Melissa's long gone, but lessons remain

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Hard lessons

It was a rush to provide new features that doomed Windoze. There was never enough time to test each feature as it should have been (unit test vs functional test). This rush to publish helped make M$ the largest software company in the world - but it also had the largest number of vulnerablilities in software - in the world.

It was naivete' on the programmer's part that created those holes. No thought/effort/time was given to making things "better" - even such simple and OBVIOUS things like structured/modular programming. Each time the execution of a program switches to a function = inputs can be checked for mismatches/wrong types/overflow. But when everything is spaghetti-code with gotos - one bad input could jump you right into some VERY important code - which is what is happening.

M$ fell into the same pit that most every company fell into - Not having skilled (in software technology) management and project managers meant that "gurus" were allowed free reign to design critical code. As long as the pizza and pepsi held out - these gurus could code you whatever you wanted (read - NOT needed). This made managers happy that they could meet deadlines, and it made project managers happy because they didn't have to do ANYTHING - and still look good.

Any decent programmer can code you whatever you want - but it takes true leadership to get the code that's "gold". Leadership is what M$ lacked and is still lacking - it was founded by a bunch of techno-geeks that got REAL lucky - hardly a replacement for good leadership. Today the company is struggling - they need to re-write their entire codebase, but that will either take forever - or a million programmers. How interesting that this is EXACTLY what the competition has . . .

Posted by: Roger Ramjet   Posted on: 03/29/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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