This is kind of a silly question, but it's telling if you answer it. How responsible do you feel for Visual Studio Team System?

Me personally or Rational at large?

You because of UML and how that accelerated modeling, and Rational at large because some of the key folks involved came out of Rational.

Right, we did have a handful of folks move over there. I answer that question by saying I'm not sure I feel responsible, but I feel flattered in the sense that imitation is the greatest flattery.

OK then, from what you've seen and heard and whatever other resources you may have, what's your thought on their technology? Are you impressed?

Well, great question. Historically, it's hard to prejudge any Microsoft product like that because—and I'm not the only one saying this—there's tremendous promise and then delayed releases and it get scaled back. So knowing what exists today and what'll exist tomorrow, it would be premature for me to say because I just don't know.

I do know that these guys are going to have to go down a very similar path to what Rational did, and it took us some years to get it even reasonably right. So …

But they have your experience to fall back on.

They do have our experience to fall back on, but they also have legacy they have to deal with as well, too.

You have a development organization inside Microsoft that's very code warrior-centric. But the problem they're not trying to face with their team tools is addressing the orchestration of people who are not necessarily code warriors. And frankly Microsoft doesn't have a lot of experience in that space. Not to say that they're stupid people. But that's just not their experience base.

That's a very good point. But that also partly points to what Gates was talking about as to why they're trying to make it simple.

Absolutely, but simple is not the only thing that one has to do. One has to deal with the different needs of those individual stakeholders and the weaving together of those concerns. This is why you see a lot of energy going on between us and Tivoli, for example. With our world view that you have continuously evolving systems, the notion of maintenance and development aren't separate things anymore. So you release a system, it goes into operation, and you need to have that feedback from the system itself back into the system.

Microsoft's not the place where they have tools across the lifecycle they can integrate with. So I see them beginning dealing with expanding the developer experience, but not necessarily the lifecycle experience. I mean the ability to see a running system, probe it, build tests against it, feed the results back into your change request system, that's incredibly powerful stuff. And it's not something you can get a bunch of bright guys together and build in a weekend.

True, but they're saying they're going to partner with others and there's this ecosystem that will evolve around it.

Yes, we'll see where that heads up. Microsoft traditionally has had challenges with its partners.

This article was first published on eweek.com.