http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwork_fortune/
A while back, Microsoft prided itself in what it called “dog fooding”. The employees at Microsoft would alpha/beta test the software on their own workstations in their day-to-day operations. In this article from the man, himself, you can see that he is using Windows XP. It also looks like he is using Outlook 2003.
My question is:Â Why isn’t Bill running Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 by now?
Sure, they are both a year out of release, but they’ve both been delayed several times. Vista/Longhorn has been in development for 4-5 years now. Customer opinion is dropping, fellas.
A year or two ago, I was a die-hard Windows guy. I was looking forward to Longhorn. The concepts were great. It seems that all of the great concepts have been scrapped or scaled back to the point where Vista is just another XP. Now, the only reason I haven’t replaced my PCs at home with Macs is the price. I’m not afraid of the switch, even though I have never used a Mac for more than 10 minutes.
I’m a Microsoft-based developer, but I’m trying to jump ship as soon as it’s feasible. .NET is a brilliant platform. With so much functionality being moved to the web, the OS is becoming less and less important. If Microsoft was smart, they should start focusing their efforts on making .NET platform-independent and start developing platform-independent applications instead of a proprietary OS.
So what does this have to do with dogfood? Well, with the restructuring of the Vista team, hopefully they will be able to get Bill on the new OS in the next couple of months. If not, they could be in for a world of hurt.
