The other side of the shutdown button
time to read 3 min | 404 words

Dennis is talking about the shutdown button issue, and bring some new insight into it:

Is that really all that surprizing [lots of people with a say on this feature]? We are, of course, talking about a critical UI element of the flagship of a $300 billion dollar company. In particular about one of the most communicated and referenced features of an operating system that will see installation on hundreds of millions (possibly over a billion) PCs.

Is it really that surprizing that a lot of people have a say in this critical feature? Maybe not. I agree that this is a highly visible feature, and that it has ties to all sort of surpising places (the kernel for one, the messaging system to inform other applications - including the hot boot support, etc).

The problem that most of us have with this is not the complexity of the ties to this feature, I think that if someone sat down and thought about all the places that this feature would touch, they would be amazed. I spend half a minute on this and I can think of a lot of issues, and I have little interest in Windows Internals.

The problem is that someone spent a year actively working on the menu. And the way it was managed. A quick calculation shows that 3.5 man-months were wasted just in meetings about this feature. 3.5 months. 

There is also the huge hassle in getting your dependencies through all the the gate keepers along the way. Let me give you a simple scenario, two teams need a feature from a third team, which is on another branch. Team A discover that it needs a certain feature, and ask team C to implement it. Team C does this, and goes their own merry way. Two months later, Team A gets the change, and they start working on that. Team B, a month later, discovers that there is a bug in their code because of this feature, and request a fix. Two months later, Team C's fix reach them, but four months afterward, Team A disocver that this fix broke their code. Rinse, repeat, weap.

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