Sunday, September 7, 2008

Ramdom Rant - Part 1

After using Vista for a few months, scrupulously getting the computer to work the way I wanted, I have come to the conclusion on the overall rating on various aspects such as usability, aesthetics, and many others.

Vista, among the lines of Microsoft products, is considered mediocre on its usability. Due to many intriguingly difficult problems presented during the development cycle of six years, including botching (well not exactly) the product in the middle and restart from scratch, Vista came out as a rushed, buggy piece of bloatware.

Now, you might ask, what happened? How could Microsoft have made that unprecedented, humongous, blatant, seemingly outrageous mistake? Then you are too naive on how companies work. That failure is definitely inevitable; it will happen at some point, due to the way Microsoft development process roll-out.

Microsoft practices something called "Extreme Programming," and that tradition came from when Gates dropped out of Harvard and began working on MS-DOS (well, he bought the copyright of the horrible OS called DOS, and began improving and re-branding it). When there is only a small number of people in the development team, extreme programming is a very useful technique. It is in which people dive straight into the work with only some rough ideas on where to start and where to go, and then expanding on it. The development process is fast and the cost were trivial, and it, however, paved the way for the future of Windows in an unexpected way.

To be continued in part 2

No comments:

Post a Comment