EU: Microsoft compliance deadline a week away

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Pravda

Microsoft did provide documentation.

Not according to Brad Smith (Microsoft's General Counsel). According to him, it was only early this year that MS pulled hundreds of senior developers into a "death march" project to reverse-engineer Microsoft protocols. Several hundred man-years later, they're still not done.

They even offered to provide source code which would be even more beneficial than the documentation.

Evidently not, since even Microsoft had to invest man-centuries of the developers who were already intimately familiar with the protocols.

That suggests that the cost to any other party would have run into very large figures even if MS handed the code over for nothing. Mr. Smith's figure was something like three hundred senior developers for eight months, so the calculation goes something like this:

2400 man-months = 200 man-years.
Burdened senior programmer: ~$160K/year
Total labor cost: $32 million

Of course, that's assuming that the outside developers were able to get started as quickly as the MS ones did, which is questionable, and that they had access to all of the materials that the MS ones do, which is also questionable.

Still, about $30 million plus or minus just to get the equivalent of an IETF specification.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 11/15/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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