Fred Brooks Would Be Proud

And another thing about Vista from the Merc. In another article the columnist mentioned Fred Brooks' seminal book The Mythical Man Month was something that Microsoft's engineering management should read. Brooks' Law says adding more manpower to a late project will just make it later. IBM found this out the hard way... in the 60s. Personal experience suggests engineering management either has not heard about this book or chooses to ignore it. It was pretty surreal seeing that title in a daily newspaper, though.

The article also points out that the Windows source code base has grown from 2.5 million lines of code to 30 million to 40 million to 50 million in Windows 3.1, Win 95, Win XP, and Vista, respectively. In Microsoft's defense, the growth or their code base has slowed down a lot. :-)