"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp."
The former is obsessed with backwards compatibility, and the latter is obsessed with the Next New Thing. Spolsky's thesis was that the latter won out, to Microsoft's long-term detriment.
That's funny - my hatred of Windows almost entirely boils down to their reluctance to chuck old and horrible APIs (see windows.h). I'm not sure how much this is true anymore.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp."
The former is obsessed with backwards compatibility, and the latter is obsessed with the Next New Thing. Spolsky's thesis was that the latter won out, to Microsoft's long-term detriment.