I saw the headline this morning that Airbus is pushing back delivery on the A380 by another two years. That’s TWO years! Heads are rolling. People are wondering about the viability of the company. It was an unthinkable thought nine months ago that Airbus would be non-competitive in big jets. Reading the headline, I had another unthinkable thought: What if Microsoft could not deliver Vista? Not just that it would have to delay Vista again by another six months, but that it can’t deliver it in its current design.

Vista is an ambitious project, as we’ve been reminded many times in the, what, six years since the last version of Windows was delivered. Programming has changed tremendously during those six years. There’s a reasonable chance that the underlying principles guiding the original development of Vista are out of date.

The analog: IBM’s System 360. The same thing happened. The project got too big and became mired in its own development. A fellow named Fred Brooks managed to pull the project out of the toilet. He wrote a book called “Mythical Man Month” that became the reference point for program management of software projects ever since. (A more recent book, “The Cathedral And The Bazaar“, threatens to take its place.)

Who would be the Fred Brooks of Microsoft?