Vista close-down menu: 1 year, 24 human beings later

An ex-Vista developer describes in his weblog how it took 24 Microsoft team of workers an entire 12 months to create the shut-down menu inside the today's windows running device, that is released at the quit of January.

In total, no much less than 43 humans were in some manner a part of what became firstly defined on the blog as "a hierarchal hell".

whilst Joel Spolsky criticised the shut-down menu that pops up while a user wants to exit Microsoft's home windows Vista , no longer many ought to predict how terrible the scenario surrounding the characteristic had come to be. one of the programmers accountable, Moishe Lettvin, spoke back in his weblog how the improvement had stepped forward.

negative co-ordination, masses of populous meetings, a sluggish decision-making procedure, six hierarchical stages, and no impact over decisions taken amongst those who labored at the feature are a few of the many reasons mentioned for the gradual development of the shut-down menu. The state of affairs described is, mildly speaking, now not high quality in any respect.

bad time management

In general, the tiny menu - which Lettvin says should have taken per week to layout, application and test - took a whole 12 months to complete. The result of the paintings involved changed into some hundred strains of code.

It need to be noted that Lettvin is now operating for Google , considered with the aid of many to be Microsoft's most critical competitor.