"Software delays from Microsoft have become par for the course. But the question of why the company does not meet its promised delivery dates has never really been answered.

Analysts and members of the Microsoft community offered up some insights, many of which were confirmed by the company itself.

“Integration, integration, integration,” said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at New York City-based Jupiter Research. With Visual Studio 2005, the database, development tools, operating system and enterprise servers are more integrated than ever before, and that creates cross-dependencies. “If SQL Server slips, Team System slips,” added Tom Murphy, vice president of integration and development at research firm Gartner, referring to the life-cycle development edition of Visual Studio 2005. “When you architect systems that are interdependent, there are advantages. But that also makes them difficult to change.”

"The process of creating such systems can cause problems. Visual Studio 2005 (and the products it depends on) have grown to a point where it’s a “challenge for Microsoft to build and test a full system every day,” Murphy said. “They have gotten to a point where releases that were [once] manageable with standard [development] practices no longer are,” he said, noting author Jim McCarthy’s book “Dynamics of Software Development,” which advocates on-time delivery techniques, such as the daily build."

"Given the scope of the Visual Studio 2005 effort, why doesn’t Microsoft set more realistic delivery dates, or wait until products are ready before announcing them? The company did not answer that question, but others weighed in.

“Why they don’t readjust their time lines, I don’t know,” said Jonathan Cogley, a Microsoft MVP for C#, and CEO of Thycotic Software, a Washington, D.C., consultancy that specializes in agile software development. (MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals, are recognized by Microsoft for their participation in Microsoft communities.) “Perhaps Microsoft intentionally preannounces, and they really don’t care,” speculated Dan Appleman, president of San Jose-based Desaware, which makes components for Microsoft developers. “But I don’t mind the delays. I want them to get it right, get it reliable, get it secure.”"

"That still leaves open the question of why IBM and other companies deliver their software development tools on time, when Microsoft can’t. IBM launched the Rational Software Development Platform, its life-cycle development offering, in December 2004, meeting the promised delivery date. “That’s not a completely fair comparison,” said Gartner’s Murphy. IBM acquired many of the tools included in the platform from Rational, while Microsoft is creating modeling, testing and other tools promised for Team System from the ground up.

Desaware’s Appleman said that although the perception is that Microsoft delays are longer than they used to be, that’s not so. “Every Microsoft technology I ever worked with has slipped,” he said. “I remember the transition to COM—wow, talk about delays—we thought VB4 would never ship.”"

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