It seems there are reportedly 30 million lines of code in the version of Office for Mac that is currently being developed by Microsoft.¬ It’s hard to imagine being able to manage and debug this amount of code even with the most modern computer aided development tools.¬ I remember in 1989 IBM was publicizing the fact that their new OS400 operating system had four million lines of code and what an accomplishment that was. Now there’s 30m lines of code in one application package.¬ This is what happens when you try to throw in every feature plus the kitchen sink.
Mac Mojo : It’s all in the numbers …:
About 30,000,000 lines of code make up the current version of Office that we are developing.¬ That’s no typo; in fact, I had to figure that out because of a research project I was working on … if I told you what it was, I would definitely have to¬ … oh, yeah, ÄòG’ ratings … anyway back to the train of thought.…It’s really mind blowing when you think about it.¬ Each developer is responsible for, on average, about 428,000 lines of code.¬ Some people have more areas, some have less, but if you just think of that number, that’s a tremendous amount of responsibility per developer…
…Just to throw another mind-numbing number out at you, there are about 40 lines of text on the page of an average paperback book.¬ That means one developer is responsible for about a 10,700-page book.¬ Or if you break it down smaller, if the average paperback is 300 pages, that means each developer is responsible for¬ about 35 or more paperbacks on his desk.¬ Imagine trying to find a single typo in all those books¬ — that’s what most bugs are, don’t ya know!
I personally feel it’s progressed to a point of it being a matter of bloat and feature over-kill.¬ While there is a certain amount of personal security in knowing that the product can probably do anything you want, either now or in the future, it’s paid for with a product that is overly complicated, often slow, costly, and sometimes buggy.¬ It also speaks to the company not being in touch with it’s users and knowing what features are actually important.¬ Therefore they try to make the product everything to everyone which often result in it being perfect for no one.
Technorati Tags: Mac, Microsoft, office, OS X