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Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed."
If they didn't release a product until 2008, the market (mostly linux) would have time to catch-up.
If MS did nothing innovative before 2006, it (Microsoft) will have to do the catch-up.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I must admit I'm getting more and more of the deja vu feeling, reading Microsoft's statements on Longhorn. I've seen it before, when Apple representatives struggled to explain the delay with shipping their ultimately sophisticated version of MacOS, codenamed Copland. They understood all too well that the classic MacOS is a bloated unstable construction based on a single-user single-machine Macintosh System, that was not designed with networking and multitasking in mind. They managed somehow to hack this system to have a sort-of poor man's multitasking and also some rudimentary networking capabilities, but they knew it's not gonna last in the Internet Age. They needed a new system and they needed it ASAP. Yet after millions of bucks and years of coding, Copland turned out to be just nothing but very expensive vaporware, and Apple's last chance to survive was to purchase NeXT, with their Unix experience, and thus MacOS X was born.
There are many similarities with Windows and Longhorn - Microsoft also tried for a very long time to hack and upgrade their old OS, also designed for single user with no networking. And yet they were strangled by their own limitations they needed to keep for sake of backwards compatibility. Can they solve it on their own or will they just, say, buy Sun for their OS experience?
If they didn't release a product until 2008, the market (mostly linux) would have time to catch-up.
Catch up? Because Linux doesn't have any command shells...
Seriously, it seems to me that Windows is less and less about operating systems. WinFS was the major new OS feature, and it's been shelved. Looks like we're waiting all these years for adequate security, a new window manager and a bunch of wizards. That's right, and a new command shell. Forgive for not getting too excited.
I guess Linux coders copy MS features for the benefit of those who wish to migrate - not to enhance the power and usability of the OS itself. Secondly, these changes would take a few days in Linux (KDE or GNome); not years as with Microsoft.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
If people are waiting til 2006 anyways, Gates would have been smarter to delay Longhorn until WinFS could be totally implemented. If they need more money coming in on the conveyor belt, then they could have just released Windows XP OSR2 - essentially a service pack/ upgraded version people would have to pay for. I seriously doubt I will be paying for a cippled version of Longhorn - especially if its best parts are going to be made available for XP.
Looks like maybe MS should have spent a little more time getting WinFS working instead of tweaking the UI to make it "oh so pretty." Unfortunately, I think MS realizes that a slick (albeit graphics intensive) UI will likely sell more copies to the ignorant masses than an innovation like WinFS.
Maybe he should have a look at iTunes and GMail.
For me, a kind of "iTunes for files", including smart queries, would be fairly enough. And it doesn't require a brand new file system and its instability risks...
slowness.
slapped on eyecandy(ala xp).
but really, who didn't see this coming? that's just how they work at ms, if a product is "somewhere on the future" they'll announce all kinda funky crap their r&d crew finds on the net as the next big thing in their future product X.
then the features get axed because they actually have to start to think about getting it out the door!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
winFS doens't seem very usefull in my eyes. it's just a layer on top of ntfs. in the end (windows 2012) you'll see they rewrite it to be a true filesystem. reiser4 seems to do this the right way. having a nice filesystem that you can extend all the time using plugins. I think microsoft wastes a lot of time by doing this in 2 steps. I also understood that winFS is "My Documents" only (or something like that) and cannot be used on the entire harddisk (atleast not in longhorn).
WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things.
*cough*
Microsoft still can't come up with shit until Apple has done it better, first. Sad.
Always ask 'why?'
IMO, the whole idea behind winFS is to take all of that structured information (meta-tags, perhaps?) and allow complex queries on it ("richly find").
However, the problem they're probably facing is making such potentially complicated queries easy for "grandma." Most programmers I've worked with have trouble creating SQL queries that do exactly what they want it to for complex results, how on earth will grandma find anything?
It'll be really interesting to see how they solve that problem.
>> Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?
Why yes, we can. The two key words are "XML patents". Microsoft talking paperclip for their new OS is XML, which is fairly insane to use for a filesystem, but will allow them to solve some of the serious bugs in Word, like the silliness in the "Undo" command.
"Isn't reiserfs4 actually providing some of this functionality (and much more) and has allready been released?"
:)
Yes, it has.
I was just thinking that it would be cheaper, easier, and faster for Microsoft to just license Reiserfs v4. Just the atomic file writes/updates would be worth the effort! And the filesystem supports plugins.
Some people in the Linux community don't think Reiserfs v4 is stable... but I'm willing to bet by 2006 the issue will be settled.
