Software Darwinism

Except for a handful of large, companywide objectives, such as its security efforts under the banner of Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft’s product development groups operate with little centralized oversight. Microsoft is often content to allow multiple groups to attempt to solve the same underlying problem, trusting that eventually it will be able to determine which group has the best combination of talent and technology. In essence, the company practices a form of “software Darwinism” as a management philosophy.

The benefit of this approach is that it lets the company experiment with various ways of solving a problem before settling on one. The chief liability is that it is often difficult for customers to determine which products and technologies will end up on the wrong branch of the evolutionary tree and become deprecated—a term used when a technology is still supported and applications built upon it continue to run, but improvements slow to a trickle or halt completely.

For developer technologies, the following points should be taken into consideration when evaluating the long-term prospects of a product or technology: