"I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week."
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Member since:2005-07-08
Yes I was thinking of the obvious Xerox Parc Smalltalk, Altos, MacOS, Next, and BeOS, no doubt also SkyOS, Atheos and the other favourite alt OSes on OSnews. Even Unix was small once with a relatively small team behind it with a few famous names.
Most of the best software I have used has been built by small teams too, usually far better than massive team software because they delivered what we consumers wanted (in the adjacent office) or did what the developers wantded. Vista on the other hand has complexity, backwards compatibility, user analysis, committe design written all over it.
Now if hardware design were as easy to do today as it was 20 years ago when you could just go over to Fry's and buy chips and wirewrap a proto motherboard and then build software to make it shine, we might still see more Nexts, BeOSes. Today though we have PC hardware with relatively complex interfaces that can't even be explained easily to an engineer (USB,Sata,FW,PCIe and so on), and ASIC budgets are almost blackholes, hence no more 10-20 man projects.
Ironically with FPGAs it actually could be possible to create interesting hardware again based on straightforward design interfaces and avoid the pitfalls of the above complex PC interfaces but that would be another universe with a few ideas used over and over through out but with little connectivety to your current toys.
Perhaps the goal should be to force down from the top the goal of making the primary OS and drivers fit on a few floppys again.
Member since:
2006-06-21
Makes me yearn for the days when 10-20 people could do the whole job and produce something with grace & charm.
Those days are still with us. You just have to recognize the need to keep things small and manageable, and it's exactly what so many mega corporations fail to do. There are sweet spots in numbers of developer teams, and if you pass them management and coordination becomes a problem, because communication links grow exponentially.