Mark Locovsky & Microsoft's Future !!

Hailed as the brain behind hailstorm and well known name inside microsoft as a distiguished operating system architect,Mark Lucovsky wrote sometime back on Microsoft's inabilityto ship upgrades in time and how their upgrade process is not effective and not reaching a large population and how this ineffectiveness owing to the large cycletime looks odd in the modern web world and questioned how long can microsoft continue to support the windows platform this way and wrote that the world would increasingly look to new model players like Amazon. Some spirited defence have come from the microsoft camp like this and the one here. (Via Scobeleizer)Kevin Schofield perhaps captures the issues quite well.He writes, "in comparing Windows to Amazon, Mark is making an apples-to-oranges comparison.Windows is client code, and amazon is a server-based service.What I expected Mark to say was that Windows is big - really big, undoubtedly one of the largest software projects in the world, if not the largest. And it's been developed over a long enough period that the original authors of many parts of the code have since moved on, and maintenance of that code has passed on through several generations of owners who struggle with the challenge to maintain the insitutional history of the code, its design and architecture, and key decisions that were made along the way. The Windows team is facing design, construction, and maintenance issues that no one in the world has ever faced before. They do their best to make smart, well-informed decisions, but some days they struggle with issues that have no precedent to inform them". In a typical microsoft style, several from their camps are attacking google as well with themes like,
- Testing system for backwards compatibility and making sure that it works, is very very difficult
- Things are comparatively much, much easier when you talk about web applications because by their very nature they don’t need to tested for thousands of hardware /software configurations but merely for 4 or 5 type of browsers

- Google Toolbar works only with Internet Explorer and only on Windows Platform, even though it’s been in works for more than 4 years.If Google can ship the software, there should be a Google Toolbar for all major browsers (there are what 4 major browsers?), for all platforms (3 platforms?) in span of 4 years- this for a "toolbar" not even full fledged application!

My Take:Marc Locovsky's argument looks too shallow in writing off the future of windows on shipping delays alone. It is widely speculated that Google is in the process of building an operating system platform and asRick Skrenta points out Google has the most amazing talent on OS today. I agree with Kevin and others - Microsoft is demonstrating incredible energy to develop, test,and deliver software of mind boggling complexity to a very diverse base. They run very large scale beta tests, they support remarkable variety of hardware and software configurations, being run by every possible kind of environemnt - industry,customer,geography and user - They are also making enough noise about their support and have the needed marketing muscle to demonstrate their reach. Their claims about non windows based product upgrade review may be suspect but they are trying their best.In my way,Microsoft continues to be the best known name in pushing new technologies to the masses.our recent coverage on Microsost's winning ways in the consumer electronics sector reinforces this view. I agree with the view, there's no other company on earth that has the capability to develop, debug, beta test, deliver software on a massive scale like Microsoft.But with all their best possible effort on supporting windows and their undue delay in shipping longhorn, Microsoft has earned the wrath of a significant section of the user community, with windows malperformance.And with unfolding developments like Bandwidth & Microsoft, tough time lay ahead for them. They are pushing the user community to look at alternatives like hosted desktop solutions, or open source or await alternate operating systems - the window of opportunity for microsoft to maintain their well earned leadership is getting smaller and smaller.