> There's another way to build software and another type of workplace
> culture that succeeds in practice for shipping software at a certain
> deadline with less resources than needed that millions of people are
> willing to buy?
Excuse me, but since when is Microsoft an example of 'shipping software at a
certain deadline with less resources than needed'?
> Or am I wrong in suggesting that no other software that people are
> willing to pay for, ships in the "millions of units" scale?
There are dozens of examples - all the major workstation vendors (and at
prices far above those MS sells its software for, for what that is worth)
and the Mac to start.
As far as that goes, however, I don't think that quantity shipped is a
particularly relevant measure of the quality of the process - it is too
heavily influenced by other factors. I suggest that timeliness of delivery
and number and severity of defects found after shipping would be better, and
don't think that MS (or much of the rest of software business for that
matter) has a very good track record by those measures.
-- Scott Lawrence Consulting Engineer <lawrence@agranat.com> Agranat Systems, Inc. Embedded Web Technology http://www.agranat.com/