The NYTimes article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/technology/09vista.html?ref=technology
October 9, 2006
A Challenge for Exterminators
By JOHN MARKOFF
REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 5 - On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft
conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer
captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress.
The principle behind the curve - that 80 percent of the consequences come
from 20 percent of the causes - is rooted in a 19th-century observation
about the distribution of wealth. But it also illustrates the challenge for
the builders of the next generation of Windows and Office, the world's
largest-selling software packages.
As they scramble to get the programs to users by the end of the year, the
equation is a simple one: making software reliable for most personal
computer users is relatively easy; it is another matter, in a PC universe
with tens of thousands of peripherals and software applications, to defeat
the remaining bugs that cause significant problems for some users.
The effort to overhaul the Windows operating system, originally code-named
Longhorn and since renamed Vista, was meant to offer a transformation to a
new software foundation. But several ambitious initiatives failed to
materialize in time, and the project started over from scratch three years
ago. The result is more an evolutionary shift, focusing on visual
modernization and ease of use.
Still, the company is within a month of completing work on new versions of
both Windows and Office, having apparently overcome technical hurdles that
as recently as August seemed to signal a quagmire.
"It looked bleak; it was a slog, but in the end this was a technical
problem, and there was a turning point," said Bharat Shyam, 37, a computer
scientist who is director of Windows program management. "We've confounded
the analysts and the press."
As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a
Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the
product to be introduced on time. "The Vista development organization has
made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista's performance,
reliability, and compatibility," he said.
[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test
version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers is
positive, the software will go into production by the end of the month.]
The debugging process has been urgent, with Microsoft scheduled to introduce
Windows Vista and Office 2007 to corporate customers by the end of the year,
and to home users early next year.
This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for
Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide
and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm
Gartner.
Indeed, it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the
software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an
extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate
partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send
data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.
The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million
users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC's were running the software,
generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000
employee computers are running test versions.
Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer
users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have
sent crash data back to Microsoft.
Such data supplements the company's own testing in a center for Office
referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and
other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less
interesting name - Windows Test Technologies.)
This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly
while looking for errors.
The testing effort for Windows Vista has been led by Mario Garzia, Microsoft's
director of Windows reliability. A former Bell Labs software engineer, Mr.
Garzia says the complexity of the Vista and Office effort dwarfs anything he
undertook for the nation's telephone network.
"Everything is easy if you do it for a limited number of things," he said.
"When I was at Bell Labs, the problems were complex, but nothing compared to
this."
The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5
petabytes of information - the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000
home PC's.
The resulting complexity can be seen in the dance that has gone on in recent
months between Microsoft's designers and its partners, who have been
tailoring software and hardware to work with Vista.
On Sept. 1, for example, Microsoft released a version of Vista called
Release Candidate 1 to a large group of outside testers, hoping to take
advantage of their free time over the Labor Day weekend.
Immediately, Mr. Garzia recalled, a wave of crash data fed back to Microsoft
disclosed a newly introduced bug that had been created by incompatibility
with a software module (referred to as a device driver) written by a partner
company.
That company was alerted to the problem, and a remedy was transmitted
directly to the testers' computers over the Internet within four days - a
vast improvement in the gap between detection and repair, he said.
Despite the impending commercial arrival of the two software projects -
which between them have involved the labors of more than 5,000 programmers
and testers here - there is still uncertainty in the industry about how long
it will take for Vista in particular to gain acceptance.
"We've been impressed with the progress, and they deserve a lot of credit,"
said David Smith, a Gartner vice president, but that does not mean that
Windows Vista will soon be in standard workplace use. Its deployment on a
significant scale will not begin at most companies until 2008, Mr. Smith
said.
Microsoft executives contend that such calculations are overly conservative,
and they have been making the case that the use of Vista could pay for
itself in saved labor and related costs in less than a year.
A more fundamental question for the industry is whether Vista will represent
a new era for computing or be the last great push of the current epoch.
While Microsoft's co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, was able to turn his
company abruptly in the mid-1990's to respond to the challenge posed by
Netscape, Microsoft has proved less effective in blunting a similar
challenge to its dominance from Google.
Moreover, the rise of Google and other companies moving toward
Internet-based software development raises doubts about the value of giant
efforts like Windows and Office, which can take more than five years.
Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the
rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut
Microsoft's software development model - using a proprietary software
development system and selling shrink-wrapped applications.
In an internal company memo titled "Don't Bet Against the Internet," he
wrote recently, "Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on
the Internet), most proprietary standards (I'm thinking of Exchange e-mail
and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open
protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet."
The larger struggle has had little influence on Ben Canning, who began his
career at Microsoft testing software nine years ago after getting a graduate
degree in philosophy from Reed College.
Rather, his days are consumed with working his way down that whiteboard
curve.
Mr. Canning acknowledges that his degree prepared him for little beyond
teaching philosophy - with the possible exception of finding and killing
bugs in software, because philosophers are trained to analyze and solve
particularly hard logical problems. For the last few months, his mind has
been focused on the hard problems at the end of the curve.
"If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it's very
high," he said. "There is a small minority that crash all the time, and they
hate us, and we want to help."
CH
PowerUser said:
[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test
version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers
is positive, the software will go into production by the end of the
month.]
I was reading this article in today's NY times (the times reader that uses
.Net 3 and WPF). Looks like MS needs a zillion bugs to be reported before
the end of this month so that it can wake up and smell the coffee. This
OS is NOT ready for production. I keep finding bugs, installations
frequently hand and ask for some "recommended reinstallations" lockups,
GUI problems, view problems, speed problems (heck I've just turned off
Aero Glass right now- Got so sick of it- And it's still slow) and these
stupid icons (like the ones that tell you the status of a mail or post-
read / unread / replied) that you can't discern easily (why won't they fix
those? It's been talked about so much) . Is MS actually trying to prove
to us how bad things can get? A completely new Office 2007 (that can't
even revert to previous view) and Vista full of bugs and more difficult to
us than XP? Boy MS has dug itself into the grave. I wonder what's
happened to their design team- they've managed to make everything less
usable. It kinda makes you look on XP fondly- those were the days... When
things were intuitive.
"As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a
Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the
product to be introduced on time. "The Vista development organization has
made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista's performance,
reliability, and compatibility," he said."
"Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer
users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have
sent crash data back to Microsoft."
Check out this article. MS tells the press something so different than
reality, it's sleazy.
