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Windows Vista Delayed Again
Trenty writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has delayed Windows Vista yet again. Jim Allchin told analysts that the OS would not ship in January of 2007, which is a 1-2 month delay. Oddly, even though they are citing the need for more time to tweak security, business editions will available to volume licensing customers before the close of the year."
i think i remember reading they had to "ship" a version to business customers early so their support plan would be worth a damn, otherwise they feared many large businesses would not renew the support plan, and that would mean a HUGE drop in revenue
While I can't imagine having to use Windows as an workstation OS going forward, is it really any surprise that MS is pushing back a release date.....again? Of course we will see the usual spiel from the Dvoraks and Cringleys about how Apple has convinced MS to make Vista EFI compatible right from launch....yadda yadda CONSPIRACY...yadda, but I think MS's reorg finally has them looking at more than $$ for once and it is starting to show.
And if anybody asks I never said that.
- InTRUHell -
That said, it reminds me of an interesting story. What happens when a company doesn't want to wait for MS to ship them the final version of an OS (say... Windows 95)? The answer is in this fun little entry in The Old New Thing weblog from a Microsoft employee.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I remember when MacOS X 10.4 got released there were plenty of comments from MS people that Vista had similar but "better" things and would be out shortly. Now Vista has been pushed back to the point where we can expect to see MacOS X 10.5 first (scheduled for the end of this year apparently), so really all those comparisons pitting Vista against Tiger were vastly premature - the comparison is Vista with Leopard - and we don't know what that will come with yet.
In the meantime the Linux side of things continues to move along. At the present rate I would expect it reasonable to find Xgl or AIGLX along with Beagle and similar as standard in distributions released around the end of this year, along with a more Cairo-ised GTK and a steadily improving GNOME. I don't know anticipated release dates for KDE 4.0, but I don't believe it's too far away (compared the the Vista release), and certainly promises to be impressive. A lot of Vista's claims to superiority are going to be already present in Linux distros before Vista gets released.
Certainly this has to be a worrying trend for MS. The Linux desktop used to be well behind and playing catch-up. While it could still use some polish in some areas, as far as new features are concerned Linux has pulled up to level pegging - that implies that the Linux Desktop is improving much faster, and Linux pulling ahead is simply a matter of time. In the meantime Apple has been managing a much faster release cycle and doesn't seem to be having any problems staying ahead of MS.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You assume less holes. Microsoft has not really proven that each version contains a significantly fewer number of holes. Given the same time frame as 2000, XP has proven to be equally flawed.
Also, keep in mind that they openly admitted that they stopped development halfway through to rewrite the entire OS and still attempted to make a deadline! That to me says that they had to cut corners on development and on testing and I'm willing to bet their are GAPING holes as a result.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
A desktop running XP is NOT a thin client.
MS has made it clear they will support older operating systems with security patches for at least 5 years after they discontinue selling it.
Businesses buy new computers on average every 4-5 years, if for no reason other than it is cheaper than maintaining the old hardware. Cost to maintain vs. new is one reason. Depreciation rules are another.
They will cut off XP update in 6 to 8 years. They will cut off all non-critical updates (bug fixes) in 2 to 4. All of this is published on their site, their policies for End of Life products.
My house is 50% Linux, 50% MS right now. We will not be making the transistion to Vista. By the time games won't run on XP anymore (5-6 years from now) I expect they will on Linux, or I simply won't buy the ones than don't.
So I really don't care when Vista comes out.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
If that were the case I'd think they'd find it easy enough to simply extend plans expiring in late 2006 to encompass Vista whenever released, while apologizing for "unanticipated delays" - such a move would generate a bit more customer goodwill than the risk of shipping prematurely and possibly having disastrous bugs.
I'll go further and say Vista is even more relevant than Windows XP, and Windows 2000.
.NET will know that Vista is the part of a larger design. Vista is the first OS release that is part of Microsoft's .NET initiative, which is to evolve the internet into a transport for technologies designed and/or inspired by Microsoft. Vista's support of XAML is a very major feature to be released with Vista, many have overlooked it and do not understand it's ramifications.
.NET framework behind it.
It will offer a very seductive and compelling experience for users. It will also seduce those wanting to deliver content to the net with Microsoft's Expression suite of products, enabling graphical artists to work seemlessly with developers.
