Vista cost $10 Billions to develop? | The Coffeehouse

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Dean Takahashi asked this quetion in his article.

Article wrote:

Business Week estimates it took 10,000 employees about five years to ship Vista...

If we assume Microsoft's costs per employee are about $200,000 a year, then the estimated payroll costs alone for Vista hover around $10 billion.

That has to be close to the costs of some of the biggest engineering projects ever undertaken, such as the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb during the Second World War.

Of course, there was that reset, so let's consider that prototyping. But he ended it with

Article wrote:

When I think about how much Microsoft poured into Vista, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a longtime Microserf.

"I think about what it could have been,'' he said.

jsampsonPC
SampsonBlog.com SampsonVideos.com

$200k/yr for each employee?

Man, I'm working for the wrong company.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

That's estimating each employee (QA, Dev, Artwork, etc) to be at $200,000....my friend that does QA there on WindowsXP (Legacy Testing) said he only makes about $80,000.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

It doesn't mean that your salary is $200K. It's estimated that the company chips in social security tax, health benefits, bonuses, 401K, etc... that the cost of an employee is about 2x his salary.

So, it's safe to assum a softie doing high 5-figures.

Erisan

And it took over a year, and 24+ devs to create the shutdown menu in Windows Vista...?
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

eagle

I asked Steve Ballmer this morning if anyone had calculated the man-hours necessary to produce Windows Vista aside from the five million beta testers, he smiled and said that contributions to Vista come from many different product Teams at Microsoft so no man-hour, man-month, man-year figure is available.

Sampy
This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it and we have become exceedingly efficient at it

I shipped code in Vista Smiley

LaBomba
Summer

Sampy wrote:
I shipped code in Vista

What did you work on Sampy?

Nightengale

I guess that everyone is using consultants/contractors to estimate annual costs. Quoted from Mr. Ballmer's e-mail:

"According to one leading industry analyst firm, we spend an average of 14.5 hours per week reading and answering email, while the time we spend looking for and analyzing information costs companies $28,000 per employee per year. And ongoing studies by the research firm Outsell show that the amount of time corporate information workers spend gathering information has almost doubled in the last five years."

fdisk

eagle wrote:
I asked Steve Ballmer this morning if anyone had calculated the man-hours necessary to produce Windows Vista aside from the five million beta testers, he smiled and said that contributions to Vista come from many different product Teams at Microsoft so no man-hour, man-month, man-year figure is available.

You should have replied, "Well, by my calculations, $10 billion spread out over five years amounts to spending $5,479,452.05 (not counting leap year days) per day on this project. Those types of expenditures have sunk other companies budgets. How'd ya do it?"

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

fdisk wrote:

eagle wrote: I asked Steve Ballmer this morning if anyone had calculated the man-hours necessary to produce Windows Vista aside from the five million beta testers, he smiled and said that contributions to Vista come from many different product Teams at Microsoft so no man-hour, man-month, man-year figure is available.
You should have replied, "Well, by my calculations, $10 billion spread out over five years amounts to spending $5,479,452.05 (not counting leap year days) per day on this project. Those types of expenditures have sunk other companies budgets. How'd ya do it?"

Annual PC sales are over 200 million units. $10 billion / 200 million units = $50 per unit. If they sell each license for at least that they've made the investment back in one year.

Rory
Free Tibet While Supplies Last

Minh wrote:
It doesn't mean that your salary is $200K. It's estimated that the company chips in social security tax, health benefits, bonuses, 401K, etc... that the cost of an employee is about 2x his salary.

So, it's safe to assum a softie doing high 5-figures.

This is true, and it's something people don't usually consider.

A safe bet for determining the cost of keeping an employee (not just paying one) is salary x 2.

It's clearly not an exact science, but once you figure in benefits, the cost of HR, financial services, etc., employees cost quite a bit more than what they actually make.

That's part of the reason contractors typically walk away with more money in pocket from the same position as a salaried employee.

A contractor could make 50% more and still be cheaper to keep on board.

I used to keep that in mind when negotiating my rates Smiley

jBuelna
Never mistake motion for progress.

Sampy wrote:
I shipped code in Vista

Lucky bastage. You've secured a spot in history. Smiley

odujosh
Need Microsoft SUX now!

On the same vain as the person who made the CPU break even point (Cost per Unit:) Bills Gates said in the first Business Launch Speech:

(I paraphase about 5:20 he talked about this):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDfRvcjBQlM

We use a Low Price High Volume model when we considered how much to invest in Vista. Vista will have an equal investment when one cosiders past versions of Windows and how the industry has grow. If someone knows where to get the full transcript or videos let me know.

Another great video on Vista's potential:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QdGt3ix2CQ

Smiley

BruceMorgan

Rory wrote:

Minh wrote: It doesn't mean that your salary is $200K. It's estimated that the company chips in social security tax, health benefits, bonuses, 401K, etc... that the cost of an employee is about 2x his salary.

So, it's safe to assum a softie doing high 5-figures.

This is true, and it's something people don't usually consider.

A safe bet for determining the cost of keeping an employee (not just paying one) is salary x 2.

It's clearly not an exact science, but once you figure in benefits, the cost of HR, financial services, etc., employees cost quite a bit more than what they actually make.

Beyond the actual salary & benefits, one also needs to factor in the cost of other expenses that are vary per-employee such as cafeteria subsidies (if provided), to real estate & facilities, networking expenses for things like VPN use, etc.

All of these go into what is referred to as a "fully burdened FTE", which is a commonly used way to account for employee costs. The fully burdened FTE cost ends up being a fixed number created from an average across all of a company's employees.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

OK, yeah when you take all those factors into consideration there is development cost yeah. However you can't say that exclusively Vista cost $200,000 per person x 5 years or whatever...you have to factor in those things.

Then do you factor in the Microsoft Research Team that contributed code, do you factor in acquitions that you made that contributed to Vista, do you factor in the electric bill for the servers storing the builds...

Breaking it down to $200,000 an employee is just room to manuver any kind of FUD on resource usage. PLUS (I can be off on this), certain amounts of that can be tax deductible according to Sarbanes Oxely (I think that's the name) that requires development, QA, etc to be considered as development. That's why you see products being released AFTER the fiscal year because if you don't release a product then to the IRS the finances are bucketed differently.

SecretSoftware
Code to live, but Live to code.

Maybe MS can lower its spending by letting its work force work from home, and since most work is online, you can do it from home office. Write code submit, review , rewrite all , while at home. Team meetings happen over VoIP + Cam. Big Smile

would that not be cool?

jsampsonPC
SampsonBlog.com SampsonVideos.com

SecretSoftware wrote:
Maybe MS can lower its spending by letting its work force work from home, and since most work is online, you can do it from home office. Write code submit, review , rewrite all , while at home. Team meetings happen over VoIP + Cam. would that not be cool?

Something tells me that would open up a load of security issues.

SecretSoftware
Code to live, but Live to code.

jsampsonPC wrote:

SecretSoftware wrote: Maybe MS can lower its spending by letting its work force work from home, and since most work is online, you can do it from home office. Write code submit, review , rewrite all , while at home. Team meetings happen over VoIP + Cam. would that not be cool?

Something tells me that would open up a load of security issues.

Why is that? The contract between MS and a worker, is a legally binding paper.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

SecretSoftware wrote:
Maybe MS can lower its spending by letting its work force work from home, and since most work is online, you can do it from home office. Write code submit, review , rewrite all , while at home. Team meetings happen over VoIP + Cam. would that not be cool?

I don't thing telecommuting proves itself, in the long run
First off, there are many people who simply do not work as well from home. When working on a project (as opposed to short-term consulting/research/bullsi work) I prefer being in a more structured environment, to seperate "At Work" from "At Home"

Secondly, IM and VoIP are no replacements for facetime. Being near your team makes communication much easier and much faster. You can achieve more in some 2-minute face-to-face conversations than you will in a set of 30 emails. A developer's work isn't just "write code, submit, rewrite" - you're interfacing with other code, interfacing with other PEOPLE.

I think that the elements that make us feel working from home is cool are exactly the elements that make it uncool for our employers. Smiley

littleguru
<3 Seattle

BruceMorgan wrote:
Beyond the actual salary & benefits, one also needs to factor in the cost of other expenses that are vary per-employee such as cafeteria subsidies (if provided), to real estate & facilities, networking expenses for things like VPN use, etc.

All of these go into what is referred to as a "fully burdened FTE", which is a commonly used way to account for employee costs. The fully burdened FTE cost ends up being a fixed number created from an average across all of a company's employees.

This is exactly what I was thinking when reading Minh's post. This is the average salary. There is people costing the company less then the average $200,000 and other that cost more then $200,000

That said I still find that Windows Vista didn't cost that much. There is so much people involved.

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

Yggdrasil wrote:

SecretSoftware wrote: Maybe MS can lower its spending by letting its work force work from home, and since most work is online, you can do it from home office. Write code submit, review , rewrite all , while at home. Team meetings happen over VoIP + Cam. would that not be cool?

I don't thing telecommuting proves itself, in the long run
First off, there are many people who simply do not work as well from home. When working on a project (as opposed to short-term consulting/research/bullsi work) I prefer being in a more structured environment, to seperate "At Work" from "At Home"

Secondly, IM and VoIP are no replacements for facetime. Being near your team makes communication much easier and much faster. You can achieve more in some 2-minute face-to-face conversations than you will in a set of 30 emails. A developer's work isn't just "write code, submit, rewrite" - you're interfacing with other code, interfacing with other PEOPLE.

I think that the elements that make us feel working from home is cool are exactly the elements that make it uncool for our employers.

Maybe, but maybe not.

Get a webcam and expect timely results. It may be (IMHO it IS) that companies like to keep their worker bees on site working diligently, but that isn't always the best way to get results. I agree that developers do need to meet with each other at times, but at other times, the need to be left alone to figure stuff out. And since every office has that annoying guy/gal that won't STFU, letting the developer work at/from home is a way to give them the peace and quiet they need.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

Heh.

... and Sun makes a big deal on how they spent $500 million developing Solaris over the past decade.

Regards,
Vincent

messerschmitt
"Develop for it? I'll piss on it."

Cant be true, according to SB himself the real devel on Vista started only two years ago so we are down to about 2 billions just there, and all those developers surely didnt spend all their time developing for Vista, say that they spent about 50% of their work-hours Vista-only, well then we are down to about one billion dollars, probably less.

LarryOsterman

jsampsonPC wrote:

SecretSoftware wrote: Maybe MS can lower its spending by letting its work force work from home, and since most work is online, you can do it from home office. Write code submit, review , rewrite all , while at home. Team meetings happen over VoIP + Cam. would that not be cool?

Something tells me that would open up a load of security issues.

Why? VPN is relatively secure, especially when coupled with 2 factor authentication. I'm aware of only one break in the past 10 years or so, and that was before we deployed 2 factor auth. In addition, there are scripts that run before the remote user connects to the MS corpnet that check for up-to-date security patches, firewall, antivirus, etc.

I know a number of people who telecommute - one guy on the audio team works half time from CA, half time from Redmond, for example. There's another member of the devices and media group who works full time from his home in the UK, and another who works full time from her home in Virginia (I think - I know it's back east).