Ouch...
Please notice that despite the nonstop handwaving from the Mozilla team about how maintaining seperate native interfaces for the assorted Gecko frontends was supposed to be some sort of impossible herculean task that no reasonable person could be expected to tackle, in the time that it took to produce ONE semi-functional version of Mozilla, Opera Software, a company with not even a tenth of AOLNSCP's resources, produced multiple versions of a fully functional web browser, for all of Mozilla's major target platforms. Not only did they produce, maintain and upgrade native Windows, MacOS and Linux versions of Opera, but they increased their market share, and made money doing it.
"We had no choice but to implement XUL/XPFE" is the Big Lie of the entire Netscape saga. The fact that mozilla team members are still stating it with cultish earnestness suggests not that you all came to a reasoned engineering decision, but that your project management was not merely incompetant, but downright pathological. If 1% market share and the firing of your entire development team isn't enough to convince you that somewhere, somehow, you made the wrong decision, you are simply delusional.
Hopefully, some of the core Mozilla developers and managers will use some of their newly acquired free time to read Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month." When Brooks talks about the Second-System Effect, he's talking about you.
I don't know if this is really fair for Mozilla but it's certainly true in general.
Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.
posted Thu 17 Jul 2003 in /software/management | link
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