Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy

markmcb writes "As Microsoft and Apple go back and forth about who came up with what idea first, it's been hard to tell who the real innovaters are. Michael Gartenberg and Jim Allchin of Microsoft give some fair opinions on the current desktop search battle. While they do give credit to Apple's iTunes for search inspiration and to Apple being first out of the box in the OS race, they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn."

Comments

No Contest!

[BandwidthHog]

Windows XP keeps your desktop from becoming overly clutterled with icons you haven't used recently, which makes searching your desktop *much* easier. Clearly, they are the TRUE innova[tt]ors here.

And if that's not enough, the second core should drastically improve that little doggie's performance.

Re:No Contest!

[RatPh!nk]

Well it seems obvious. Ben and Hoss need to head on up to Redmond and get us our horse back, if you know what I mean.

And by horse, I mean a usable OS
And by get back I mean, shoot some people
:)

Re:No Contest!

[Moofie]

If by "Apple however did "borrow" ideas from Xerox" you mean that "Apple paid licensing money to use Xerox's R&D ideas as the basis for Apple's tremendous user-interface investment", yes.

I mean, if you're going to be accurate, let's be accurate.

Re:No Contest!

[Baricom]

It does the same thing I used to do as a kid - hide the mess in a corner where nobody would see it.

Uhh, GOOGLE?

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

Uhh--- the first real mainstream desktop search I started to see people use was...

Google Desktop Search?

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Actually Apple had a desktop search as part of the Mac OS at least as far back as 1998. I forget what it was called but it came with a bunch of pre-defined search sites and you could download and add plugins from other sites as well. It was part of the OS search feature, though, and not a plug-in to a web browser.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[bushidocoder]

Companies like X1 (recently bought by Yahoo) have been making desktop search systems for years that are vastly superior to the new arrivals in the desktop search wars. It just wasn't a popular topic until very recently.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[Amiga Lover]

This I find interesting too.

While they do give credit to Apple's iTunes for search inspiration and to Apple being first out of the box in the OS race, they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn.

The same thing was being said before the release of Panther. The strengths of longhorn were touted and Panther was conceded as being "admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better". Now 18 months later we have Tiger that is 'admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".

I bet when Apple announce their next OS (let's call it Ocelot) the commentary in the media will again be...

"Ocelot is admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".

Of course, the world will suck it up and nod their heads, agreeing that this fabled new version of Windows will be better, sometime in the future, while ignoring the last half decade of "admittedly good" OS X versions which ACTUALLY EXIST AND CAN BE USED!

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[jafac]

No shit, Sherlock. :)

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[Morgahastu]

This reminds me of then the Dreamcast came out. Most people didn't buy it because the PS2 "would be better". Thing is that the PS2 came out a year and a half later and it wasn't better, the graphics were slightly poorer (IMHO) than the Dreamcast and it was over a year late.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[HeelToe]

But the PS2 also clearly took the market out from under the Dreamcast.

The PS built a reputation on having good games to play on the platform. I think this was a large part of why people waited for the PS2 - banking on good games for the platform.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[CarlinWithers]

There was a difference though. The reputation of Sony was improving during that time period. And SEGA had some terrible previous flops, Saturn anyone?

With the current climate, Google and Apple are gaining public favour. Whereas Microsoft is plagued by favourability problems such as adware/spyware/viruses.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[Flyboy Connor]

I remember the same thing happening in 1994. OS/2 (I believe it was version 2.0, might have been a later version -- a good version of OS/2 anyway) was released, and Microsoft was struggling with building Windows 95. The most-read computer-mag in the Netherlands published an article that compared OS/2 to Windows 95. It explained in half a dozen pages why Windows 95 was MUCH better than OS/2. It was larded with screenshots from both OSses, those of OS/2 mainly consisting of a window opened in which a DOS-shell was run, while, of course, the Windows 95 screenshots showed cool icons. At the end of the article, in a very small font, it said that the author of this article was a Microsoft sales manager. I wrote the mag a letter of which the geste was, that it is easy to call a system faultless if it doesn't exist. I also ended my subscription, since it was clear to me they had "sold out".

Of course, those that have followed Microsoft's career know that their basic strategy is always promising, if not guaranteeing, that the next version of their applications will be perfect. Amazingly, some users still believe this hogwash.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[0racle]

The PS2 has a DVD player, the Dreamcast didn't. It might not be important to you, I know it wasn't for me, but everything I've seen says that was the nail in the coffin for the Dreamcast. So in that sence, it was better.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[timster]

WinFS has been dropped from Longhorn as it won't be ready in time. Well, actually they dropped it and then came up with something else CALLED WinFS which has nothing to do with what you are talking about. The search in Longhorn is an index system just like Spotlight, and everything still runs on NTFS.

Don't expect Microsoft's new file system to be available before 2010. At this point nobody knows what form it will take. WinFS has been kicked around for about a decade now and nothing has come of it, so Microsoft may choose to make incremental improvements to NTFS instead of going the database-driven route.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[squiggleslash]

They're great but they don't search inside files.

Actually what makes all of this interesting is that Apple and Microsoft are improving the search features so they're usable. Right now, for example, you wouldn't browse your hard drive using the search features of your OS: it's quicker to to to Documents/Essays/CMP101 and open "Data Hierarchies.doc" than it is to open Find File from start, look over the various criteria settings, enter words you know appear in the document, and hit Find.

What Apple and Microsoft are doing is encouraging applications to create indexes that go with every file they create, so searching can just be a matter of going to a ubiquitous Search box and entering whatever it is you want to find. Within seconds, you'll have the files and objects that are relevent. You'll end up using it as your default way of finding documents, rather than navigating your file heirarchy.

Less Exploring, more Finding. Ironic, in some ways.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[topham]

Normally I would agree with your statement.

But in this case the point isn't the user interface to the search capabilities. It is important, but not the technical issue.

The technical issue is the filesystem / operating system has the necessary hooks to reduce the subjective overhead to zero.

By having the hooks integrated such that indexing occurs when files are updated, moved, or otherwise changed the search capabilities are dynamic. It isn't necessary to scan the file system to detect changes, the changes are already known and the search query itself simply has to refresh. It doesn't scan the filesystem for the relevant files, it simply looks them up in it's index.

I've used BeOS and I am hopeful Apple's Spotlight will match, or exceed BeOS' implementation. In my mind it is imposible for Microsoft to do it better, So I don't understand that part of the issue.

I believe Apple is supplying the necessary tools and information so that a new file, created by an application can have it's filesystem details index, as well as call a custom routine to pull any application specific data from the file and have that indexed.