Microsoft has had 10 very long years to think about the internet. Vista is what they've come up with as a result of it. Developer's of
Many will scoff at this but, we are approaching the end of HTML's reign over the internet. HTML is simply not a rich enough medium to deliver the complex user experience people want. AJAX is a symptom of this, it's just yet another attempt to hack out a solution to the many architectural flaws of HTML as an application development platform. HTML was never designed to be used for what people do with it today, it's evolved organically, and like most things which have been designed organically it's simply not an elegant solution.
Many things have been developed to superceed it.... Macromedia Flash, W3C's SVG, Mozilla's XUL. All these technologies offer similar features to Microsoft's XAML, slick, vectorised graphical interfaces, designed to scale up/down for tomorrow's display devices. What these technologies don't have which XAML does is the full power of direct-x and all the resources and security features packed into the Microsoft
XAML downloads in a browser, it's somewhere between a web form and a windows form. If all Microsoft's dreams come true, decades from now much of the content you'll see on the net will be in XAML. Vista is the first step to realising this dream.
I normally don't reply to people who post ad hominem's but I actually had more to say and I didn't want to reply to my own post, so you're a convenient excuse.
3. Dealing with thousands of Linux whackos like you
Nowhere did I say I was a Linux whacko. I don't use Linux (for many of the reasons you cited, actually). I use Windows XP almost everyday, and I like it. I also use Mac OS X (which I love, rather than merely like). But that's the problem: you see, Windows XP is good, not insanely great mind you, but good. Windows 95 was worth the wait compared to the mediocrity of Windows 3.1 (and don't get me started on 3.11's "networking support"). XP is pretty fast, reasonably stable (I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen XP blue screen, and those were mostly due to crappy drivers for el cheapo hardware), and its development tools are excellent.
So, whereas when Apple releases yet another yearly release, I'm excited to try it and see all the nifty little gadgets they've put in there this year, when Microsoft waits three, four, even five YEARS to release another version of Windows, I'm thinking I'd better be blown-away. This rarely happens. In fact, all of the features that would have blown me away (*cough*WinFS*cough*) are steadily removed from the shipping OS every time the release date slips.
So, there's the problem as I see it. By waiting so long to make a new release, they build up excitement while at the same time watering down the release so much that it's quite anti-climactic when the product finally DOES ship. I still like Windows, I just think they're screwing themselves here.
13. Idiots (you fall into this group, too!)
Assuming I'm a "Linux whacko" becuase I submit a post critical of Microsoft release practices? Hmmm, no comment on this one.
"Not to mention that they're handing a near-fatal blow to OpenGL support, too."
Uh, that's by design. DirectX is not cross-platform, at least not to the extent that OpenGL is. So this is yet another platform lock-in play by Redmond. Color me shocked.
Wouldn't MS want to get Vista out in time for Christmas? There are two big PC shopping times... back to school (August) and Christmas (December). They'll never get it out by August, and never said they would. But getting it out in November would be just in time to make a big blitz about "Buy a new computer with Windows Vista to put under your tree this year." The OEMs would love this, and MS could get massive sales.
Frankly, by November I don't think you should buy a new computer until Vista comes out and is pre-installed (Wintel only, if you are buying for Linux or a Mac, this doesn't apply).
If anything, I think this would HURT MS and the OEMs.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I think it has a lot to do with not wanting to sell before Christmas. Many people who are buying new PC's for the kids will do that at Christmas, and you'll see a lot of "Vista Ready" PC's being advertised. However, many of the new games that come out starting next year will use DirectX 10, which will only be available for Vista. This will create a lot of kids whining for an upgrade to Vista next Christmas.
Why sell it now (at OEM pricing, around $50US) when you can sell it a few months, maybe a year, later at upgrade prices (at least $100US). They even get to keep the 50 bucks they made selling the OEM copy of XP.
The PC makers like the idea because it will boost PC sales in the early part of the year, a traditionally slow period, but probably won't seriously impact Christmas sales.
Open Source for Open Minds
I didn't say that Vista hasn't had a lot of internal changes, just that they don't matter in that way. They don't enable new applications or technologies; they fix shortcoming in the previous implementation.
I'm not as much talking about vendors as technologies. MS comes up with their own versions of things, pushes everyone to use them, and then they drop it from something shinier. The non-MS part of the world has been using things called "standards", and they have been doing so far longer than Windows has existed, let alone been used.
