Product Delays Becoming the Norm?

If you have been following the news these past few weeks, there have been four major delays announced. The Sony PS3, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Toshiba HD-DVD. Is this all a coincidence or over promising complex technology?

Well based on what I have read, Sony said the PS3 delay is due to final Blu-Ray copy protection technology specifications not being ready for a Spring 2006 delivery. Ok, I'll buy this since this can be confirmed throughout the industry. However, the product delays here are due to a specifications ratification which in essence is considered part of the software engineering project. This is a dependency risk avoidance strategy and looks to be a sound management decision. "Playstation 3 delay - a good thing?".

Then you have Toshiba delaying their HD-DVD launch to wait for the release dates of HD-DVD content in April 2006. This makes sense also. Who wants to buy a device that has no content? I would not. From a marketing perspective, this would put a dent on initial sales. From a software engineering perspective, timing the release of content to coincide with release of a product is a market risk avoidance strategy and looks to be a sound management decision.

Then you have the new bombshell announcement that the already late Windows Vista will be delayed nine more months due to quality and security programming issues. Recall that Windows Vista is already two years late. I read an article stating that a possible 60% re-programming of Windows Vista is required in order to deliver it by January 2007. "60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten". This sounds like a rumor or FUD. If there is at least an ounce of truth to this and if you are in the software engineering field, this sounds pretty significant to me. If you have to re-write 60% of the code within the last 15% of effort, then I think there are some major design quality problems within the project. Has the complexity of the product and age of the Windows code base finally caught up to itself? Or is there some requirements creep happening internally to the project? Well according to some blogs I've read, Microsoft is even moving programming resources from XBox into the Vista project. This should be a challenge for both teams.

Adding more developers to an already late project just makes the project, well, even later. If you are familiar with Fred Brook's essays on project management, then it looks to me like Microsoft is having some serious internal project management problems. For a consumer level product which Windows Vista has become, all these delays and excuses really do not go well with the average non-technical buyer. It primarily affects the public's perception of your brand or company.

So are all these product delays now part of the norm in today's ultra fast paced high technology world? If you look at proprietary software technologies the answer is dependent on the size of the project. The larger the project, the more likely there will be delays due to the thousands of dependencies within the project. If you look at the open source universe, it seems that the open source model appears to attack size the complexity in a different manner. Since there really aren't any open source projects as large as Sony PS3, Microsoft Windows Vista or HD-DVD this is yet to be determined.

Being the optimist that I am, the jury is out on whether project delays is the norm today. I think project size, over promising, marketing hype, increasing complexity, and requirements creep are probably the real causes of delays. Each of these aspects are manageable components of the software engineering and product development life-cycle process. Of course this is much easier said than done.