Scoble takes Joel to task for a few comments, and goes off on a rant:

If your employees get bored, can they go over and talk with some of the world's top experts on Linux? Oh, and think no one wants to come work at Microsoft? Well, the founder of Gentoo just came to work here. Sorta invalidates your theory that the Slashdot crowd won't come to work here too, don't ya think? Do you have any people who've written operating systems where you work? This Microsoft employee has written two. Do you build tools that let you build a new OS in minutes?

Well. Since you can build a new OS in minutes, I expect Longhorn will be out next month, eh? MS has a serious inertia problem when it comes to shipping, and there's a reason for it - everything depends on everything else. If MS has anyone on staff that understands the concept of loose coupling, they are locked away in a closet somewhere, probably to protect their own sanity.

You want to know why Longhorn - and VisualStudio, and SQLServer, etc, etc are late? Tight coupling. Remember the kerfuffle a few years back when MS said that it would be impossible to remove IE from Windows, because it was embedded there? People ranted about all the wrong things when that came up. The problem wasn't that MS was trying to strangle other browsers; the problem was that MS actually did embed the guts of IE in the OS, and thought that it was a reasonable thing to do. Longhorn may not be the last OS MS ships, but it's going to be close - they've tied themselves into a set of tightly coupled knots from which it will be really, really hard to escape.

What Scoble needs to ask himself is this:

• Over the last five years, how many versions of the flagship products has MS shipped?
• Compare and contrast that to what Joel's firm is doing.

Heck, compare and contrast it to what we do here at Cincom Smalltalk - we have a product who's history dates back to the 70's - i.e., it's far, far older than anything MS is doing. We manage to put out a major release once a year, and a minor release in between each major release. People knock Smalltalk for its supposedly monolithic nature, but we manage to keep updating, extending, and adding to it - with regular releases. While there's more coupling at the core (kernel, if you will) level of Cincom Smalltalk than we would like, we recognize that and are working to change it. Meanwhile, MS just keeps coupling stuff more and more tightly - and the release cycles get longer and longer.

Sure, MS has some cool technology. It also has huge problems.