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Microsoft Hoping for Vista in January
WebHostingGuy writes "Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company's next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January. He is also hopeful that the next version of Office will ship in December. The holdup, he says, is due to constant revisions due to beta tester feedback." From the article: "'We've got to get this absolutely right,' Gates said. 'If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I'd be glad to delay it.' He said Microsoft was investing $8 billion to $9 billion in developing Vista and the company's next version of Office, its key cash-generator. He said the company's software partners, in developing and adapting their own products for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much as Microsoft."
Gates says 80% chance that it will be a go in January.
Mr Gates, how much do you want to bet?
I'd really like to see what kind of odds the Vegas bookmakers would give it.
"The holdup, he says, is due to constant revisions due to beta tester feedback."
Well duh, Just quit testing!
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
From the article and summary :
Looks like Microsoft has notched the bar a little higher than usual. Hopefully they really really really mean it this time. (And Lucy isn't going to yank the football back this time.)
And (emphasis mine):
Once again, Microsoft leaves the heavy lifting to others. What a crock.
Hope is alway a good thing but sometimes reality must butt in. Who is going to make plans based on an 80% chance of a product being available?
a reason to actually upgrade to it by then?
Last I heard, all the features were being removed, and that it required an insane machine to run.
Registered Linux user #421033
At this point, even Debian has a more reliable release schedule!
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
If beta 2 was any indication, they better start from scratch again.
My computer doesn't meet the system requirements to excrete the interface of that bloated piece of crap all over my screen.
There is no real need for a Vista release anytime soon, really. Judging from what we've heard so far, people complain about the hardware requirements. Microsoft should not have had a public release date on this product and it seems people are upset only because they missed it. Well, guess what, Windows XP is still here and I doubt anyone in here can actually give me a good reason why we HAVE TO get Vista right away. I wouldn't mind waiting another year.
Full Tilt
I bought XP in 2001 and had 5 mostly good years with it. But it was time to move to something better -- and I'm so happy I switch to Mac.
OS X Tiger is awesome and already has everything and more than what Microsoft is promising in Vista. And with Leopard right around the corner, I'm sure I'll get a few more neat features Windows might have 3 or 4 years from now.
Go Apple! Goodbye Microsoft.
boxlight
He continues: It is not our fault, the beta testers keep causing problems, which we then have to fix.
One wonders how all the other software developers manage to get any product out at all. MS Vista is what, two years late. I can understand them saying that the process is crap and we have to retrofit and refactor to make things work. Or the EU requirements mean we actually, for the first time, understand the API. But blaming delays on beta-test? This software was overdue long before the beta testers hit it.
The sad thing is that MS had some ability to produce in the 90's. They wrote some of the best books in the industry. In the span of 10 years they have gotten to the point when they can't even push out an OS, even when all the major features have been removed. Pitiful.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Bud Light presents ... Real Men Of Genius.
[Real Men Of Genius.]
Today, we salute you, Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.]
While others marvel at an operating system whose primary repair
tradition is a complete wipe, you just can't wait for more of the
same.
[I just love my Long Horn!]
Yes, it lacks security, efficiency, speed, heck, just about
everything. But ever since 1985, when you first jammed your floppies
into that curvaceous 186, you've been enraptured with Windows.
[It was five and a quarter inches!]
Despite the fact that it requires an array of Crays to run already
invented technologies at sub-optimum speeds, you will beat the rush
and see Notepad and Clock run in CPU-crippling GPU-hogging
translucency.
[It turns on all my pixels!]
So crack open an ice cold Bud Lite, oh Chevalier of the Control Panel,
because whilst the rest of us wonder what Vista will bring, you
already know.
[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy!]
Bud Light beer. Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri.
Windows Vista = new Windows();
Vista.announceWayTooEarlyReleaseDate()
Vista.test();
public void test()
{
test();
}
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
So much buildup for what amounts to, after all the stuff they cut out, a Mac OS X-colored GUI and a fancy new video game engine. And they've been working on this how long?