We have POSIX as an API standard, and that's been around for a long time. MS has had no less than six APIs that I can think of, just off the top of my head. They tried to have their own networking protocols, their own email formats, APIs, and on and on. They have all been problematic, and largely dropped for the standards that were already there. In that regard, yes, I can think of "vendors" that it doesn't apply to.
> Has Microsoft EVER released anything that was ON TIME?
Yes. In terms of the NT product line, the most notable time this happened was with Windows NT 4.0, which was released about two years after Windows NT 3.5. Most folks would consider two years to be a reasonable timeframe for a major revision of an operating system, and there were service packs in between.
However, the codebase has rather grown, as have the demands on what needs to be done for each new release, and the total amount of entropy in Microsoft's organization, so you don't expect that kind of timeframe for a release today.
Eventually, Microsoft will have to discard the NT codebase, as they had to do already with Win9x/Me, and as happens eventually to virtually all software. One supposes that they know this and are already and have a small team somewhere secretly working, unbeknownst to most of their own employees much less the public, on a ground-up new OS. However, I don't think we'll hear about it publically until after Blackcomb has been released, and possibly not until after the next release after Blackcomb. Predicting what decade that will be is left as an exercise.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
They certainly didn't port the whole of Office to the .NET CLR, if that is what you're implying
.NET.
....What's your point -- that maybe they won't screw up again, this time?
.NET has been very successful, and quite a number of businesses are picking up on it. I've been personally involved in a number of projects for major corporations, including banking and financial organisations. I hear from people in managerial positions, in major corporations with a large investment in Java and Oracle looking at migrating to .NET all the time.
That's exactly what I'm saying, I've yet to find a link on the net to confirm it, but at developer meetings I've heard verbal confirmation from a developer at Microsoft that they are in fact in the process of porting Office to
How can you honestly make this statements as if they were truth without anything to show for it? Expression is meaningless right now, and is practically of toy status
Well alot of people will disagree with you there. I think
As for Expression being a toy.... it's actually got two distinct parts, the Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. The graphic designer is Microsofts Photoshop killer app, it produces, GIF, JPEG, PNG etc etc... HTML and XAML. Unless you classify Adobe Photoshop as a toy it's very much a serious app and is already released. The Interactive designer produces XAML and yes until Vista is released and Win FX is shipped through windows update to XP and 2000 systems, you could say it's a "toy".
Have a read of this article I just found on sourceforge it might help you convince you, it pretty much repeats and re-affirms everything I said in my original comment.
Make no mistake about it, Microsoft has had a bias towards ASP.NET developers, and has been very successful in hooking alot of people into this technology for web development. XAML, WinFX and Vista are some major signs that Microsoft is beginning to shift their focus from web development back towards windows development.
Office usually doesn't ship exactly on time either. See this article about 2003. Even 2007 is behind schedule. However, we're usually talking weeks or months with Office and often years with Windows.
Excuse me... but Windows patches *do* break thing regularly. There's a reason that MS has had to pull so many of their service packs. In both my experience, and in the experience of many admins responsible for Windows servers, it is often dangerous to apply Windows hotfixes, too. Even with all the precautions of test environments, and staged updates... all too often the patch breaks everything anyway. It can takes weeks to figure out *why* this happened, since MS doesn't exactly tell you what they changed in more than vagueries.
You also demonstrated that different operating systems do things differently. I don't see DirectX available on anything other than some versions of Windows. A Windows application doesn't run on Solaris, or MacOS, or anything else. What's your point? There is far more standards following and compatability across various UNIX implementations than there is between Windows and *anything* else. So sound doesn't always work... so what, it's only sound. Mission critical applications don't even use that. As for UI things... Xlib and POSIX will take you quite far. There are other options, such as all of those the GP mentioned.
My point about the MS APIs were that they were the "way it will be done" according to MS. Then they were abandoned in favor of new toys to do the same thing. MS suffers horribly from the lack of foresight. It is obvious through all of their APIs and products. They are a marketing company, not a software one, and it shows.
You also seem to assume that UNIX = Linux. That is incorrect. Also, you need to learn to read. I didn't post the GP that you were critisizing so heavily for contradicting my last post. For what it's worth, I don't have that much love for Linux. I think the community around it loves to come up with a lot of great ideas, and then don't bother to finish them before moving on. That bothers me a whole lot, and it's one of the reasons that I tend towards BSD and Solaris.