MS Upgrades To Be Smaller And More Frequent

duplicantk8 writes "Following the numerous delays to the Vista launch, MS is planning to have more frequent and smaller incremental upgrades, according to the Financial Times." From the article: "Those delays are set to end late next year with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95. The new versions of the company's key PC software are likely to rekindle higher growth after a period that saw its growth rate slip below 10 per cent for the first time last year, according to Wall Street analysts. Mr Ballmer's comments are the most public sign yet of the dent to Microsoft's confidence in its core development process that resulted from the Vista delays."

Comments

Great

[dancpsu]

These "smaller and more frequent" releases were formerly free bugfixes. Now they will be crap you have to pay for. I think we'll see things like the service pack issues where small fix #9 worked okay, but #8 and #10 had horrible issues.

too ambitious?

[sqlrob]

Wasn't WinFS originally supposed to be out with NT 4, and they *still* can't make it?

It won't help

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

Smaller, more frequent upgrades will cost more to publish, will increase their support costs, and won't result in increased sales/upgrades. Most home users upgrade automatically when they buy a new PC, most corporate users upgrade en masse when there is good reason to do so. Trying to shorten the upgrade cycle in the corporate environment will backfire. Smart IT managers will still only upgrade when there is a compelling reason to do so, and now they might have the opportunity to cherry-pick smaller upgrades that would theoretically be less expensive.

Microsoft almost got it right with XP, but then they got greedy/stupid at the last minute and fragmented the product line (first Pro v Home, then Media). The 31 flavors of Vista is bad enough, but to compound that with multiple, more frequent upgrades will be even worse.

never give it automatic control

[CiXeL]

it reboots your system for you. really pissed me off how many times i lost work to it.

I can see this as only a good thing...

[HerculesMO]

For Linux that is.

Tell me which corporation will install a new point release of ANY Microsoft OS? Hell, remember service pack 2? That's technically speaking, a whole point release. And where I work, and countless other places, IT managers opted NOT to install it for a *very* long time until the bugs were worked out in that point release.

This idea of 'smaller' and 'more frequent' upgrades plays merely into the Linux world's hands. The problem with Windows is that there's a tie-in to everything. So if a change must be made, it affects the OS at the kernel level. With Linux, kernel updates aren't as frequent nor as impacting. However, KDE can release a new version and since it's part of x windows and not attached to the OS in a surgical manner, it really doesn't matter. People don't know that now because Linux isn't mainstream, but they will when they find themselves extensively testing for compatibility with legacy apps they have in-house, or whatever with regards to Windows.

This is the opportunity for the Linux community to come together and offer a *true* desktop competitor to Windows. As it stands right now, and I know the /. users will voice complaint -- Linux on the desktop sucks. The key to break into that market is ease of use and while as /.ers we can generally 'figure it out' even if we are unfamiliar, the average Joe will not. Apple is going in the right direction there but with limited hardware and inflated prices, it's not a viable alternative for the desktop, as pretty as it is.

If Linux as a desktop becomes EASY to use (and I mean damned near idiotproof), the server can pretty much remain as it is. Nobody cares about the server when they are using their desktop, especially as an end-user in say, Accounting. They just want to get their figures out the door without having applications crash and close on them.

Now's the time to do it though.. Microsoft is going to set themselves up badly with Vista... and sometimes you only get one good chance to whack the bad guy in the back of the head. And then kick him while he's down :)

Re:Smaller changes?

[Jugalator]

Hmm, I don't understand this joke. :-s

I suppose you haven't used the latest versions of Vista? I was just doing it and is totally confused by the new Explorer UI, and I'm pretty used to working with Windows. I can't imagine what Vista similar to this form will do to my mom. When others seem to be trying to simplify, MS sure is going the other way.

For example, if you go to Documents from the Start Menu, you're seamlessly put in a virtual folder. Not really a physical one where the files are, but a folder based on a file search. The files there can be in several different places, but you don't really notice easily as the searches are now instnataneous thanks to the new indexer (a good thing in all this mess). So then you try to go to your *real* documents folder and find it's in a completely restructured place (hint: Documents and Settings is no more in Vista). And there you have the changes involved when you just try to go to a folder.

It's really, really, a lot of changes in this build, feels like more to me than going from NT4 -> 2000 actually.

And that's just the end-user thing. What's in there for devs? Well, an entirely new development API from scratch -- WinFX is there to succeed Win32, and it's anything but similar, don't even think of having it being backwards compatible. While Win32 was C libraries, this is .NET framework based. A side effect is that you can no longer develop in C++, in that case you need to use Managed C++, which is very much incompatible with regular C++, with even new keywords introduced like "gcnew" for "garbage collected new" and "^" for a garbage collected pointer, etc.

I'm actually starting to believe Microsoft may be introducing *too much* stuff in Vista at once for devs and end-users alike. To develop Windows Vista apps, you're best off in using Visual Studio 2005 (not out yet), .NET Framework 2.0 (not out yet), and three recently announced products which didn't even have a counterpart before. Then you can start developing Avalon (a new API) apps in XAML (a new language) and a .NET language of choice. No, simple C or C++ won't do it at all, it's totally incompatible. You need e.g. VB .NET, C#, J#, or Managed C++.

So don't come here and tell me there can't be much smaller changes. ;-) This is an OS I think administrators will fear of rolling out due to its changes, not to speak of its new hardware requirements because it heavily uses the GPU as a desktop renderer (another not too tiny change btw).