{"id":280,"date":"2006-03-27T10:57:18","date_gmt":"2006-03-27T15:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=280"},"modified":"2008-09-23T14:17:53","modified_gmt":"2008-09-23T19:17:53","slug":"open-letterr-to-steve-lohr-john-markoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=280","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter to Steve Lohr &amp; John Markoff"},"content":{"rendered":"<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>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<p>The interesting question is whether we will ever see a Microsoft equivalent of glasnost and perestroika.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve described only symptoms in Windows Is So Slow, but Why?, not the underlying problem. Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}