Can this week ever end?

Ditto. This week has been a week of sun spots, attitudes, drama, poor health… It is Saturday, isn’t it? Hopefully that puts an end to this week in only a few hours.

Oh, wait, you were talking about Windows and Vista. My bad… I guess it’s the stiff drink part that caught my attention.

Best, ~Toby Getsch

http://www.tweblog.com

So, end the confusion by either getting Brian Valentine or the Vista Release Manager on video to ask them the pointed questions. You can call all the “friends” you want, but until we hear it from them, and not filtered through you, this stuff will continue.

Dmad: it’s on the Xbox team blog. I quoted the vice president of Waggener Edstrom. That’s good enough for now. Your protestations don’t mean a thing. You aren’t even willing to tell us who you are. So why, again, should I listen to someone who is probably working for a competitor?

The 60% thing is just patently ridiculous.

“Even the evidence denies this story. At Mix06 last week we had Media Center PCs for people to use, running, gasp, Windows Vista. An entire keynote (damn cool demos too) ran on Windows Vista and it didn’t crash the entire time. That doesn’t sound like something that needs a 60% rewrite. Or something that isn’t on schedule to ship.”

That’s all fine and good, but it still doesn’t change the fact that Vista is getting delayed for the millionth time and, while demo machines are cool and all, no one really cares until they have the product in front of them.

Scoble, I liked your blog for long time. Your blog was very objective (together with your Channel 9 videos) for someone working for Microsoft.

You do ask provocative questions from time to time, but smart people could sense self-censorship was always present. Anyway… all that was better than reading PRs or marketing collateral….

But your reaction to story about Vista code rewriting, which for sure is not true, shows where your heart is really about.. And what kind truth you are defending. Your company lied about much bigger stuff, much bigger. For years…from top management to the whole world. Shame on you. You deserve this..

I know MS is happy to have Vista finally working without crashing when running something simple for couple of hours. Wow…this is 2006, Microsoft is biggest SW maker in world, Vista is more than 5 years in development and whole world should be happy because you guys finally did beta which does not crash? Get real…

You are not on the mission to go to the Moon for the first time, so whole country (or world) is living your mission accomplishments, and every milestone is big event for all of us…
We have alternative already on the market, it does not do not crash, and have everything Vista will have (maybe), once it is released…

Get your stuff together…finish that product on date as you have promised, and we will then judge what MS can produce in 5+ years. Did you rewrite 60% of code in 9 months or in two weeks, or you did not rewrite anything – who cares. Get us working product ASAP.

So please…try to stay “objective” as you did before, and your blog and Channel 9 will be on my day-to-day reading list…

Sincerely,
Mike

btw. I read on IE blog about some disturbing features of brand new IE. For example someone asked “will IE have feature “Open links in Tabs”, IE dev team answered something like this “No, but this is cool feature, we like your feedback”. Com’n guys, this can be added in 1 day. Didn’t you see this features in Firefox a year ago? Or in Safari? Do you have single developer who can do something without asking Bill first? I hope Bill will schedule this feature for IE 8

That kind of attitude toward users shows perfectly clear that you still think users are stupid and will believe yours feature set is the best they can get?
We have internet Scoble, we can see what other guys are offering to us for free, too.

I don’t care how often Vista is delayed or how much (or how little) code is rewritten, if any. Take all the time you want. Just deliver a solid product when you do launch. XP Pro works for me now for the most part. It has it’s quirks but nothing that makes me want to switch to anything else.

Get it right out of the gate is more important to me than launching early with major issues and having to wait until SP1 is released months later.

“… there is no way that 60% of Windows Vista is going to be rewritten between now and November. That’s just ridiculous on its face.”

Well, I don’t know…. Maybe he means it will be changed to “Windows Pasta”… no, that’s only a 40% rewrite, I guess you’re right….

Robert…you really need to correct your misstatement about what Scott Byer said before you get all angry about other people’s misstatements. Cast out the beam in thine own eye, etc.

You really count surviving one demo without crashing a proof that a rewrite is not needed? Way to go for high standards!
There is only one way to quench all these criticisms… Ship a good product on time. I’ve stop thinking Microsoft can do that. Sold all my stock. It is time to stop talking about the future and deliver…

But Scoble – no-one believes Microsoft anymore.

Are you surprised ?

—* Bill

This 60% stuff seems ridiculous, but Microsoft has really brought this on itself. There is still no official RTM date and it’s not clear from the original press release how strongly Microsoft is committed to the January launch. Could we see another delay announced in a couple months because of “quality” and “security” concerns? If Microsoft officially (not through blogs!) made very clear, unambiguous statements about when their most important product would launch, none of this would be an issue.

