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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (59887)	7/16/2001 7:16:44 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

This is true because it is a structural problem inherent to software-in-the-large. Advances in programming technology move the boundaries somewhat (though never as far as their proponents assert) but they don't change the nature of the problem. The history of programming (large vs. small) is also one of mutual underestimation. Large organizations forever underestimate just how clever and capable an individual programmer can be, which is why virtually all major programming advances begin with a single individual and invariably catch the software establishment by surprise. Conversely, individuals forever underestimate how resourceful large companies can be in pushing the limits of large software, which is why "hopelessly bloated", "impossible to enhance or maintain", etc. products are invariably the backbone of the software economy. IBM's MVS was given up for dead twenty years ago by most individual programmers because it had grown "impossibly large". It has since grown manyfold larger and in the process has continued to earn billions for IBM. The same is true of Windows. The reason is that a billion dollars is an impossibly large sum from an individual programmer's perspective and as a result we really have no intuitive sense of the scale of resources such a sum is capable of marshalling. The result is that one should never trust the assured pronouncements from one camp about what the other camp is capable of doing. This has been true since the beginning of the software industry and I see nothing to indicate that it has changed of late.