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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearded One who wrote (20769)	8/28/1998 6:34:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

>>>Anyway, the proof is in the pudding. They're building a directory from scratch, they're late, they're always late, this is bigger than anything they've done before, yada yada yada blah blah blah they're up the creek without a paddle.<<< Yeah, probably. It took ten years for Windows to become usable. Possibly it will take another ten to 20, starting from NT 3.1, for it to become solid. It took 25 for Unix to become real solid. Also, I had forgotten that device drivers are mostly written by the board makers, so my point was BS anyway. The part of the job that msft does is exactly the part that is least modular and most interdependent (due to the way they do things, partly.) It might have gotten to the point where all that could get them out of this is to open the system. 5000 coders, 35 million lines, thats 7000 lines each, calculated over-simply. 150 pages, maybe, if it is C. Probably there is some assembly in there, maybe a lot. And some C++, and other stuff maybe. Anyway, 150 pages isn't that much for an experienced person to simply maintain, but it is a damn big size for a part of a new system one person is supposed to keep track of when you are mixing IE and Internet and new file system functionality through dozens or hundreds of DLLs and so forth. How big is Solaris in lines of code. Or Linux? And does the NT code size include the thousands of device drivers from board makers? There are a lot more folks who do Unix internals than are doing NT. Maybe an order of magnitude more. Now, because of factors you noted, that doesn't make it easier, necessarily, unless you also have a very different organizational model for development, which of course Unix does. More open, more collaborative, for longer. Solaris took forever, Java is bogged down, NT is taking a long time - this really makes the Linux folks look pretty good. Not an accident that it is the most open effort. Cheers, Chaz