[link|http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112743680328349448,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one|Wall Street Journal] (via /.):

By ROBERT A. GUTH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 23, 2005; Page A1

REDMOND, Wash. -- Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows.

"It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly.

The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.

Mr. Gates resisted at first, pushing for Mr. Allchin's group to take more time until everything worked. Over the next few months, Mr. Allchin and his deputies would also face protests from programmers who complained he was trying to impose bureaucracy and rob Microsoft of its creativity.

There's not a whole lot of meat there, but it reminds me of [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=99897|this] thread and [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=192563|this] thread.

I imagine that Microsoft will be repeating this "it's too complicated, we need to start over" stuff again in 5 years. My recollection is that initially Longhorn was going to be so different that existing [link|http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_preview_2005.asp|"legacy" applications would not work without a VM-type subsystem]:

One thing users should be aware of is that Longhorn will include a new kernel and will thus not offer the same level of compatibility with legacy 16-bit and 32-bit code that Windows XP does today. For business users, Microsoft believes that Virtual PC 2007 will help broaden corporations' compatibility options. But the company will also ship an early release of the Longhorn Compatibility Toolkit in 2005 to get users ready for the changes.

I don't know if that's still in the plans...

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.