

The Windows Shutdown crapfest - adambyrtek
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

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dchest
(2006)

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adambyrtek
Sorry, I forgot to mention the date in the title :(

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emehrkay
The repository structure seems a bit bad in that it takes months for changes
to propagate, but how else should a project as big as windows be handled at
the source-level?

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btilly
For an alternative watch <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc> to see
how Google does it.

Basically most of the company develops on one branch, but no changelist can be
checked in without going through peer review. (The talk is about the tool that
Google uses for peer review.) It seems to work quite well.

Now you can ask how the project size compares. Well
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code#Example> claims that
Windows Server 2003 had 50 million lines of code.
<http://code.google.com/opensource/> claims that Google has released over 15
million lines of code across various projects. I guarantee that Google has not
released most of its code. Based on those data points I wouldn't be surprised
if the sizes were comparable, at least to within an order of magnitude.

(However Google's source code is probably significantly better. Google has not
been around as long, and does not have the same kinds of accumulated legacy
issues that Microsoft does.)

Random disclaimer, I work for Google and I like how Google does it.

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macrael
Is it really fair to compare the amount of code in windows server to the total
amount of code that google maintains? Google has many different software
projects, what is the biggest? Search? Android? Gmail? Compare _one_ project
to a server operating system and my guess is that the OS is going to be an
order of magnitude larger. An OS is an enormously complicated piece of
software with lots of co-dependent parts. That's what led the to this pretty
horribly complicated source management system.

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wtallis
Google's stuff may be a lot more modular than Windows, but that's not to say
that there aren't inter-dependencies. Google's web services all share just a
few back-end technologies (MapReduce, GFS, BigTable) that are comparable to an
OS kernel, with things like GMail and Docs hanging off like subsystems. But
even things like Gmail, Docs, Calender, Search, etc. aren't even close to
independent. The GMail people need to collaborate with the Docs people to
handle attachments and the Calendar people to handle to-do lists and event
invitations and the GTalk and Voice people to implement the voice and video
chat and phone calling. The Picasa people need to collaborate with the the
Google Earth and Maps people to handle geotagging, and the GWT (probably)
people to deal with the web interface. The Android people need to collaborate
with everybody who works on the front-ends of all the other products in order
to develop mobile versions or integrate them more deeply in to the OS.

Even if the "collaboration" in many of these instances is mostly limited to
using an API published by the other group, there's still the need to make sure
that those APIs are sufficient to accomplish the task at hand, and obviously
Google's UI consistency between products is more than an accident. I think
that to the extent that Microsoft's code is more tightly coupled than Google's
or that of a desktop Linux distribution, it's mostly their own fault.

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philwelch
I love this article. It's practically a case study for Fred Brooks' "mythical
man-month".

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rbanffy
Again?

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adambyrtek
Interesting. I couldn't google the previous entry, Hacker News didn't detect
that this as a duplicate as well.

[http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator....](http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%22shutdown+crapfest%22)

~~~
_delirium
This does look like the first submission, unless SearchYC is missing it:
<http://searchyc.com/submissions/moishelettvin.blogspot.com>

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code_duck
I think it's Reddit and Slashdot where I saw the the first three times.

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some1else
I just used this in a metaphor today, to explain why Windows is inferior to
Mac OS and Linux Gnome

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DiabloD3
Ahh, this is why I love Linux and XFCE.... XFCE didn't take a year to write
such a dialog box.

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wccrawford
Any time I hear someone say they spent a year working on a few hundred lines
of code, I have to wonder how much of the problem was other people, and how
much was that person.

I suspect there's a ton of exaggeration going on here, and that's probably not
the only code they worked on. It's also probably not the highest priority,
either.

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lumisura
I'm not even going to tell you how long it took and how complex it was to
replace one single icon sometimes in Vista. I worked in the Windows UX team at
the time and tried really hard during Windows 7 to improve that process,
because there were so many people involved and so many hours spent for such
simple things. So yes, I believe what this guys is saying about his feature is
possible - to swap an icon we sometimes had to track a ridiculous number of
people, wait several builds to see it, and get approval from a room full of
people many times several management levels above me.

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2arrs2ells
I fought similar battles (but at a much smaller scale) trying to change some
of inane dialog box text/tooltips in InfoPath for a feature I owned as a PM. I
was an intern, but the pushback was rarely along the lines of "Your version
isn't better" but rather "We can't handle the
globalization/internationalization/testing/etc burden of making the change."

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lumisura
Yup. Which is even more frustrating. Many times you got everybody to agree it
would be better the way you are trying to do, but for whatever reasons that
seem to be out of control of every person involved in the process, it can't be
done. It's sad actually. A company full of people with the right ideas and
skills that can't put those ideas in practice because the operation and
processes are getting in their way.

