Wasting time at Microsoft

Ryan's Tech Blog (good name) recently had a nice ranting post about how Microsoft wasted 6 months of developer time re-creating a source control client for Codeplex.

"This problem is ingrained at Microsoft, which feels the need to brand everything, but it is in no way limited to them. A search on Sourceforge for “issue tracker” gives 585 results. Sifting through those to pick a winner is difficult."

It's hard to argue with his logic. He makes a strong argument about the need to work with extensible tools that can plug into each other. I think this exemplifies one of the basic differences between Windows and Unix tools that I've noticed: Windows tools are designed as "solutions", whereas Unix tools are designed to be extensible. It's almost unheard of to see Windows tools that are designed to be pluggable, but in the Unix world, the opposite is true.