Microsoft's Culture Paved The Way For Vista's Delays

A Microsoft program manager on Thursday pulled a blog entry in which he had claimed that Windows Vista's many delays have been due to overly complicated code and a corporate culture that impose deadlines so unrealistic that slipping is inevitable.

Philip Su, who managed development teams in the Windows group for five years -- and who still works for the Redmond, Wash. company -- called out code interdependencies, an overbearing process that slows down developers, and a culture that forces managers to lie to superiors as the faults that have made Vista the slowest-moving software project in Microsoft's history.

In a blog Su reposted Wednesday -- he pulled it for a week "of my own volition" but republished it to put to rest speculation that "The Man beat me down" -- he bluntly laid the blame on Microsoft's corporate personality.

"When a vice president in Windows asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit," Su wrote. "It's certainly true in some sense that they genuinely want to know. But in a very important other sense, in a sense that you'll come to regret night after night if you get it wrong, there's really only one answer you can give."

Thursday, Su yanked the blog again.

"I have removed the rest of this post of my own volition, without any external pressure whatsoever," Su wrote. "What started as an opinion on the challenges of managing large software projects has turned out to be a rallying point for detractors, which isn't interesting or productive."

In the now-gone entry, Su said that at Microsoft, telling the truth about a deadline, and how impossible that deadline is, gets you nowhere.

"Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence."

Su also put the onus for Vista's slow going on the code's complexity -- 50 million lines of code by his estimate -- that sports 50 different interdependent components. And the constant barrage of e-mails and progress reports to answer and generate cut into developers' time, making Microsoft's engineers about a sixth as productive -- based on the number of lines of code produced in a year -- as the U.S. average.

"An interesting question is whether or not Windows Vista ever had a chance to ship on time to begin with. Is Vista merely uncontrolled? Or is it fundamentally uncontrollable?" Su asked.

The often-delayed Windows Vista is scheduled to ship in January 2007, and was released last week in a broad-based test phase dubbed Consumer Preview Program (CPP).

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