Probably what happens when no one's in charge and the legal, backwards compatibility, etc. teams have veto power over the UX people.
See also: (re: windows vista shutdown UI)
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
See also: (re: windows vista shutdown UI)
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root.
This is terrifying. It sounds like the Windows development process is about to collapse under its own complexity.
What are the cross-sections that the dev teams work under? Who reports to what sections, what does this group feel their job is vs. that group? etc. etc.
Of course DVCS for something as highly targeted and heavily secured as the NT code tree would open a firestorm of other potential attack vectors, but it's worth it for MS to explore those problems.
Regardless of the technical solution, this may represent the biggest challenge that MS to date has ever had to solve -- figuring out how to scale their agility has been the key to success so far and there are obvious signs that this might be a local maximum. For the good of large scale tech I hope they can crack it.