A decent portion of the bureaucracy is scar tissue from the antitrust case. Another big chunk (at least in Windows-land) is the commitment to backwards compatibility over new functionality. The third chunk was compliance with governmental requirements for purchasing by the federal government. There's things like "any software the feds buy must have Foo", and that's a really big deal for Microsoft, who set up a whole group to ensure that everything has Foo.

It was pretty painful. A feature I was involved with got nixed by the Compliance team due to concerns around backwards compatibility. They had no incentive to say Yes, either, since that would mean more work for them.

But some of it was just math -- a large company with many teams that need to coordinate slows things down. I like this anecdote from a Microsoft engineer about how it took a year to design a really crappy shutdown menu with nine (nine!) options.

It turns out there 43 different people who had a voice in the feature, which was hashed out over a series of grinding meetings involving teams responsible for kernel, shell, Tablet PC, Longhorn, and (drumroll please) "Windows Mobile PC User Experience"."

"In Windows, the [repository] node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes."

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

> "In Windows, the [repository] node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes."

Does it take less time for a patch to the graphic system (for example) to trickle up to the Linus' tree? And to end up in an LTS distro?

Depends what it is, but commonly - no. There's been research on this:

http://mcis.polymtl.ca/publications/2013/msr_jojo.pdf

What percentage of submitted patches has been integrated successfully, and how much time did it take? Around 33% of patches are accepted. Reviewing time has been dropping down to 1–3 months, while integration time steadily has been increasing towards 1–3 months, bringing the total time to 3–6 months.

That's based on 8 years of data.

been reading old articles from Joel Spolsky and the need for backward compatibility to break down barriers put up by prospective customers.

has a few passages that illustrate how that startegy helped Microsoft Excel trounce Lotus 123 plus chat wars won by AOL around that time.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

thoughtful analysis. re backward compatibility, any suggestions on what the company should have done differently? the tension between compatibility and innovation seems like a central challenge of platform leaders like microsoft. re government compliance, did the company consider shipping different features for government customers -- like how some companies offer enterprise tiers for high-end business customers?

There seems to be a tipping point at a lot of really successful companies where they get a little too top-heavy. Too many executives, too much management (often as rank and file are being laid off or shown the door) and not enough people doing things.