The clocks serve as a reminder that Microsoft has a deadline to meet.
The once-daily shiproom meetings have become twice-a-day events as the product has neared completion.
Projected onto a screen is a list of unresolved issues that need to be addressed before Vista can leave.
There were about five dozen such issues at a meeting last Wednesday morning.
At each sticking-point, the person responsible for tracking the issue gave a one-sentence report on where things were.
“(If) there’s a fix, I want to put it in.
It should be clear that date means not much to me, that quality is much more important.”
In one case, there was a bug in the Slovenian release of Vista.
Some of the glitches were already known.
Many were things that have already been fixed, and a few were too new and need investigating.
None appeared to be a show-stopper.
Hallauer had predicted that the morning’s meeting would be fairly short–maybe a half-hour.
After 20 minutes, the group decided that things seemed pretty good.
Perhaps they wouldn’t need to revise the code again.
At the afternoon meeting, though, the team was forced to revisit that decision.
Hallauer and team decided to spin one more build.
Weighing changesIt’s all part of the process.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft thought it had something that promised to be the final version.
But within a couple of days, two new glitches had surfaced.
The issues were arcane, but significant enough.
In one case, there was a potential problem with burning DVDs.
And not everyone agrees which things need to be tackled.
The battles inside the shiproom can get testy sometimes.
These days, there are certainly folks who feel Vista is ready to send on its way.
Others keep lobbying for particular fixes, including some requests made late last week.
“Through most of the product cycle, the teams are fairly independent,” he said.
Sharks and limpetsWhile Vista is not glitch-free, the product is finally coming together.
When Microsoft does find a bug, it gets classified into one of two categories.
One is “sharks”–bugs that everyone agrees need to be fixed before the product ships.
Retiring Windows chief Jim Allchin doesn’t like the shark and limpet analogy.
To him, nearly every bug is a shark worth fixing.
“(If) there’s a fix, I want to put it in,” Allchin said.
But Allchin is finding plenty of resistance these days.
Microsoft is under a fair bit of pressure to get Vista out the door.
The latest shark, though, means that he can get in one of the changes he wanted.
For months, the company has been struggling with an issue in the Vista set-up process.
Developers put that problem right.
To Hallauer, it was an issue that might or might not have justified a new build.
Allchin was convinced it did.
The unrelated software-installing problem let Allchin win the day.
Apparently, the development team for the operating system also works pretty well on battery power.
“We’re almost there.
Nothing has stopped us before, and this isn’t going to stop us either!”
Luckily, the company didn’t need to spin a new build that day.
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Until recently, Microsoft has issued a new internal release of Vista every day.
That’s a grueling process.
Down the hall from shiproom, Windows unit employees can pick up the latest builds.
“I haven’t had any ‘heart attack’ issues arrive in the last few months.”
That list includes rank-and-file Windows employees, as well as some of the company’s top brass.
“I’m doing video calls with my mom in Boston,” Allchin said.
Elsewhere, Allchin is testing a multimonitor set-up with four displays, including some in portrait mode.
As the finalization deadline has neared, he has added more systems to his office.
As of last week, he had nine machines crammed into his office.
He is among those who nearly always picks up the daily build.
He changes all the default prefs, for instance.
“You find bugs,” he said, “You absolutely find bugs that way.”
“I haven’t had any ‘heart attack’ issues arrive in the last few months.”
“Our job is to try and break the apps and find the bugs.”
But Vista’s fortitude does not depend solely on the watchful eyes of Windows veterans like Allchin and Donnelly.
The companies that come also get their own rooms that lock with a code combination that only they know.
They can use PCs from Microsoft, or bring their own machines.
Either way, the computers can connect directly to the Internet without going through Microsoft’s data pipe.
“Essentially, this is their office,” Wascha said.
The center has been home to 16,000 people since 2004, and is booked solid every week.
In August, the open-source software makeracceptedanoffer of helpfrom Microsoft.
“We worked through a ton of issues.”
Another rival that credits Microsoft for helping it get Vista-ready is AOL.
McCool said that AOL has continued to meet weekly with Microsoft.
“I don’t think we had any big surprises in the past week,” McCool said.
About 60,000 machines inside Microsoft are running Vista as part of the company’s “dogfooding” process.
“It’s totally ready to go,” Markezich said.
“We have to learn from ourselves,” Donnelly said.
“I just remember the pizza boxes stacking up in the kitchenettes,” he said.
