btw. are from non other then David Moore, Microsoft
Director of Development at the time.

	Consider this is what M$ DO publish, imagine how bad it really is.

	I rest my case.

-- 
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| Ze'ev Maor		    | "We all have a little Daemon inside...      |
| gmaor at tx.technion.ac.il   |  ...Waiting to come out and become a kernel"|
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