Microsoft: The Most Ridiculous Software Company in the World

And that's putting it mildly. Graphical proof.

Everyone in the know has known this for the longest time but it took a genius at Sana Security to come up with the perfect way to depict it. If never before then certainly now: a picture can truly be worth one thousand words.

These are comparative call graphs for Apache and IIS. Apache is of course the open source web server and demographic leader with (deservedly) over 70% of the market. It's not only free, it's good - really good.

The Apache call graph: processing web requests is far from trivial but this code is - obviously - well organised.

But you'll also see the call graph for Microsoft's IIS - the web server the US Government Accountability Office (along with Gartner) condemned eight years ago as unfit for Internet consumption. [← Yes condemned.]

And if you've never understood before then now you surely will. Those thousands of silly little lines are what happens when inexperienced Microsoft programmers (remember Microsoft shun programmers with experience because they're not 'malleable' - they can't be brainwashed) come into contact with marketing executives in heat because they just have to have just one last feature in a product.

The Microsoft IIS call graph. If you ever doubted Microsoft software products were ridiculous, doubt no more.

Apache is open source and it's built to be the best possible web server. Period. This website runs Apache and its proprietors would go elsewhere to get Apache if they had to - and they'd rather go offline than even catch a whiff of IIS.

So that's bad, what? Oh yeah - but think now what Microsoft are doing inside that 'operating system' they just released: for if you think this is bad you ain't seen nothing yet. When David Cutler wrote the original NT in 16 million lines of code, when Microsoft got rightfully sued by DEC for stealing the code, when Cutler subsequently vomited Microsoft all over the campus, when Microsoft were forced by DEC to rewrite the entire operating system: those 16 million lines of code turned into 64 (SIXTY FOUR) million lines of code.

So next time you hear about a Microsoft worm outbreak where the clueless are running IIS without knowing it because they bought Windows XP Ess-Pee-Too or even THAT NEW ONE and IIS is just there running without their knowing it: think then of these graphs.