Diego Doval is considering the reasons for the delays and incomplete features in Microsoft's next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.

"I say this because monolithic design is a tendency difficult to avoid, and this has been very much on my mind lately. You start pulling pieces together (for different reasons) at compile-time, and before you realize it you en up with a set of highly interdependent binaries. (Regardless or language or platform, all modern platforms support dynamic binding to different degrees). And it's deployment where things start to slip, because it's there that the potentially different versions of a component have to be reconciled. In other words, deployment is one of the largest half-cracked nuts in software development."

His points about deployment are well-taken. The news.com article he quotes is also interesting. They both suggest an interesting question: why has Apple's MacOS X delivered some features on par with longhorn, years earlier than Microsoft?

One thing to remember is the MacOS X team. It is made of both Apple and ex NeXT engineers. It is a team rich in failure: one commercial OS failure, and several failures that never even shipped a product.

Failure is a good teacher.