Photo New York times.

The New York Times points out that Windows XP has 35 million lines of code. And:

Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.”

David B. Yoffie, a Professor at the Harvard Business School says: “Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down. That’s why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation.”

Ray Ozzie, Chief Technical Officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote in a memo: “Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.”

True, but what’s the answer for a clearly-failing Microsoft?