"It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver," said Microsoft Senior Vice President Bob Muglia this week at Tech Ed 2005. He's talking about the Monad command line shell, quoted in this article, via /. Here's the Mary Jo Foley reportage.
Here's what Microsoft's CEO said about tightly integrated innovation a year ago:
"... we believe in something that we call integrated innovation. We not only
need to enable you to do new things, or to do things you didn't think
were possible today, we think part of our value is integrating these
innovations in ways that make your life simpler, lower cost, and easier
to take care of."
Here's what former Microsoftie Marc Lucovsky had to blog about Microsoft shipping software: "I am not sure I believe anymore, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software". When a Microsoft engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? I know the answer and so do you... The software sits in a source code control system for a minimum of two years (significantly longer for some of the early Longhorn code)."
Clayton Christensen's research points out that in a market that is underserved, i.e. the product isn't "good" but fundamentally enables the customer, then the company that can control all the variables and deliver a tightly integrated solution best serves the market and "wins". Once the technology in that market matures and the customer is overserved, the pressure to componentize is great, and indeed the component players can "win" against the tightly integrated encumbant. Think ... Firefox! Or OpenOffice.
It's just a command line shell. You haven't actually reinvented systems management for the heterogeneous masses, despite how innovative I know you've been. Impress your customers. Ship it!
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