Can Microsoft's Developer Division Compete?

time to read 1 min | 198 words

Mike Schinkel has a couple of posts about Microsoft development division that makes for an interesting read:

Be sure to check the comments, Eric Lippert has responded with some very interesting insight. And there is some very interesting discussion beyond that.

My own comment to that is that OSS projects has far less cost of change than most commercial projects. They are structured to enable change (otherwise they die), most commerical projects require a lot of extra baggage to move. If we will take NHibernate vs. the ADO.Net Entity Framework, I can make a change in NHibernate and not consider the affect it will be on the UI that Visual Studio needs to present to the user. Just this can make a world of difference in my ability to add features or fix bugs.