--Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft platforms, in 2006 on a private email thread with BillGI am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. ... Apple did not lose their way.
JimAll was the top guy on Windows back when I was at Microsoft. I had never heard this quote until now.
I can't help but wonder what was the true failure of Vista. Was it really lack of leadership? Or was it just pure numbers? Windows had at least a thousand engineers with commit access -- possibly more. OS X must have had still several hundred -- several times fewer.
Keep it lean and you can move faster. Be small, and do big things. That's what I learned the hard way in my time at Microsoft.