Friday, November 23, 2007

Bill Gates on focused design

"The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree."
"We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing."

Unfortunately for Bill, his company is having a difficult time getting Windows back to something which resembles David Cutler's locomotive of an OS, which was itself birthed in a rather chaotic manner. How disappointing to see his company forget these essential truths in their core products over the years. I think for them to compete with Apple or Google the way they want to, they're going to have to get back to this. Iconoclasm is something they've forgotten how to do well, and they're getting their asses handed to them for it.

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