Looks like working on Saturday encourages breaking.

Anyhow, here's a quote from a particularly good post on Slashdot.

[Microsoft is] willing to take ten YEARS to let something come to fruition; they have no problem 'waiting for fullness.'

This is a HUGE advantage that a lot of OSS people simply don't have; whoever's coding NiftyApp gets bored around version 0.64 and drops it, and meanwhile, some other guys is making GniftyApp 0.4 because he doesn't feel like working with the first guy.

On the other side of the pond, Microsoft will let something fail, and fail, and fail, tweak, twist, fix, and then they have something worth having.

People who like open source often point to the biggest projects, but as we've seen with Mozilla on Mac OS 9-, sometimes when you take away the money, even the largest projects die as well.

How many people are really coding large, successful projects, like OpenOffice, Mozilla, Eclipse, even AbiWord, primarily because they love coding? How about Red Hat and IBM's contributions to Linux? How about jEdit and SQuirrL SQL, two apps I use every working day? Even people who write apps for the fun of it are often doing it to make themselves more marketable, even if their motavation isn't as bad as those open source vaporware projects I mentioned a while back.

That's where a successful, commercial company has a great advantage. Longevity and a reason (unfortunately money) to keep with it. Good post.