While I agree with you, I'd be interested to know if there are any 'intelligent' solutions to this problem. You can't possibly just have thousands of devs checking into one central SVN repo, can you? Any idea how Apple does it?
Apple has less than 1% the number of developers working on OS X than Microsoft has working on Windows. Im sure the problems are a lot easier to deal with.
That is very interesting. I am sure both companies break their teams into smaller units of 5-20 people. But the structure of that environment might be quite telling.
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.
Sorry for not following up sooner. Honestly I wonder if distributed version control systems, as currently being heralded by the open source community, might not be the answer. If you remove (or augment) the hierarchy with lateral connections perhaps you can solve some of these problems.
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.
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.