Open Letter to Steve Lohr &amp; John Markoff
<p>You&#8217;ve described only symptoms in <a href='http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?_r=1&#038;th=&#038;adxnnl=1&#038;oref=slogin&#038;emc=th&#038;adxnnlx=1143454048-XUCsb3JgU5ZXxMZCAX0x7A'>Windows Is So Slow, but Why?</a>, not the underlying problem.  Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.</p>
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<p>Microsoft hit this wall six years ago, arguably longer; it&#8217;s why they&#8217;ve had to cancel several strategic projects in favor of superficial patches on the same old codebase.  But it&#8217;s not a Microsoft-specific problem, just one that&#8217;s hitting them the worst because they&#8217;re the largest closed-source developer in existence. Management changes won&#8217;t address it any more than reshuffling the deck chairs could have kept the Titanic from sinking.</p>
<p>Apple has been able to ship four new versions in the last five years because its OS core is open-source code.  Linux, entirely open-source, has bucketed along even faster.  Open source evades the scaling limit by decentralizing development, replacing top-heavy monoliths with loosely-coupled peer networks at both the level of the code itself and the organizations that produce it.</p>
<p>You finger backward compatibility as a millstone around Microsoft&#8217;s neck, but experience with Linux and other open-source operating systems suggests this is not the real problem. Over the same six-year period Linux has maintained backwards binary compatibility as good as (arguably better than) that of Windows without bloating.</p>
<p>Microsoft&#8217;s problems cannot be fixed &mdash; indeed, they are doomed to get progressively worse &mdash; as long as they&#8217;re stuck to a development model premised on centralization, hierarchical control, and secrecy. Open-source operating systems will continue to gain at their expense for many of the same reasons free markets outcompeted centrally-planned economies.</p>
<p>The interesting question is whether we will ever see a Microsoft equivalent of glasnost and perestroika.</p>
