Lazycoder

Not even close Kevin

Kevin Schofield’s Weblog

See, the argument fails because if Microsoft software fails, no one dies. NASA can’t really ship a patch if they miss something. They did during Apollo 13 (the infamous CO2 scrubbers), but even then they had to or the men were going to die. That puts a whole other level of pressure on a team.

Another facet that you’re not giving proper credit to is that the Apollo missions had NEVER been done before. There really wasn’t anything in human history to compare it to. Creating an operating system or a program for a PC is pretty routine and had been even before Microsoft was founded.

If you are only thinking in terms of man hours and money, yeah MS puts in far more effort than it took to put a man on the moon. But you can’t compare creating commercial software to one of man’s greatest accomplishments. I mean hell, Microsoft puts in FAR, FAR more effort into creating the “home” button on Internet Explorer than Davinci did on any of his projects. Which one had a greater impact? I would think that it would almost be sacralige to compare the moon landing to Windows ME for a man of science.