Slip! or No Slip!
March 25, 2006
After a week on the phone talking about the Microsoft’s announcement on Tuesday to delay the release of Windows Vista the Brothers can only image that Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Co-President, Platforms Products and Services Division must have had quite a nightmare Monday night.
The Brothers imagine that for months now Allchin has been dreaming that he was a contestant on NBC’s new game show ‘Deal or No Deal’ but instead of Howie Mandel as the master of ceremonies there was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO.
Instead of twenty-six models dressed in evening wear each with a shiny steel briefcase there were all of the Vista Group Program Managers.
Instead of card with an amount between one dollar and a million dollars each of the briefcases contained a card that read either: ‘Slip!’ or ‘No Slip!’
As he played the game in his dream Allchin called out the number of each case that he wanted opened, and each Group Program Manager would open their case to reveal that each card read: ‘No Slip!’. No matter how many cases he opened there was never a ‘Slip!’ card.
Then came Monday night and the dream became a nightmare. Suddenly every case contained the card labeled ‘Slip!’ and each Group Program Manager looked stunned, as if someone had snuck in and changed the cards without their knowledge.
Waking up in a cold sweat, Allchin must have decided that he had to admit something the Brothers had long suspected: Windows Vista development and testing was not as far along as Microsoft would have had us all believe.
Oh the Brothers had heard all the promises: that there was a new development process, that the new Customer Technology Previews (CTP) would allow faster and better feedback, and even that Chris Jones, Corporate Vice President, Windows Core Operating System Program Management would forgo his bonus if Windows did not release to manufacturing by August—a promise that was so wrong on so many levels but particularly because his bonus is likely to be larger than the annual pay of most of the Windows team.
Seriously, the Brothers wonder how could so many people at Microsoft be so delusional about the state of the Windows Vista code. Ever since Microsoft announced it was cutting the Windows File System (WinFS)—the only key feature of Vista that most users understood and truly wanted—and promised that they would release Vista in 2006, the Brothers have said that something just didn’t smell right.
The Brothers did the math on a back of an envelope and taking into account the level of change Microsoft was proposing, the amount of work to be done just didn’t fit in the time available. Based on the Brothers historical estimates Microsoft had never delivered a major upgrade to Windows in less than 40 months. And any new process improvements are offset by increasing complexity caused by integrated innovation and unending feature creep—the addition of more and more cool features and unwarranted change for the sake of change.
The Brothers began to think that maybe Microsoft would ship the consumer (Home) edition in 2006, declare that they fulfilled their promise to ship in 2006 and then ship the (Professional) version later. Looks like the Brothers got it half right: Microsoft is going to release to manufacturing in 2006, and business customers who have Enterprise or other agreements that use volume media can get access to the code this year, while everyone else has to wait.
So the Brothers spent most of this week thinking and talking about software development and slips. To start, the Brothers don’t think this is the last slip. Based on their experience with the Feb. 2006 Windows Vista CTP (or as it is sometimes called ‘the Enterprise CTP’) that the Brothers are using the Windows team still has a lot of work ahead of it before this product will be stable and ready for release. And now that Microsoft has missed the timeline for the fourth quarter of 2006, does it really matter when in the first half of 2007 they get it into the hands of most customers? The Brother’s rule of thumb also says that if they can’t release to manufacturing by Thanksgiving, they won’t release until next year—no real work gets done between Thanksgiving and New Year.
The Brothers also think you have to discount Microsoft’s spin that they made this decision to help partners. Admittedly this is a new take on the ‘Customers told us…’ mantra they love to spout, but if Microsoft really cared for partners then they would have information available today to help customers know what computer hardware they need to buy so that they can exploit Vista when it finally ships. Or as Ina Fried of CNET News.Com suggested during Allchin’s conference call to announce the delay, offer purchasers some form of upgrade to Vista when it is released. Seems like the kind of thing that even if Allchin hadn’t thought this obviously good idea prior to the call he could have, as co-president, decided to offer a free or discounted upgrade on the spot.
But as of today, if you have to replace your Windows-based computer that failed you have no reasonable way to determine whether the replacement you purchase will have all the hardware, such as a powerful enough graphics sub-system for Aero, which provides visual effects such as glass-like interface elements that you can see through and BitLocker Drive Encryption, which uses the Trusted Platform Module to protect user data and to ensure that a computer running Windows Vista is not tampered with when offline, lost, or stolen.
And frankly, isn’t the fact that Microsoft cannot provide the hardware specification yet another data point that proves Microsoft doesn’t have a handle on Vista? So not only can’t Microsoft’s partners sell you Vista this year, they can’t even sell you a Vista ready machine. Please don’t point the Brothers to the Windows Vista Logo program, the Brothers maintain that you shouldn’t have to be an EE to buy a computer.
Lot’s of people asked the Brothers which feature they think caused the slip. Frankly the Brothers don’t think you can point to any one feature, such as User Account Control, or the new Aero UI and assign responsibility to that feature for the slip. The reality is the entire system feels unstable, unresponsive, and not ready.
One last point, late this week Kevin Johnson, the other Co-President, Platforms and Services Division announced a reorganization of the management of his world, which includes Windows. Fundamentally the Brothers see this as ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’, and the Brothers have to wonder why a company needs three levels of Vice-President: Senior-Vice-President, Corporate-Vice-President, and just plain Vice-President. It begs the question who actually does any work such as specifying, writing and testing software code. The Brothers are are also always nervous about Microsoft executives who are taking a sabbatical—the Microsoft equivalent of being exiled to a dacha on the black sea.
But most of the questions about this reorganization involve the movement of Steve Sinofsky from Office to Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering, as if the movement of a single individual will cure all of the scheduling and other product development problems. To quote Yogi Berra, ‘this is deja vu all over again’. Seems to the Brothers that this is just what happened when Brian Valentine replaced Moshe Dunie, who decided to step back, take a breather and spend more time with his family when Windows 2000 was floundering. It has nothing to do with Sinofsky, he has a good track record, but so did Valentine, who still plays a major role in the Windows organization.
Therefore the Brothers have to ask, can simply adding an individual solve the long-term software engineering and scheduling problems, or is there a more systemic problem in Microsoft? Will there be a short term improvement because a change has been made and the team has to be embarrassed by the current state of affairs, but over time, will they slowly drift back into entropy and the greatest state of disorder?