Lets say you have a new word processor that stores it's data in a compressed format; a routine for the application could process the file and update the index with all the keywords, perhaps all the text, etc automatically.

A third party company would have difficulty putting forth a standard for such a function, and would have to support the major applications themselves.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[hahiss]

The fair test seems to be this:

I can get instant results with OS X Tiger vs. I will get better results, someday, maybe, with Longhorn.

In other news, Low-Level Microsoft employees have been using the following pick-up line at local pubs:``while Brad Pitt may be better looking I am *now*, in about 2 years I will be SO much better looking.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[dgatwood]

Sherlock, AFAIK, only indexed text and text-like files, and treated them as an amorphous blob of text. It did so crudely through nightly scrapes of the entire hard drive, which most users tended to... um... cancel....

Spotlight indexes every file on your system for which there's a scraping agent (I forget the correct term). And companies can create those agents for their own file formats and tag all sorts of metadata about files in addition to the raw text content.

For example, if your word processor supports a structured title page (i.e. if it knows who the author is, what the title is, etc.), and if there's an agent that understands its file format, you could do a spotlight query that searched specifically for any file where the author was "Anonymous Coward".

More importantly, after the initial indexing pass (where applicable), spotlight doesn' index files nightly like Sherlock. Spotlight knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you change files a bit, and keeps its index up-to-date. :-)

Comparing Spotlight to Sherlock is a lot like comparing an RSS-enhanced version of Google to the old world-wide-web worm.... It's an entirely different animal altogether.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[soft_guy]

That was a major factor in favor of the PS2. It is somewhat harder to really "get" today given that you can buy a good DVD player for under $50, but back in 2000 DVD players were over $200, so a $399 PS2 that can also play DVDs was easier to justify as a purchase than a console like the Dreamcast that cannot play DVD.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[dannannan]

Windows XP comes with a thing called the "Indexing Service" that periodically crawls through the disk and builds the index that you speak of. It typically waits to do its indexing when your machine is idle, but I have that service permanently disabled because my disk is loud and the churning causes me to panic for fear that my supposedly idle machine has been 0wn3d.

D

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[ciroknight]

The fact is, I salute Microsoft for going this route.

I've evaluated plenty of SQL filesystems, attempted to implement my own, and with mild success, ran and tested many implementations. Here's what I found out:

SQL sucks as a filesystem. While it's great that SQL can store relations incredibly well, make finding files easier, and provide a good, intellegent backup system, its faults are with the implementation, every time.

It requires the programmer to make two choices; "Do I want to include an entire SQL engine in kernel space, or leave it in user space?" and "Do I want the 'parsing agent' to run in user space or in kernel space?".

To anyone who's ever worked with an SQL engine, the answer to the first question is obvious. If you move the entire SQL engine to kernel space, you're introducing kernel bloat in the size of 40-80 megabytes for the software itself (including caches, sql tables in ram, etc). But if you leave it in userspace, every user has to have their own copy of the software running for them, or your parser agent has to have a kernel hook that basically takes the input from the user accessing the file system, and redirect it to the SQL engine itself.

The "Parsing Agent" as it were, is a piece of code that actually rips apart the files you send to it, grabbing the content's type, and any metadata it can filter out of the file. It can then use two seperate transfers to send the file to one table, and the metadata to another. When searching for a file, it simply queries the metadata, and matches a file index to the files located in the data cache. This is how almost all modern desktop search technologies work (Google Desktop Search, Spotlight, and whatever Windows Longhorn will have).

The existance of a good parsing agent makes an SQL file system virtually irrelevant. I commend them for not wasting their time storing the whole files in an SQL database, but the metadata should be. That way, using a common API, all programs should be able to quickly find files they need to operate, making the file system more amorphous, and less rigid. Hell, if software engineers cared enough, we could get rid of the whole idea of a heirarchial file system now; simply tag incoming files with a UID, and write them to disk, making the "Parsing Agent" keep all of the metadata, and letting it deal with finding and opening files. You could have links on your desktop to commonly used searches "All files Containing the word 'Lyrics'" (a common one used during my tests).

Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[JohnsonWax]

"Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it."

If I'm not mistaken, Apple is using Core Data's sqlite interface to manage the metadata, so they're doing almost exactly what you are proposing.

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[AntigonusPiglet]

Apple actually developed the indexing technology even earlier than Mac OS 8.5 and Sherlock. It was code-named V-Twin, officially named "Apple Information Access Toolkit," and demonstrated at the Apple developer's conference in 1996 or 1997. The original designer of V-Twin was Doug Cutting, of Excite, Lucene, and Nutch fame.

Sherlock's "Find by Content" feature -- the one that crawled your files slowly -- was one application of the technology, but V-Twin was used for many other things over the years. I believe both Spotlight and the SearchKit are based on updated versions of this same infrastructure. As for why it didn't catch on in 1998: The old (pre-X) Mac OS didn't support multitasking very well (so indexing was intrusive), and disks were a lot smaller (so people didn't need search as much as they do now).

Re:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[Phroggy]

I've used BeOS and I am hopeful Apple's Spotlight will match, or exceed BeOS' implementation.

The guy who developed the Be filesystem is the same guy who developed Spotlight at Apple, so yeah, it'll probably be pretty good.

What about google's desktop search?

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

I'm amazed to not see it in the blurb, considering the love affair with Google. I know it works better than 'find' for me.

Re:What about google's desktop search?

[ergo98]

It's offtopic, but I used Google Desktop Search for a while and found it terrible. I switched to Copernic and have never looked back.

(Oh I tried the MSN search tool as well, but found Copernic superior to that as well)

empty promises...

[utexaspunk]

they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn.

It's pretty easy to make empty promises with a product that won't even be released until next year. The point is, OSX has this feature NOW...

Hmm...

[daveschroeder]

they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn

So, OS technology will have improved in 18-24 months?

Amazing!

Re:Hmm...

[burns210]

Two years is roughly what should be expected for 10.5/11... Apple has said they are going to slow down development(they can't hold this break neck speed indefinitely) so 12-16 has been the standard 10.x development time frame, another 6-12 months would be roughly correct.

Re:They both suck

[KillerDeathRobot]

Searching for stuff requires you to have organized it well in the first place.

No it doesn't. The point of searching is to bypass organization or to impose organization on data according to current needs.

Dunno...

[Quiet_Desperation]

I rarely search for files, and the current Mac OS X and WinXP search systems suffice. I guess I'm just not the target user type for this stuff.

