mtbc | (Reply)

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I've been in businesses which wrote their own software, or used niche providers with high quality products. In both cases they did well for the first five or ten years, and then the maintenance overhead rose and the mainstream competition overtook on features or became industry standard, and in the end they had to back off to whatever was ahead in the market, because they or the small provider couldn't keep up even though the product met their needs better. It became cheaper to use software which cost more and was worse, because somebody else was doing the bugfixes and format changes and updates.

Also, I think there's invisible exponentially increased complexity because things have to maintain backwards compatibility. Office is running with two sets of menus now; the clicky-through ribbons at the top, and the keyboard shortcuts which match the previous drop-down menus. The number of file formats they support is proliferating (but no longer include .dbs, which our previous mapping software required). I suspect in 1985 there were people at Microsoft who understood the design, and the design decisions, and knew roughly how it worked. I bet there is nobody alive who understands the current versions.

(In a previous workplace I was assigned to maintaining 10,000 lines of C code; they handed me Kernighan & Ritchie and the obfuscated C archive on day 1 and told me to teach myself. Comments in the code were very sparse, and included "I bet you can't see why I did it like this!" It worked until it didn't, and by then they'd gone off the idea of writing their own.)