Production cycles have interested me ever since I was part of a disastrous systems development project with Andersen Consulting, back in the "day". We were using Oracle SQL server as the back-end and Oracle Forms and PowerBuilder to build front-end GUIs for a custom-designed petroleum trading system. It was a nightmare. The development schedule was, in retrospect, appallingly optimistic, and our Go Live date slipped at least five times, if not more. I can still remember the feeling of leaving at 5 PM and coming home on time after months of overtime, because our project manager finally put his foot down after the fifth launch date slip and said "My people aren't working like dogs anymore." It was bizarre to be home in time for dinner!
I think about that project whenever I hear about a high-profile wingding like PS3 has been delayed, and I think, those poor people, they're suffering horribly because someone thought they knew how to put a project schedule together. It's very easy to sit in a room and pare back deadlines in MS Project or whatever, but when reality smacks you and you realize that those dates were pure fantasy, it's the little people who are going to pay. MS Seems to have pulled it off, more or less, with the Xbox 360, but Vista is clearly imploding and shedding features like crazy just to make it out five years after its predecessor. Sounds like PS3 might be having the same problem. Funny how the OS X releases don't seem to be bogging down...hmmm. I wish Apple would allow a journalist in to document their project life-cycle, a la Soul of a New Machine.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
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3 comments:
But Macdoug, OS X updates are incredibly minor compared to Vista. I would actually look at MS as Apple's model for milking the product line. NT4, Win2K, and XP were decent upgrades with decent frequency - similar to OS X upgrades I would say.
Vista is taking a couple of huge steps that OS X will have to catch up to, foremost among these is a vector based graphics scheme. I'm using a 12 inch laptop screen with 1400x1050 resolution right now and I can barely see what I'm typing. What I really need to do is scale IE up by a factor of 2 or 3. Some apps sort of support this now, but it is nowhere near universal on Windows or OS X. I think this is a prerequisite if really small form factor devices are ever going to reach their potential.
Of course, I agree with you that Sony is a train wreck.
I really didn't understand much of the above technospeak but I give 10 points for citing "Soul of a New Machine." Ah, the days of minicomputers in the suburbs of Boston...
Dr. Funkey, your points are well taken, but there's something to be said for properly managing the expectations of your users. MS has historically tried to bite off way more than it could chew in terms of feature sets for the next-gen OS, and thus promising more than they could deliver in the state time frame.
Apple, on the other hand, after its near-fatal dithering with Rhapsody/OS X in the early years, seems to have finally gotten its act together in terms of project management. They are clearly the thought leader when it comes to features - besides the graphics engine, where else does Vista surpass the feature set of OS X?
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