I just keep my hard drive carefully arranged and orderly. Folders are your friend. Nest them with wild abandon. I also print out any interesting info tidbits (stuff I know I'll reference multiple times) I find online, and put them in a couple large notebooks that I maintain.

Re:Dunno...

[aftk2]

Yes, but see, that takes your time. It used to be (and still is, like in the system you describe above) that finding something on a computer required an investment of time: either that time was used beforehand, ensuring proper organization, or at the time of the search - wading through poorly organized folders, duplicates, old files, etc...

But now, the promise of these tools - in theory - is that we can eliminate this investment of time. We can drop file wherever we want to, and the searching is instantaneous, by whatever bit of criteria we happen to need, conceive, or have access to, at the time of search.

It's not perfect, though: I know that my sense of organization has devolved since I started using Quicksilver, and that is sometimes a problem, when I am forced to go manually through folders. Heh, who knows - maybe Apple will release some sort of Spotlight -> Automator transition that allows people to use spotlight queries to actually reorganize their data permanently, not smart folder this and query that, but actually reorganize data in the filesystem based on certain things (kind of like how iTunes manages the folders in its library folder.)

Re:Dunno...

[badasscat]

Yeah, but think about it - with desktop search, if you want to go after a file, just type the name, or some content related to it.

You can do this already with the search tools already built into Windows XP. Just type the name, part of the name, or search by type of file.

I don't see that this new "desktop search" thing is going to do anything other than teach people how to be disorganized. So now you can put any file anywhere you want without even knowing where it physically is on a disk. Big deal. The point is the OS still knows where it is, and what happens when something invariably gets erased either through user error or a system crash? You erase a folder now and you (should) know exactly what's in it. With the system they're talking about, you'd just lose a bunch of random files and you'd be coming across stuff you didn't even know you'd lost years after the fact (you'd only figure it out when you actually searched for those files, and you'd probably wonder why the search function is not coming up with anything).

I think the desktop metaphor not only still works fine, it is also necessary. There is real utility in knowing exactly where your OS thinks a file or folder really is - not just smart-search pseudo-folders that automatically update themselves based on your criteria (a neat idea, but this should be an addition to the desktop metaphor, not a replacement for it).

Tweaks and helpful features are one thing, but there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater like MS is talking about here. I sincerely hope there will be an option to just keep using your system the way we always have.

Remember how Windows XP turned off things like file extensions by default? Remember how the first thing you did when you got Windows XP, along with everybody else in the world, was to turn them back on? I feel like that's the sort of thing MS is trying to foist upon us again.

New search functions are fine. But I don't need to learn a completely new way of doing things on the desktop. My desktop - and my PC - works perfectly well as it is.

Re:Dunno...

[andreMA]

maybe Apple will release some sort of Spotlight -> Automator transition that allows people to use spotlight queries to actually reorganize their data permanently

+5 Intriguing
-5 Scary

*ponders*

Re:Dunno...

[PureCreditor]

Ever tried Smart Playlists in iTunes ?

- Give me the 25 most frequently played songs by either Spears, Beyonce, or Aguilera, added in the past 6 months, that are longer than 3 mins but shorter than 5.

Bam you have the list. And auto-updates as you add new songs and as time moves on.

Now imagine the same thing for the entire OS.

Smart Mailbox, Smart folders.

Even though Windows 98 has a really weak "Find" too, I use it everyday at work by dumping all my documents in "My Documents", and use search to find the file I want instead of going through folders, and scrolling hundreds of files.

Re:Dunno...

[nathanh]

- Give me the 25 most frequently played songs by either Spears, Beyonce, or Aguilera, added in the past 6 months, that are longer than 3 mins but shorter than 5.

... aaaannnd DELETE.

You're right, this is a useful feature!

Uh...OS 8.5

[Wyatt Earp]

Wasn't Sherlock on 8.5 the first "desktop search" tool? For the Apple/Windows fight, or did it get web intergration with 9? It's been so long ago I forgot.

Re:Uh...OS 8.5

[solios]

Web "integration" was there out of the box and was the Big Deal with Sherlock. It was such a Big Deal that it was integrated as a tab into the System-level "Find" command to augment it. Sherlock didn't search your hard drive, it searched the internets.

Oh, and it had banner ads.

This was nicely unobtrusive until OS 9, at which point Apple made Sherlock the Find command and replaced the simple, clean interface with the bloated "brushed metal" that we see to this day. Same functionality as previous incarnations with a more OMG TEH INTERNETS!!!! emphasis.

Oh, and it had banner ads. AND it was big and ugly. So I hauled in my "sherlock" from 8.6 and used that with my powerbook until I switched over to OS X.

And I didn't do that until they peeled Sherlock back into a separate app (that I've never launched on this machine) and left a useable Find in its place. Which we didn't have at all in between 8.6 and 10.2.

And...

[daveschroeder]

...I'm sure that Apple won't have been doing anything in the meantime.

Like, oh, working on Mac OS X 10.5.

Which will, quite literally, probably be shipping around the time Longhorn ships.

impromptu poll

[spoonyfork]

Does anyone else out there consider themselves an above-average to power user and completely not care about the desktop search battle?

I'm sure there are those that do care and think everyone else should too, and good for them, but I want to hear from those that don't care for whatever reason.

Re:impromptu poll

[BandwidthHog]

And for the stuff that falls under multiple categories, which folder should that go in?

[cue "but what about symlinks?" responses]

Re:impromptu poll

[Wyatt Earp]

Only file search I use on OS X is by content. I index folders I know I'll need to get into, so when I know I had X in some file in "School Stuff" and so I search by content.

Re:impromptu poll

[Otter]

Does anyone else out there consider themselves an above-average to power user and completely not care about the desktop search battle?

I care, because knowing what utilities can and can't do, and how to take advantage of the former and cover up for the latter, is what makes me a "power user".

Re:impromptu poll

[pilgrim23]

Indeed.
Who makes the best mouse-click and type-in-the- name look up. Who CARES?
My favorite search engine is...my BRAIN and eyes and a good shell program. On any system that supports any version of Norton Comander/ Midnite Commander, I can usually find a file in pretty short order.

Re:impromptu poll

[sonic_ak]

I personally don't care about things like spotlight, I know where my stuff is. The interesting question is how this sort of thing de-emphasizes actually organizing your stuff in the first place and how a system like this would affect children who grow up with it. Would they have trouble with simple organizational tasks? It seems that peoples personal organization styles mirror the way that they think, I don't think that what we need is less organization or less emphasis on logical thought. Its bad enough that you can take an Intro to Logic class in college and see people who look as they are encountering an entirely new way to think.

