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Heads Roll As Microsoft Misses Vista Target
A reader writes: "Business version is on time, but the company won't make the key holiday consumer sales season.
After another delay in the release of its Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft last week put a new executive in charge of future Windows projects and replaced several other managers. The changes are designed to better align Microsoft's desktop and Internet software teams and get products to market faster." There's also a NY Times piece that discusses why Windows has been so slow (to come out). Worth the reading.
Or, get someone with a trackercord of delivering a modern OS. Like Maybe Linus.
.net runtime + graphics layers + GUI + DirectX + user-level applications that ship with the OS.
Is *anyone* qualified for this? Linus, for example, just works on the low-level Liunx kernel. Vista is a kernel + the
I'll readily admit that I don't much like Microsoft or their software, but they must be commended upon their due diligence on this one aspect. A lot of software from Windows 3.0 can still run on XP.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.
;-)
.NET code sucked too much in performance to be usable). This time could be spent on making... well, how about WinFS? ;-)
"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."
I'm not so sure this is really why this time, or that it's the only reason...
People paying some attention to the Vista development may notice that during build 5000, Microsoft did basically a 180 turn and decided to throw out the new foundation of managed (.NET) code on an XP SP2 based kernel, and rather go with the Windows Server 2003 kernel. This required such massive rewrites that to the end user experience, the project was essentially restarted. This happened in September 2004, just less than 2 years ago. And people wonder about the feature cuts and delays.
MS did a major goof up in planning with this OS, and they're paying the price now. Just imagine if they could get the two years or so spent on developing on the wrong kernel and with an invalid design philophy back (it was later found out that
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
From the sound of that, this may be the last major Windows release. The Windows name may carry on but it will be the end of Windows as we know it.
Well, what is Windows as we know it?
The windows natural market position is this: it's the world's dominant desktop operating system, the one that almost every worktation, no matter what it is used for, is almost certain to use. But it's not anymore, because Windows has an identity crisis. It's been seen by Microsoft as a lever they could use to enter and dominate new markets, such as home entertainment. It leads to a lack of focus.
Consider Apple: You have a choice of two operating systems from them Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OSX Server 10.4.
From Microsoft: XP Home, XP Pro, XP Media Center, XP Tablet Edition, XP Pro 64 bit Edition, Windows Server 2003 and of course the embedded/mobile versions (Windows Mobile and Windows 2000 Core OS) which arguably don't count.
The thing is, Apple is doing everything with vertical integration that Microsoft is trying to do. They've just drawn the lines around projects differently. I wonder, though, whether this makes the difference.
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