But they told us XP was all new?!

The Scobleizer Weblog

Believe me, it ain’t fun to work at Microsoft when we continually have bugs found in our products. It’s the discussion at every lunch and every meeting I’ve been in lately.

Are we working on answers? Yes (with more to come).

50 million lines of code, some of which was written more than a decade ago. I remember using 386’s about a decade ago in Fawcette’s first offices. They were never attached to the Internet. We didn’t have email. No Web. I’m sure that guys who were writing code back then had no idea their code would be permanently connected to everyone else’s computers and that criminals would try to break into their computers.

Interesting that MSFT never expected any box running Windows (or DOS) would be networked, but the Mac shipped with networking built-in. Anyone ever wonder how companies like Novell came into being? By supplying the networking that the grand visionaries in Redmond didn’t understand.

And now we have Scoble (admittedly not a tech guy) saying that some of the 50 million lines of code in the current MSFT offerings dates back to the pre-internet era. Funny, we had dog and pony shows about how XP was all new, all good, and nothing to do with that old Windows95 dreck.

Bah. When I consider that Apple has introduced the PowerPC line with very little, if any, code dating back to the 68K days in 1993 and then switching to OS X with yet another completely different code base, Linux has emerged from the fruitful mind of a university student, the various *BSDs have all evolved in their divergent directions, and the Leading Brand gives us what?

<snicker> spent some time with the tech staff at my workplace today and one of the fired up and XP machine, to which another asked (about the default background), “did you get that from TeleTubbies?”