Given the importance of Vista to Microsoft’s future, it’s time for Ballmer to step up, reassure everyone, and make crystal clear what is really going on. If he does, this Smarthouse kind of nonsense goes away, poof. If he doesn’t, the company deserves all the flak it gets for breaking it’s commitment to a 2006 launch and then creating this information vacuum. This is a job for Steve Ballmer, not Robert Scoble. This is the kind of situation where senior leadership shows if it is adding value or not. Sadly, so far, it’s not.

Robert,

This is complete nonsense on the 60% thing. I have worked on ALL releases of Windows shipped by Microsoft. I don’t work there any more, and therefore have no one should worry about me speaking “marketing-speak like you”. Shoot, Microsoft officially, and publicly hates my employeer (and I am assuming me).

There is not an ounce of truth to the 60% number.

Sure, over the course of development, 60% of the files may have been touched, a large number of functions may have had slight changes or new system wide defense mechnisms included, but give me a break. Rewrite means throw it out and write it again. My guess is that 60% of the code in Windows was written long ago and no one wants to touch it because of the tar-baby effect (If you touch it last, you now own it and all its bugs).

Windows is filled with code like:

for(i=0; i

Robert, Switch to blogger. Your blogger software ate half my comments. Up to you to repair it now, assuming you got the second half of my post. Blogger at least has preview. I used < in my comment but didn’t entity encode…

This is a job for Steve Ballmer, not Robert Scoble. This is the kind of situation where senior leadership shows if it is adding value or not. Sadly, so far, it’s not.

Agree 100%. A few weeks ago, we had Gates/Ballmer in our face just about daily telling the world how everything was on track. Now that the train has come off the rails, they trot out Allchin to do a Baghdad Bob-esque fantasy show of bravado in the face of total failure and both Gates/Ballmer are suddenly MIA. Kudos again to Robert for dealing with this but it’s ridiculous that it’s falling largely on him to do so. Steve/Bill, if you can’t lead then resign. Frankly, neither one of you has distinguished yourselves this entire decade.

What I find amazing is all the developer bloggers out there that picked up this story and ran with it… I mean come on guys 60% of an OS to be re-written in 11 months umm, yeah that sounds likely, not!

Shame on anyone who ran this as a headline or continued it’s propogation; you should all know better and if you don’t well I think maybe you should re-examine your career choices.

Scoble, I’m not suggesting to get Valentine on camera to address the 60% story from some unqualified hack on a irrelvant web site. In fact, I’m baffled you even continue to acknowledge it, or did so in the first place. But the bigger issue that needs to be addressed is the continued Vista delay. For that reason it would be good to hear from someone that is accountable for its shipping, not the head of MS’s PR agency. Do you REALLY believe that is a credible source for this community? A PR statement may be good enough for you, but I think a larger majority would prefer to hear from someone on the front line.

it’s on the Xbox team blog. I quoted the vice president of Waggener Edstrom. That’s good enough for now. Your protestations don’t mean a thing. You aren’t even willing to tell us who you are. So why, again, should I listen to someone who is probably working for a competitor?

Cluetrain manifesto #53: There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

I’ll trust the conversation in the market over self-interested posturing from your workplace colleagues.

Interesting comment from ex-Microsoft employee:

http://davidbau.com/archives/2006/03/25/vista_and_the_altair.html

Here’s another theory. Maybe 40% of Vista components are closed for submissions, and 60% are still open for fixes. When I was working on OS X we had that kind of progressive lockdown of OS components.
OTOH, we did ship a version about once a year, which made it easier for teams to accept a lockdown, and not try to squeeze in ‘one more feature’ in the guise of a bugfix.

Anon: that’s bullshit. Here’s what Dave Winer says: “Anyone who believes that it’s conceivable is someone who hasn’t got the most basic clue about how software development works.”

And Mark Lucovsky is above. They are both real software engineers who’ve earned their stripes in this industry (and who, like Mark says above, have no love lost for Microsoft). They both say that the 60% thing is bull.

You, sir (if you are a sir) are a troll and an anonymous one at that. You don’t control the industry conversation. I’ll go with Dave and Mark until you identify yourself.

Kevin: we’re in feature complete. So, if an engineer sneaks a feature in at this point he/she better have executive level signoff and a darn good reason.

Naturally, no one with a brain thought that the 60% rewrite thing was true. However, everyone with a heart *wanted* it to be true. They wanted it to be true because Microsoft is a lumbering colossus which is a convicted monopolist on two continents. It’s a company which sees other, successful companies, and says, “Where can I imitate them today?”.

Check out the latest quote from Steve Ballmer:

“Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our in­tel­lec­tu­al property. I’m not going to comment. But to the degree that that’s the case, of course we owe it to our share­hold­ers to have a strategy. And when there is something interesting to say, you’ll be the first to hear it.”

If reading that makes you think that Microsoft is a company who thinks that suing people for using its primary competitor is a good idea, then you’ll understand why people are willing to, no, *want* to believe that Microsoft has to rewrite 60% of its source code.

Everybody want to see the school bully fall flat on his face.