How big an event is Windows Vista Beta 2? A Microsoft rep claims it has been so overwhelming that:

If we increased our bandwidth any further there’s a possibilty of taking down the Internet - people might have problems with World Cup viewing, etc.

Downloading issues aside, others have already pronounced judgement on the perpetually Soon To Be Released product.

Testers told ChangeWave that Vista’s 50 million lines of code expressed itself as too big, too slow, too memory-intensive and too buggy.

Others complain that the behemoth munches laptop batteries like a fat man tossing back popcorn at X-Men 3… All those flashy new graphics, you know. This threatens to roll back all the hard-fought savings that have been designed into the new power-stingy CPUs.

So how could a product that has flown so high fall so low?

Philip Su thinks that 50 layers of intra-code dependencies, some circular, make Windows Vista way too complicated.

In addition, after five years of managing Windows developer teams, Su concluded that the whole project is burdened by an overbearing development process, along with too many spasmodically micromanaging Dilbert-esque VPs who force Project Managers to lie simply to get them off their backs.

“Every once in a while,” Su says, “Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.”

According to Su, the effect of all this spirit crushing is “creating a generation of McDevs, few of whom enjoy the monotony.”

Microsoft’s army of McDevs have plodded through Vista code for five long years, with no end in sight. The result has been pretty hard on Microsoft’s stock.

Anonymous Microsoftie, MSFTextrememakeover, claims that Redmond has underperformed NASDAQ by 40% over the last five years, while every one of its self-selected competitors has beat MS. Even worse, Microsoft’s real competitors (Salesforce.com, Google, Yahoo, Redhat, and Apple) have creamed them.

That explains why Windows Live developer Dare Obasanjo displays a Microsoft stock chart on his site with the lament, “There goes the down payment on my first house.”

Will the “largest software project in mankind’s history” actually make any release dates?

A dazed Su says, “One has to wonder whether it was merely illusory, given the collective failure of such unified human will, that Vista was ever controllable in the first place.”

Oh, Vista will ship. But will it float?

[Note: Su’s excellent post, Broken Window Theory, was removed from his website, but has been restored.]

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