Microsoft's new way: It's about time

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal had a big front-page feature on how Microsoft changed the way it wrote Longhorn. The piece has irritated some people (notably Slashdotters) who seem to think it's a puff piece masquerading as an expose.

Well...yeah, sort of. Suspiciously absent from the story is the number 30, as in the anniversary that Microsoft was celebrating the day the story ran, and the story is certainly kind to Microsoft. But that spot on the WSJ's front page is usually reserved for long features that are often on newsworthy topics but are never hard news. Sometimes they're profiles of corporate bigwigs, sometimes word-pictures of smoke jumpers or small towns. But never exposes.

Personally, I believe it's possible that Microsoft improved its software-development practices. I just have a tough time believing Jim Allchin didn't think it was an actionable problem until mid-2004 when Longhorn bogged down.

According to the WSJ profile, "In 2001 Microsoft made a documentary film celebrating the creation of Windows XP, which remains the latest full update of Windows. When Mr. Allchin previewed the film, it confirmed some of his misgivings about the Windows culture. He saw the eleventh-hour heroics needed to finish the product and get it to customers. Mr. Allchin ordered the film to be burned."

Very dramatic gesture, Jim. But a year before, you got a memo from Microsoft distinguished engineer Marc Lucovsky, telling you that Windows 2000 shipped with 63,000 "potential known defects" and 65,000 other "potential issues" that were likely to affect customers. (Lucovsky left Microsoft for Google late last year, and has his own thoughts about Microsoft's ability to ship software.)

Apparently 63,000 known defects in 2000 weren't enough for Allchin to confront Bill Gates about the problem. And a clearly broken process in 2001 wasn't either.

So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that back in 1998, Microsoft was actually trumpeting its horribly broken software-development process to reporters and analysts, back when Win2K was still called Windows NT 5.0. And who was in front of the room, explaining to reporters that NT 5.0 was late and its feature set was being cut and generally trying to reduce expectations? Allchin, of course -- "little demons" and all.

In other words, it took at least six years for Jim Allchin to finally tell his boss that Microsoft's way of building Windows was broken and to present a plan for fixing the problem.

I'm glad Allchin finally did in 2004. And I hope Microsoft really has made its Windows development process better. That's would be better for all of us.

But I wish he'd had the guts to do that six years earlier. Then we'd really be a lot better off.