Microsoft voles "can't make decisions"

Moishe Lettvin, who worked at the Vole mound for seven years, says it was taking developers a year to write features that should only take a week.

Lettvin worked on the 'Windows Mobile PC User Experience' team which was part of the Longhorn and Tablet PC group.

He said that he said that Vole's organisation structure was more esoteric and convoluted than an Intel roadmap. He had to go six or seven steps up an organisation food chain to find a manager who could make a decision.

Lettvin said that his group had to improve the experience for users on laptops, notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs. To do that he had to talk to the Windows Shell team which had a cunning plan of its own which may or may not have intersected his teams.

To support one developer - Lettvin - he had a UI designer a program manager, a user-assistance expert, a team of testers and a few layers of management. There was a planning meeting each week which had to include a program manager, developer, developer lead, two testers, a test lead, UI designer and user experience expert.

A shut down feature sequence apparently took the efforts of 24 people with 43 Voles who had a say in how it worked. It took a year and still was not finished by the time Lettvin left.

Lettvin's bog is here. µ