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by jasode 2817 days ago
>Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never resolved.

From the fragments of leaks I read about the internal strife, the .NET code had huge performance problems and the C++ team was frustrated that "DevDiv" couldn't solve them. ("DevDiv" is Developer Division that owned NET Framework.) Therefore, they ripped a lot of "managed code" out and redid it in native code.

I hope that one day, an ex-Microsoft programmer or product manager writes a tell-all book of this period. It would be a fascinating case study.
2 comments
stupidcar 2817 days ago
Yeah, that's my understanding as well. But what I wonder is what would have happened if someone at the top had brought the C++ and .NET teams in and made some Jobsian declaration like "this isn't negotiable, the company is switching to .NET. All of your jobs depend on finding a way to make it work." Were those performance problems really insoluble, if all the engineering ability of the company were brought to bear on them? I get the impression that a lot of the C++ old hands were never pleased with .NET to begin with, and were all too happy to chuck it.
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WorldMaker 2817 days ago
Right, it certainly sounded from the outside that a lot of the Longhorn performance issues were various sorts of sandbagging by one side or the other. There's an interesting leadership question there too if some of the worst sandbagging was intentional or just ADHD-style distractions due to a lack of a singular, focused vision for the product. (The biggest example being letting so much of the WinFS team get sucked into the never-ending "semantic web" rabbit hole of trying to "schematize the world"; it's hard to focus on performance when you are busy trying to catalog all the different ways that people store data.)
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pjmlp 2817 days ago
At RustConf 2017 keynote presented by Joe Duffy regarding Midori at a certain moment, he mentions that even with Midori running in front of them, WinDev guys were still not open to the idea of such kind of system being possible.

"Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k

Sorry a bit lazy to track down the exact moment.

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pjmlp 2817 days ago
The thing is, if they actually collaborated with each other, the outcome would surely look quite different.
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