Where’s The Off Switch? Where’s The Goddamned Off Switch…?!?!
First…check out this article from Joel Spolsky on how pointlessly complicated the Vista shut down menu apparently became…
Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.
My team’s raison d’etre was: improve the experience for users on laptops, notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs. Noble enough. Of course the Windows Shell team, whose code I needed to muck about in to accomplish my tiny piece of this, had a charter of their own which may or may not have intersected ours.
My team had a very talented UI designer and my particular feature had a good, headstrong program manager with strong ideas about user experience. We had a Mac that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI. Of course the Shell team also had some great UI designers and numerous good, headstrong PMs who valued (I can only assume) simplicity and so on. Perhaps they had a Mac too.
In addition to our excellent UI designer and good headstrong program manager, we had a user-assistance expert, a team of testers, a few layers of management, and me, writing code.
So just on my team, these are the people who came to every single planning meeting about this feature:
1 program manager 1 developer 1 developer lead 2 testers 1 test lead 1 UI designer 1 user experience expert — 8 people total These planning meetings happened every week, for the entire year I worked on Windows.
In addition to the above, we had dependencies on the shell team (the guys who wrote, designed and tested the rest of the Start menu), and on the kernel team (who promised to deliver functionality to make our shutdown UI as clean and simple as we wanted it). The relevant part of the shell team was about the same size as our team, as was the relevant part of kernel team.
So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.
In small programming projects, there’s a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.
In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository — among other problems, the infrastructure just won’t support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.
So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.
Wow. Just…wow. Check out the comments section on moblog (Moishe Lettvin). There are a few other former and current Microsofties in there sharing his complaints and wondering where it’s all leading for Microsoft (and a few who think Joel Spolsky is full of it). It’s interesting to read them comparing what Microsoft is doing with what Apple and the Open Source community are doing.
Remember that YouTube in-house parody of how Microsoft would have marketed the iPod? I guess that wasn’t satire at all, really.