Re:impromptu poll

[ernst_mulder]

When I see the layout of other people's computers I always get the feeling I'm the onlym person that has a nicely ordered structure on my hard disk. I know where everything is, I hardly ever use find. On other people's Macs I see Document folders with >300 random files, often named "untitled document x" in "untitled folder y" and I always wonder how they cope. What's worse is the user's desktop with >50 icons! Especially Windows users seem to like cluttered desktops. Ask me for a document on my Mac and I'll get it for you in three seconds. I started my structure a long time ago when I got my first >10MB hard disk (yes, MB, not GB). Maybe I'm just a little bit of an authistic freak, but I'm sure I won't use Spotlight Find very often. Oh and working according to a nice structure is easy, but that might be MHO.

Re:impromptu poll

[BandwidthHog]

AAARRRGGGHHH!!!1!eleven!!!1!!

You *completely* missed your cue!

Okay, everybody, from the top of page four!

Search Technology

[CastrTroy]

The best way I found to find files on my computer is to keep them organized. Keeping them organized allows me to find files without having to keep an index of what's on there, or worry about whether a certain program can tell what's actually in the file. In the end it all comes down to proper organization.

Re:Search Technology

[2nd Post!]

"It all comes down to proper organization"

The point of Spotlight and desktop search, in general, is that the computer handles the proper organization.

Who would be more anal, perfect, and organized than a computer? Someone with OCD?

Re:Search Technology

[arminw]

...In the end it all comes down to proper organization...

Indeed true. Some people are forever looking for certain physical things, such as their car keys, cell phone and other small items. The computer is like a workshop. A workshop with its tools well organized is a pleasure, but a disorganized one, with tools mixed up is a real pain. Organization in a computer is just as beneficial in getting work done as it is in a real workshop. Even so, adding a good search system should not affect an organized computer user much, but might help those who are not well organized.

Re:Search Technology

[GaryPatterson]

So how do you search for (example) all images emailed to a family member in the two weeks before Christmas?

Spotlight can do this.

What about Excel files printed in the last week? Spotlight can do this too.

Or dog photos added to Pages documents that were subsequently sent to a friend?

With a little image metadata ("it's a dog") Spotlight can do this as well.

Organisation is great, but it's only giving you one part of the picture. Spotlight also tracks what you've done with those files, allowing you to effectively search your usage history *as well as* the file contents/names/etc.

WinFS

[ip_fired]

I thought that they had pretty much junked what would have been good search. I was looking forward to WinFS, hoping it to be an improvement over NTFS (a modern FS, one with no fragmentation!). And on top of that, cool searching!

But instead, they are going to make a background process that just indexes things like Spotlight.
I hope it is at least as flexible as Spotlight, to allow developers to make plugins for their indexing engine so that new filetypes can expose information to be searched.

I also hope they do a good job at making it transparent. I don't want my computer to be noticeably bogged down while it indexes a 4GB movie file (hopefully it won't index it in the first place!)

ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

'man find'

What about Beagle?

[Xpilot]

We can currently download Beagle for open source operating systems and desktops, and it's already somewhat usable. It's written in C# and requires Mono, and I think it's one of the killer apps for OSS too. We've also see it ported to Windows so things are getting very interesting here.

So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle :)

Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tiger is nice in that they've put search capability in a lot of places, but there's a lot more (in Longhorn)," Allchin said.

Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy, especially when comparing its features to those of an OS that will be on store shelves in 10 days. He might as well just say Longhorn will cure cancer and make your breath minty fresh while you use it. No matter what features it has, they're not doing anybody any good at 6PM on April 29th, 2005-- Tiger's will.

Re:Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have!

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy,"

Not Really. Longhorn Beta 1 ships in just over a month, and the RTM date is set in May 2006.

"No matter what features it has, they're not doing anybody any good at 6PM on April 29th, 2005"

Yeah, and Tiger's features aren't doing anybody any good at 5:59PM on April 29, 2005.

Yes, Tiger will be released before Longhorn. But, when you get down to it, neither product has shipped yet. Right now, it's prerelease vs. prerelease.

Microsoft *will* get Longhorn out the door in 2006. Whether it will be a good product has yet to be seen.

Don't sell them short, though. They have a *lot* of programming talent and they *can* release a solid product. More and more, it's looking like they will *have* to release a solid product.

Re:Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have!

[GaryPatterson]

"cure cancer" ?

So... Longhorn will finally kill off Linux?

Re:Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy,"

Not Really. Longhorn Beta 1 ships in just over a month, and the RTM date is set in May 2006.

Yes, really. Until it's preloaded on systems, and in boxes on store shelves, and can be bought and used by the public at large, it doesn't exist. Betas don't count for shit, even if Microsoft says they're okay for use in a production environment (HA!). Neither does some RTM date that's more than a year away and not even remotely set in stone no matter what Microsoft says.

Re:They both suck

[MustardMan]

What, you mean like smart folders, that automatically detect when you add a new file of a certain type, anywhere on your hard drive, and add it to the virtual folder? Oops, Tiger has that.

Smart folders WILL change the way you use your computer. There's no need to hunt through folders for a certain document, as all organization can be done at a smart folder level. Plainly put, it doesn't MATTER where your data is stored in the file structure, smart folders will allow you to organize everything easily and quickly. Just like file systems make it where you don't care where the bits lie on the disk, smart folders will make it where you don't care where the files lie in the directory structure. This is a BIG improvement.

Of course, you didn't actually bother to think about the point you were attempting to make, because you were rushing to get your post near the beginning of the dicsussion so it could be modded up.

Microsoft has delivered in the past.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 95 brought us far more features than Macintosh 84.

Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past.

[globalar]

Some people really believe that Windows is pretty up to par with OSX and will go after this point. Check out these comments from ComputerWorld (poor magazine IMO). For record, I don't like the magazine or agree with any of this:

"Mac OS X may be a nice-looking overlay to Unix, but it still leaves much to be desired. For example, networking in an environment where multiple servers are used is decidedly flaky, permissions must be changed to do simple things like adding fonts or nonstandard printers, and administrative access is difficult."

"...the view from the trenches is that Windows will be the way to go until an OS that is as user- and admin-friendly comes around."

