I read this article recently that describes the mind frying complexity of the Windows development process. With Vista sporting around 50 million lines of code, it’s no wonder Vista suffers from delays. Quick, what does line #37,920,117 say? Microsoft has acknowledged the need to release more often (as in sometime this millenia), but that agility is difficult to achieve with the current codebase due to its immense complexity as well as Microsoft’s (stubbornly?) heroic efforts to maintain backward compatibilty. The author of the article labels this the Curse of Backward Compatibility. I don’t think anyone doubts that maintaining backwards compatibility can be...