Developers working on Windows Vista are only 16 per cent as productive as their peers outside the company based on the lines of code that they produce, according to Microsoft blogger Philip Su. 

The poor productivity is one of the reasons for the many delays to the Vista operating system's launch. 

"Windows is in bad shape but only by a constant, not by an order of magnitude," Su wrote.

Su was a Windows developer for five years and currently works on the Tablet PC team.

He criticised Microsoft's corporate culture of "belittlement and aggression" , and stated that "Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth".

There is no room for dissent, according to Su, and developers are pressured by the company's senior management to meet unrealistic deadlines to the point where employees "simply stop telling the truth".

Microsoft has about 2,000 developers working on Windows Vista and a whole army of managers to lead them, Su claimed.

This makes for 11 management layers between the company's top executives and a rank-and-file developer. The result, in some cases, is senior vice presidents fussing over minor design features.

Su argued in Microsoft's defence that Windows Vista is the largest software project in history.

"The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully," he wrote. "The solutions to these challenges are certainly not trivial."

But Su questioned whether the software was ever going to ship by the previous deadline of August 2006. Managers have been put under tremendous pressure to make sure that they meet the deadline.

"One has to wonder whether it was merely illusory, given the collective failure of such unified human will, that Vista was ever controllable in the first place," said Su.

Su published his posting on a company blog within the Microsoft Developer Network. He edited the content late last week, but subsequently decided to restore the original text to avoid the impression of corporate censorship.

The blog is one of more than 3,000 written by Microsoft employees. The company said in a statement to vnunet.com that it values the dialogue that blogs create.

"The viewpoint in this post is one of many. There is also a great deal of optimism across the company and the community for the progress we're making on Windows Vista, and the benefits it will bring to our customers," said Microsoft.