And another:

"A couple of years after the release of Win 95, I attended an Apple event celebrating the new features in Mac OS 8.0. As I sat watching this operating system version that offered full-screen wallpaper (a feature of Win 3.1), Internet options (catching up with Win 95), systemwide sound effects (another Win 3.1 feature) and more, I said to the longtime Mac user sitting beside me that this was Apple's attempt to maintain parity with Windows 95."

Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past.

[NutscrapeSucks]

Just as a historical point, Apple took an astoundingly long time to respond to Win95. In late 1995, the only way to get your Mac on the Internet was to warez a copy of MacTCP (academic only software), and then use this really crappy FreePPP thing. Apple finally got around to shipping OpenTransport, but it was just horrifically buggy in the beginning.

Win95 was the most hyped thing in computer industry history, and Apple's management was so screwed up at the time they just ignored it (other than the snarky Win95=Mac84 bumper stickers).

Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past.

[damiam]

FWIW, I've had four different Windows machines on my home network at various points, and none of them has ever reliably been able to access each other's SMB shares. Linux and OSX, using Samba, both work perfectly on the first try. So OSX works better better for me at accessing Windows shares than Windows itself does (this is XP, 2000, and 2003).

Re:They both suck

[dcclark]

I'm not sure where that's coming from. I can't speak for Longhorn's search features, but Spotlight (in OS X 10.4) will search based on contents, file name, and tons of metadata. You could toss your files onto your hard disk in any random way you want, and it would be equally efficient at searching as if you had organized it in a more human-friendly way.

Ideally, if you can't remember what you called the document, then maybe you can remember a few key words from its contents, the approximate day when you created it, some metadata such as "photo taken at the Mackinaw Bridge" or something like that.

So while this may not be groundbreakingly new, I think that Spotlight really will provide USEFUL features. Based on what I've seen in previews and whatnot, it would be extremely useful to have an always-ready and always-accessible search feature which can handle metadata easily.

Re:With longhorn?

[Enrique1218]

They didn't give an exact date. But, they did mention something about hell and snowman.

Re:Microsoft always steals features

[Quiet_Desperation]

BUT, they implement them better than anyone else.

With the exception of GUI design, networking, popup menus, text rendering, web standards, file systems, security, user friendliness, software licensing agreements, programming languages, feature creep/application bloat and general business practices.

Other than those things they're great! :)

Copernic Desktop Search

[blueturffan]

Can't wait for Longhorn? Try Copernic Desktop Search for WinXP. http://www.copernic.com/)

Makes finding files or email messages a breeze.

Why am I not suprised

[xbrownx]

that CNET comes up with a shitty article, totally ignoring Google?

Hold on a second.

[Moofie]

You mean that two Microsoft honchos say that the product they will probably ship sometime next year is better than the stuff that's available (more or less) right now?

Wow. Stop the presses.

Neither of them were first!

[Trixter]

Anyone here old enough to remember Lotus Magellan? If any company or product could be considered first in the desktop search category, it would be Magellan. Released in the late 1980s, it indexed every file on your hard drive into Btrees; when you searched for a term, it would narrow the results in realtime with every keystroke -- blazingly fast. Found files were displayed (many looking just like they would in their native program thanks to several file type filters) with the search word highlighted. Truly one of the MS-DOS highlights of the 1980s.

Re:Why a desktop search tool?

[izomiac]

My guess is that Joe Average can't remember if he saved Important.doc to C:\, C:\My Documents, C:\Documents and Settings\JAverage\My Documents, N:\, or to the Start Menu/whereever else inexperienced users tend to save things.

Well, THIS sure is helpful...

[Twon]

"Instead of being a static graphic indicating the type of document a file is, an icon in Longhorn will be a smaller representation of the first page of a document." ... so I'll have to read the filenames carefully if I'm trying to grab all the .pdf's I've made of my Word documents if they're in the same directory! Wheee, thanks!

And the winner is

[FidelCatsro]

BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it .
not to mention the other companys that have since been making products of this nature .in an MS vs apple fight since Tiger comes out in 10 days and longhorn comes out god knows when, its pretty one sided and apple wins hands down

Re:And the winner is

[pianophile]

BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it .

Did you know that Dominic Giampaolo, one of the file system gurus from Be, now works at Apple? you can even download a book he wrote about file systems from his web page.

Cool!

Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries?

[ikewillis]

How about BeOS LiveQueries, created by Dominique Giampaolo who would later be hired by Apple to develop Spotlight?

Spotlight is largely an improvement on the ideas he developed with LiveQueries, adding natural language metadata searching to an OS that's pro-actively metadata oriented in the first place.

If anything, everyone else copied BeOS... the real difference is Spotlight is available to the public at the end of the month. With WinFS, who can say? 2007? 2008? 2009?

The open source world can look forward to Spotlight-like functionality once Beagle and inotify mature, the only real drawbacks are that it's currently rather unstable and written in .NET/Mono

Re:Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries?

[mrchaotica]

the only real drawbacks are that it's currently rather unstable and written in .NET/Mono

Ah, so that's why Microsoft keeps delaying -- they're waiting for the code to be written for them!

Let's peek in on GENIUS at work.

[hey!]

Engineer 1 (GENIUS): Wow, these 100GB hard disks sure hold a lot of data.

Engineer 2: Yeah, I know, half the time I can't find a file I made a few days ago.

Engineer 1 (GENIUS): Well, these are computers after, all, wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to actually search for your data?

Engineer 2: Well, there's that cute puppy thingy.

Engineer 1 (GENIUS): No I mean a way that didn't suck.

Engineer 2: *** dumbstruck ***

Manager: Quick, call the patent attorneys!

They're not empty promises

[RLW]

Microsoft has been the *best* and *truest* inovator of the MS Windows desktop (and of MS Windows OSes for that matter) the world has ever seen. Nobody puts more features in to MS windows applications than anybody else. True it does borrow some ideas from *completely* unrelated fields (such as OSX for instance). But putting those features into MS Windows is the real litmus test of MS Windows OS inovation.

Re:They're not empty promises

[BandwidthHog]

Nobody puts more features in to MS windows applications than anybody else.

You might be right, but those guys at Gator/Claria sure gave 'em a run for their money.

nostalgia moment

[fred fleenblat]

Anyone remember xargs?

find . | xargs grep foo /dev/null

ah, the good old days.

Magellan lives on as X1

[micron]

Most of the guys who wrote Magellan got back together and released a new desktop search package called X1. http://www.x1.com

It is quite good, and worth looking at, especially if you were a Magellan fan.

Re:Magellan lives on as X1

[Your Pal Dave]

And the free Yahoo! desktop search is based on X1:

About Yahoo! Desktop Search

Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta
Yahoo! Desktop Search 1.0
Build 1500zk
Copyright © 2003-2005 Yahoo! Inc. and X1 Technologies, Inc.

