OS, Interrupted

A report in today’s New York Times offers an interesting account of Microsoft’s struggle to complete Vista, the long-planned Windows update whose release date was pushed back last week. The article makes a convincing case that Microsoft’s development team is, in some ways, a victim of the company’s success.

Microsoft has maintained a stranglehold on the PC operating system market in part because new versions of Windows take great pains to accommodate software and hardware created for earlier editions of the program. But that emphasis on compatibility has made Windows’ code increasingly byzantine and unwieldy, according to the Times:

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That’s why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."

In the five years that Microsoft programmers have been working on Vista — a period which saw company officials scrap their first attempt at designing the software, then called Longhorn — Apple has released four new versions of its operating system and scooped Microsoft on a number of minor innovations. Apple, the Times writes, is reaping the rewards of operating outside "the massive business ecosystem of Microsoft, with its hundreds of PC makers and thousands of third-party software companies." (The New York Times)