I get the impression that for every new version of Windows, they are just having to keep on doing (or perhaps redoing) too much work creating these huge delays and whatnot. They have alot of work to do to fix security AND make Windows usable for MAH and PAH at the same time. I just can't help but get the feeling that the way they are going about creating Windows is part of the problem they have in maintaining it and releasing newer versions of it.
Perhpas I am just interested in seeing Windows evolve rather than just re-inventing itself again and again. Perhaps I'm now thinking of different operating systems.
P.S. I am a Windows user that just happened to install Linux on his old spare PC recently and might have a Apple sitting in the corner ;)
- http://www.sunrizen.com/ It basically does what was taken out of Longhorn- turns the filesystem into a database, and uses that for fast searching. It doesn't have the SQL and real-time queries that BeOS does, but it's hella fast and really cool. I've used it for bug-hunting code, since it searches for text inside documents hella fast. It's much better than MS's shipped in search utility.
click me
Why don't you check those out to see how much it will do for the interface. What will MS "invent" next?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Man some of you people on here are very, very bitter. I fail to see how this is an 'advertisement' for Microsoft. I personally was looking forward to WinFS and not only for it's search capabilities. Athalon also might get the axe in Longhorn but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
"WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things."
Nobody, Mr. Gates? Apple announced this was going to be a key part of OS X Tiger. It is scheduled to be released this coming year, and they have already implemented it in the preview versions of Tiger that they have made available to developers. By all reports it is working just fine, today, right now.
So please, lay off the "nobody" stuff, mmmk?
You know, whenever I call a company that I have a paid subscription to and I am on hold hearing their advertisements it really pisses me off. You know why? Because I already paid for their product - I am a customer - I do not need to be inundated with more sales from them for something that I am already paying for. Do I really need to pay my cable TV company two membership fees per month for the same service? The words "Preaching to the choir" comes to mind
So advertising on a Linux site where you have less customer loyalty is not a bad place to advertise on.
As for the original reply - just because Bill Gates makes a press release does not mean he is trying to get free press. He is the richest man alive, he can buy the press (he actually did). The press wants to hear from Bill Gates, they TRY and hear from him. If this was any other company (almost any) making a press release, you would have been praising them for being forthcoming and letting the public know whats up...so lets not down the man because he is keeping the public informed.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Not necessarily. Microsoft wants enourmous numbers of people to buy Longhorn (or new computers with Longhorn). Most of those people already run Windows. Microsoft needs to convince the people who are already in their camp to upgrade, much more than they need to recruit new users from Mac, Linux, or non-computer-ownership.
This is a tricky game they're playing. Microsoft was telling Win2k users that they should upgrade to an operating system with a database file system, and is now announcing that they aren't going to provide one soon. This might encourage those people to upgrade to an operating system that already has one (sort of).
I'm sure that if more people help out, we can get that driver fully featured by 2006. Then we just need IBM to pay for a series of TV adds: "Linux: the features Longhorn was supposed to have."
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
We will not cut corners on product excellence.
Right. That's why SP2 came out on time and with so few problems. Not only was it late, it came with new security problems.
I think Bill is just desperate to keep the press from noticing articles like this little tidbit at Newsforge.
As interesting some of the planned features are, they are still dancing around the most important issue: security and timely fixes.
Surely you can't be so naive as to let some FUD like a script utility distract you from the fact the security problems and perpetual scheduling delays!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Microsoft probably looks at software as less modular and more monolithic. Even when running server applications like Exchange or MS-SQL, they're either run as applications, or integrated strongly into the system in such a way as it's difficult to use the OS for any other dedicated purpose without reinstalling it to wipe away all traces of the server app.
Linux, of course, is very modular. With some notably lame exceptions (I can't recall them exactly now, but they had to do with some graphics library), I'm able to run most anything I want to on my Linux server without installing X, but Windows 2003 will not run properly without Explorer. I could probably get those libraries to work if I did some investigation and re-compiling, but there's pretty much no way I could get Windows 2003 to run right without Explorer. I could change the shell, but I would be missing some critical core functionality.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
So in early 2005 consumers will have a meta data file system, and since Mac OS 10.2 they've had 3d accelerated GUIs... Now if WinFS did get released in longhorn (which it won't be, according to MS.) We'd still be waiting until late 2006, for these features.
I wouldn't place too much emphasis on MS's ability to timeline a product to market. After all windows 95 was meant to have the 3D accelerated GUI, and NT 4 was supposed to have WinFS.
At this rate it'll be 2010 before WinFS sees sunlight.