All Rights Reserved. Patents Pending.

Outside In® Viewer and Content Access Technology © 1991-2004 Stellent Chicago, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Click here to try Enterprise Desktop Search from X1.

This just in...

[SoupIsGood Food]

This just in! Microsoft downplays competitor's achievement with a promise of better functionality in a vaporware product! Film at 11!

SoupIsGood Food

Re:They both suck

[jafac]

That scares me.

If Smart Folders detect porn, and put all my porn into one folder, then I'll literally have a hundred thousand files in one folder. I doubt Finder, Explorer, or Nautilus can handle browsing such a beast.

Unless; Smart Folders can automatically put my porn into; Readheads, Asian, Lesbian, Threesomes, Celebrities, etc. . . .

Inovation == Bloat

[timigoe]

The only problem with all this inovation is the OS itself gets bigger and bigger and far more tied into the core, meaning more problems if theres a security 'blip', which we know will happen. No software is ever 100% secure.

Re:empty vaporware promises...

[DickBreath]

Vaporware will always be better than a shipping product. Just go back through history looking at every vaporware announcement just in the 20th century alone. "My vaporware product will do everything Joe's shipping software does, plus X and Y and Z! So don't buy the currently shipping product. Wait for my vaporware."

Maybe it is time to change that old IBM joke into a Microsoft joke. You know,the one where Ballmer/Gates/et.all just sit on the edge of the bed telling her how good it is going to be, but they never do anything. Wish I could remember that joke.

Re:Lol. Mod me redundant.

[jafac]

MORE advanced than grep?

Maybe more (nontechnical) user-freindly. But can these search engines use RegEx syntax? Hell No.

In my book, that's LESS advanced.

Oh great...

[blueZ3]

Desktop search will be wonderful in Longhorn. Like I can wait until 2008 to find those desktop icons MS keeps hiding :o)

Re:They both suck

[taybin]

It's not just for MP3s. They took iTune's MP3 indexing features and generalized so it would be useful for other applications. They added it to the OS so that it would be generally available. I wouldn't be suprised if the new iTunes doesn't have an internal MP3 search, but instead uses the new, generalized, Spotlight search.

Magic Icons.

[zkn]

"However, its implementation(Apples) is not as universal as what Microsoft is proposing."

So what does this really mean? Apple already does this but Microsoft promises to NOT ONLY do exactly the same, but have improved uppon the ideer by their next release.

We have an OS versus a Proposal. How can it be they declare the proposal the winner? By that time chances are OSX will have evolved just a tad bit. It takes less time to develop a feature already implimenten then it does starting from the bottom. Even if you do have somthing to copycat.

Actually, you're kind of wrong

[daveschroeder]

No, scratch that.

Really wrong.

1. The user does not have to organize the contents. At all.

2. Almost all metadata, except the one example you picked, requires no user action or intervention. Things like the contents of a textual document (text files, word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, email messages, bookmarks, etc.) Things like the properties of a file (larger or smaller than a given size, created before, after, or during a time, etc.) Things like the properties of image files (all CMYK files of type X with resolution Y, etc.)

The ONLY thing you have to add keyword metadata to manually is pictures.

So, in sum, you're completely wrong.

This article drove me nuts

[Pecisk]

Totally 'Microsoft PR', nothing more.

First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form. But as search on my OS X stations I just click on input where i start to type file name which I look for and...whola! there it is.

And second - Longhorn is 3 YEARS still to go! It is like middle ages for history! For christ sakes, Microsoft must be desperate to push such PR stunt like this.

And yeah, as open source advocat, I have to say that Beagle will certanly rock the world too - because it is actively developed and pushed by Novel/Ximian guys. And of coarse, let's not forget king of the hill in search now - Google.

And if it is not paid article - however it looks like - then it is such "we just love Microsoft" style press which I simply can't stand anymore.

Re:This article drove me nuts

[As Seen On TV]

First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form.

Basically everything you said here is wrong.

Ever since Panther, we've had a thing called Search Kit. (The technology behind Search Kit goes farther back than that.) Search Kit would index the contents of readable files, meaning plain text, and allow you to search them.

It was slow, it wasn't extensible, and it wasn't modular.

Spotlight is completely different. Spotlight has a content-search component, but it also has a metadata-search component, and both are linked to data through modular pieces of code called importers. Each importer is associated with one or more file types. When a file of a given type changes on disk (is written to, moved or created), the Spotlight import task (mdimport) calls the relevant importer(s) to re-index the file. These importers are very simple and run very fast. Even on old hardware, the overhead of Spotlight indexing isn't noticeable, in large part because it runs at a very low priority.

So Spotlight is really something new. It's ubiquitous and it's modular and it's fast.

Microsoft's search technology looks strikingly similar on paper. Problem is it only exists on paper.

Re:grep anyone?

[DickBreath]

The search tools being discussed are NOT like grep.

For instance, if you have some text in an OpenDocument format (i.e. the file format of OpenOffice.org, and soon KOffice and maybe AbiWord) then you will never find that text using grep. (Because an OpenOffice.org file is actually a ZIP file.)

Search tools need to have custom plug ins that know how to search specific filetypes. Searching an HTML file, then use a plugin that won't find the tags, for example. Searching a GIF or JPEG, then search the image comment, but this requires knowing something about the layout of the GIF or JPEG file. Trying to search within a PDF, etc.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I don't get it

[yabos]

It's good because it's not slow as hell searching. The index is updated before you search so you know exactly where everything is. Windows search is slow as molasis in winter. With a pre indexed drive you type your search in and instantly you have your files.

Re:I don't get it

[fribhey]

because OS X's spotlight searches INSIDE of files and meta tags. it can search inside email messages (not just search but subject or sender) and can search inside of word docs, pdfs, mp3s, etc etc. current search tools in only search file names/types/dates. Mac OS X Tiger indexes every file on the hard drive so search results will be instantaneous as you type. read about spotlight here to see why it is a big deal vs. current search tools: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/

In Gaming News

[r00td43m0n]

In Gaming News.
Duke Nukem Forever will be better than Half Life 2.

No it doesn't

[yabos]

I've used the Google search for finding PPT files that I need to study for an exam. I type in the topic of what I want to study and it finds the files. I don't have to remember which file contains which topic.


This helps a lot because for example on the topic of utilitarianism the ppt files are util1.ppt ... util4.ppt and have stuff from different philosophers in them. Now I don't care what the name of the file is, I can just type in the philosopher's name and find what I want.

