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

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (59888)	7/16/2001 12:28:16 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Bill, I agree with much that you've said about complexity. I have some more comments about that. It's amazing how far Intel has extended the x86, which with its 20-level pipeline (!!) has reached clock speeds that were thought to be physically impossible on x86 just a few years ago. Of course this was done at the expense of real performance, since unless you're running utterly linear code, you cannot keep all 20 pipe levels filled, but still, Intel engineered the P4 to maximize clock rate, and with the ungodly amounts of cash they have been able to throw at the problem, they did that very well. Microsoft too, has managed to keep the spaghetti heap of their Windows codebase alive for much longer than many would have thought possible, and they accomplished that by the sheer force of billions of dollars. But it doesn't always cost billions of dollars to maintain very complex projects. The evolution of Linux is of course an excellent example of how well-structured engineering can obviate huge expense. Although you would think from reading this thread that the various Unix flavors are so fragmented that porting between one and another should be nigh impossible, a few Alias\|Wavefront engineers ported the 25 million lines of code in Maya to Mac OS X in just a few months. Because it is engineered to be easily ported to new hardware, for Apple to release Mac OS X (including Carbon, Cocoa, Aqua, and everything else) on, say, an Intel box, would just take a few months, despite the complexity of the software. As a matter of fact, I believe Apple has an Intel version of Mac OS X running in alpha quality now, but has no particularly compelling business case to make a product of that just yet. They are able to port OS X easily because it has been well abstracted from the kernel. As I think these cases illustrate, while I agree that unfathomable mounds of cash can solve nearly impossibly complex problems, those problems are generally better solved with good structured engineering. Dave