Re:They both suck

[As Seen On TV]

No, iTunes will keep its own database for the obvious reason: It's cross-platform. We have to ship an iTunes for Windows, which means we have to have an internal database anyway.

iTunes 5 will get the benefits of the souped-up V100 database, though, so searching will be even faster. (This won't affect you unless you have hundreds of thousands of songs in your library.)

3 words - locate | grep

[gosand]

How do I search? I use "locate", "|", and "grep". That's it. OK, sometimes I use "which" and "find". But I don't even have to use these very often, because I organize my work.

Why is desktop search such a big deal again? Are people just writing files to random locations on their hard drives? Even when I have to use Windows at work, I put things in logical places so I don't have to search for them.

Re:3 words - locate | grep

[joh]

Just look at what file managers have become. They literally encourage putting everything in a hierarchy one level deep. Neither the Windows Explorer nor the Mac Finder can really cope with deep hierarchies -- you're just lost after two or three levels. So you put everything in a handful of "folders" in your ~ and then, well, then you'll be in need of a tool to find things.

Not that I think that meta-data is a bad thing. More than one way to get things organized is always a good thing. I think that while all this stuff is mostly PR, you and me will be able to put it to good use. Just ignore the hype and enjoy the fallout.

Re:3 words - locate | grep

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know how many people stick documents, well, wherever they may fall? They have _no_ clue to navigate to c:\Documents and Settings\\Documents -- it's where Office type documents will default. They just see "My Documents" on their Desktop and go to town. Or save everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) to their Desktop. Or just C:\ in most other cases. Heck, when forced to use Windows I'll go to c:\Data and/or use c:\Temp (each created on the spot).

Otherwise, yeah, I'm with you 100%. Except I tend to over name my files, and am anal about what goes where and why. A simpe find | grep usually does the trick for me.

Even in the Mac world I find people putting stuff all over. / is up for grabs. ~/Library is usually not a good place, but they're there too. ~/Documents? I stay away from it as too many applications like to use it for settings as well.

Every grandma type Linux user I've seen sticks everything into ~/ for no particular reason. Those are rare -- and typical Linux users are anal in their storage as well...

I remember, way back when, on the "main frames" at college (Unix based) people were always "losing" files. .Let's.name.a.all.my.files.with.periods.and.wonder .where.they.go.

Who will win "desktop search"? Apple. Hands down. For functionality. Otherwise for the numbers, today, it will be Google in the Wintel world.

Re:With longhorn?

[terraformer]

...something about hell and snowman.

That's "snowball's chance in hell" (Results 1 - 10 of about 27,300), not "snowman's chance in hell" Results 1 - 10 of about 615. Oddly enough, I did not use longhorn's fancy search engine to find that out...

Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor

[pointwood]

It's the Contextual Linkage Engine that will be part of KDE4. They got some pretty cool ideas which you can read about in that article and also in the comments.

Re:Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor

[double-oh three]

If you confuse Contextual Linkage engine with "Trappist Westvleteren 12 (Yellow Cap)", which is a type of beer, you're either way too drunk or very extremely not drunk, so much so you've gone through the other side and have emerged into drunkeness.

I think you were trying to point here.

Duke Nukem Forever??

[moonpxi]

Is it me, or does it seems that Longhorn will be released with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever??

By that, you can already expect the release date.

A few misconceptions..

[bmajik]

WinFS was originally going to be like, the next version of "Organize your Photos Wizard". It grew into something so scope-out-of-control that it had to be cut from LH client (at least, the full WinFS vision). The ship vehicle seems to change daily.

That said, what WinFS is trying to tackle currently is considerably more ambitious than what Spotlight, MSN Desktop, or Google Desktop Search do. The "someday" WinFS is not a background process that indexes text documents. Not even close. What Apple is delivering is a "search thing". That is _one application_ of WinFS, but by no means the point of doing it.

The comparison of Spotlight to WinFS indicates (understandable) misconceptinos about what WinFS does. That's reasonable since the WinFS story isn't universally clear within MS, much less outside it :)

Oh - about NTFS fragmentation. I've been trying to fight this good fight internally for a couple weeks (it was bugging me). The NTFS people claim that defragmentation on NTFS isn't strictly necessary, but it can make certain disks MUCH better and makes most disks "somewhat" better. There are some people on the NTFS team that would be happy to tell customers not to bother with defragmenters but old habits die hard. In any case, i presented the case for ffs cylinder groups and made sure the NTFS developers i talked to understood it. It's not news to them, and they dont feel there is a significant difference in the observed fragmentation levels in normal NTFS volumes and normal ffs volumes.

Personally, i never run a defragger on my NTFS volumes so in that sense, its no different than ffs derivatives (i dont worry about fragmentation)

In any case, there is no current WinFS plan in which NTFS goes away - WinFS's filesystem component attacks a different problem space than NTFS, and WinFS (currently, and, afaik) needs NTFS under it anyhow.

Re: Indexing a 4GB Movie - you might be surprised what WinFS does when it finally gets all the way cooked. Whenever that is :/

Battle...

[taskforce]

While there's a true battle of the OSes with regards to features, (Tiger and Longhorn are both very good OSes from what I've seen) that battle is for individuals to make up their mind on, not market forces.

Surely nobody can realistically believe that there's going to be a real battle of numbers in the same way there is for games consoles/competing digital disk formats etc?

I don't know the exact figures, but I do know that Windows gets about the same number of new users each year as Mac OS has in there entire installed base... No matter how good Mac OS is (and I'm sure it's very good) it's not like we don't know with infinity+1:1 odds which OS is going to be the most widely adopted?

More like OS 6 + On Location

[podperson]

I'd say On Location was the first serious tool of this type. Find Pro was a freeware/shareware search tool which eventually was licensed by Apple and became Sherlock.

Re:Why compare OS X 10.4 with Longhorn?

[Enrique1218]

cNet is bias against Apple. I wonder why they have Microsoft executive commenting on another company's product. Where is Phil Schiller or executive in charge of OS development commenting. I bet they didn't bother to asked. cNet has pretty much trolled this story since Apple released Tiger in various forms. I don't wear a tin foil hat but I can read between the lines.

Re:Indexing every file built into the OS is new

[GaryPatterson]

Have a read of posts by "As Seen on TV". You might need to dip into his recent post history to see what I mean.

He's an Apple software engineer, and gives a good insight into exactly what Spotlight can do.

It's not just searching by content, and it's not just the metadata that we've known for ages.

I'd elaborate, but he's already explained it much better.

Re:empty vaporware promises...

[netringer]

Vaporware will always be better than a shipping product. Just go back through history looking at every vaporware announcement just in the 20th century alone. "My vaporware product will do everything Joe's shipping software does, plus X and Y and Z! So don't buy the currently shipping product. Wait for my vaporware."

It's gets even better than that.

I remember an actual quote from a Microsoft executive (Ballmer?) many years ago along the lines of, "They just copied what we're going to have to the next version of..." something.

That's a statement you have to go to Bizarro World to parse.

That joke...

[NanoProf]

Three women are discussing how their husbands make love. The first says, "My husband is a footbal player. He is really powerful and energetic in bed, and this is a real turn on for me." The second says, "My husband is a musician, and when we make love it's as if he were playing me. He al- ways knows exactly what I want and gives it to me without my asking." The third says, "Well, my husband is a sales representative for IBM. When we make love all he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it's going to be when I finally get it."

(http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0213.htm)

No.

[bmajik]

Shiping the wrong thing is worse than not shipping anything.

Everything we ship has to live for at least n years, where n changes depending on what it is. We have to patch it, we have to run regressions against it _forever_. When we come up with something else better, we have to convince developers why this is bad and why they should switch. We never, ever get to remove it without upsetting everyone.

Just throwing out something that kind of solves a few Photos/PIM scenarios means we're introducing new concepts and APIs that we cant unload.. even though we want it to do more and to do it better.

My team for instance is way far out from shipping its product. We've been letting key customers work with our unreleased internal milestone bits. Parts of it are utterly broken. It doesn't do anywhere near what it needs to do. We're just getting feedback to make sure we're on the right track and to get people thinking about what's coming and how it may help what they're trying to acheive.

Even so, the overwhelming feeedback is "just give it to us now". I suppose we could, but it'd be unfinished crap (even more so than some other things we _did_ release ;) and we'd be adding support baggage. And for what?

As someone on a team who has no idea when their work will see the light of day - i am at least as frustrated as you are about MS stuff not shipping.

But ultimately, it comes down to shipping the right thing even if it takes longer. The risk you take is that you miss your opportunity - it's obviously a tradeoff. I cannot make those sorts of "soft" decisions, and especially not about the WinFS project as a whole. Guys down in the trenches (even very smart NT kernel guys) don't always see the picture the same way the people at the top do.. or even as their trenchmates do. I don't have (or need to have) undying faith in the abilities of the management above me, but the arguments i've heard for doing things the way they're being done are generally not objectinable. Again - the course of action is not obvious, so you dont have unilateral approval :)

Incidentally, developers dont like 1 billion APIs per year. They dont like it when we "get something out there" and then abandon it.
We've done that in the past and we'll probably do it in the future, but it really sucks and lots of people hate doing it, up and down the chain.

As an aside, one appealing thing about .NET is we can start to leave Win32 behind. Surely you dont want us to release CreateFile only to later come up with CreateFileEx a while later.. or Foo() followed by Foo2() and Foo3()...this is the kind of crap that happened with Win32 as it evolved.

Normally I'd figure we'd get a warmer response for trying to do the right thing in the first version :)

Re:hey, dumbass

[mr100percent]

Tiger is more than an update, it's got features that I'd pay to upgrade to. Automator? VoiceOver Spoken Interface? Quicktime 7? Spotlight architecture? I'd pay for each of those features, and I'm getting a bunch of extra features with the OS, like RSS support and Access Control Lists.

So Spotlight isn't as good as Longhorn? Care to explain to me their strengths and weaknesses? Can you provide me with a screenshot or two? The story linked to in this article is no good, it tells of things that Apple already has, and leaves out details on the search technology.

Re:They both suck

[As Seen On TV]

No. There is no chance that we'll release any software for Linux. There are several reasons why. Let me explain them in no particular order.

First, Linux is our closest competitor. It's not a very good competitor, for reasons that should be obvious, but it's our closest. We have no desire to advance that. That's purely a business decision. (I'm not a business guy. I don't have an opinion about this. But it's how things are.)

Second, Linux is utterly impossible to support. An operating system where every nine-year-old can run his own kernel is not an operating system that we have any interest in working with. The whole overriding philosophy behind Apple is that working with your computer should be a good experience. It shouldn't be frustrating or unpleasant. You should never have a point where you don't like your computer. If we shipped our internal Linux ports, they would fail to work properly on two out of three computers out there. We'd be generating bad experiences for our customers. That's not how we do business.

Third, the reason we ported iTunes to Windows was to sell iPods and music. Linux users don't buy iPods or music. This isn't just anecdotal; the market research is overwhelmingly convincing. So there's no motivation to port.

Fourth, the Mac mini is $500, and its targeted specifically toward people who already own one computer cobbled together from parts. It's designed to be a drop-in replacement for an old-fashioned home computer with detached display, the kind all Linux users have. They should buy Mac minis instead. And, in fact, they are. We can't keep 'em on the shelves of our stores. Post-sales polling says that something like one in three Mac mini buyers self-describe as being primarily users of Linux.

Fifth and finally, in every single environment where Linux and Mac are viable alternatives, we're taking down business hand over fist. This is most obvious in post production. Discreet and Avid used to own post. Then Discreet started shipping their products in a Linux version last year. Suddenly customers were faced with a choice of a Linux product or an Apple product. Lots of them, on the strength of the marketing buzz, chose Linux. They're all going back. Bunim-Murray bought fifty seats of Smoke on Linux two years ago. Every one of them has been replaced with Final Cut Pro on G5s now. Our solutions work better.

Bottom line: Linux has the raw potential to compete with us. Windows doesn't, nor vice versa. Windows is so insular that a Mac can't really do the job of a Windows computer. Likewise, it's so insular that a Windows computer can't integrate into an open network like a Mac can. We're changing that a little at a time, but it's really how things are right now.

Linux, on the other hand, has the raw, untapped potential to compete with us. They're ten years behind us; we started working on Mac OS X technologies in the mid-1990s back when there was still a NeXT. Linux basically hasn't changed since. Evolution, yes, but no revolutionary changes. No Quartz, no Open Directory, no Cocoa, hell, not even anything that can compare with the Finder. So we're not worried, not by a long shot, but we recognize that if somebody were to take Linux and dump that stupid license mess and really invest time, money and energy in making it a modern operating system, it could potentially compete with us. So we're not interested in calling attention to it.

So no. No Linux ports.