Man, I remember 10 years ago when I was making fun of Windows 95 for not having any original ideas. I didn't know how good we had it. At least Windows 95 had some ideas, whether or not they were original-- there was at least a substantial difference from Windows 3.1. But it seems like from 2000 to XP to Vista all Microsoft's really done is move options around in confusing ways and make the window title bars increasingly elaborate.
Considering that Vista will be once of the most complicated computer programs in computer history, designed to support more hardware and more third party programs than any other app or OS in history, I don't really think that you can call this "pitiful". I can't think of any other app or OS that comes even close to doing what they're doing. Nothing else is even *close*.
How long has this operating system been due now?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
So by saying that 3rd parties are spending 20x9 billion, Mr. Gates tells us all that reimplementing for Vista will cost us 180 billion dollars... Ouch!
stuff |
January 2007, or January 2008?
Here's one PC user who is seriously thinking about getting a Macbook.
"He is also hopeful that the next version of Office will ship in December."
Oh man, now he's resorting to asking Santa...
Since Mr. Gates lives in Washington, he is unfortunately not able to respond to your wager online.
Prove it.
Nice Post. It would've taken me till January to write such brilliance. And you did it in a matter of minutes. Karma onward!
...which January?
How does one spend that much money writing code?
Well, OK, when you write it over and over and over again....
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What about right now? My co-workers are all running Vista on their Intel 64-bit desktops with the incredible Aero enhancements. I have to say that this is probably the best Windows EVAR. It even gives Mac OS X a run for it's money but that might be going too far. Fortunately, I use Enlightenment on 64-bit Gentoo so I've been running with all these features for the past three years. But, it's nice to know that the rest of the world is catching on to what's possible.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
xyz and mm/yy isn't important. how ready is the key. and with his emphasize of testing. maybe Bill is talking about "vista is ready to be tested (by a small group, or by the public) by jan 200x."
i have high hope that statement will come true eventually. anyone want to wagar?
When the wetherman says there is an 80% chance of rain, nothing happens. Is he now a Microsoft consultant?
I'm a windows user through and through, and this is the first Microsoft OS in a while that just doesn't excite me at all. There's just isn't the usual 2 or 3 slam-dunk features which sell me on the OS.
-I don't need a spanky, glossy interface.
-I don't need windows popping up all the time telling me something is making a minor change to my OS.
-Some of the minor features like System Volume Shadow Copy service is nice for some of the computers in my office for backing up of 'always-used' files, but for Joe windows user, I don't even think they'll know what it is or how to turn it on.
I will be very interested to see how successful vista is. Besides a bit of a cleaner and better UI, there just isn't anything to sell me, or anyone, on vista.
He said the company's software partners, in developing and adapting their own products for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much as Microsoft
Right there is why Microsoft is the most successful software company in the world -- respect for developers.
It's all well and good to laugh at Steve Ballmer sweating like an ape on a stage and shouting about developers. It's fine to feel smug and superior using Mac OS or Linux (I'm using both write now myself).
But Microsoft has always respected the work of developers coding to their platform. Backward compatibility is a religion at Microsoft, by all accountts. Which is good because they're, um, a platform vendor.
Sounds simple, but it is amazing how often this is screwed up. Apple is notorious for breaking old programs that didn't interpret the Mac API just right -- or that relied on a technology fad Apple pumped and abandoned (OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, Publish + Subscribe, etc etc).
Apache Foundation did the same thing moving from httpd v1 to v2 -- PHP took quite a long time to move over and at one point was telling people not to even try using it with v2.
Firefox seems to do it on every release with its extensions.
Backward compatibility might not give warm fuzzies to the systems programmers -- it is hard, inelegant work. But it is a boon to users and application programmers.
I only use Linux on the server, where I don't run into backward compatibility issues, but from what I understand the drivers often have to be rewritten from release to release.
I'm not in love with Windows or Microsoft, but I will continue using their OS becase of the sheer range of CHOICES in terms of software and hardware, and the fact that all my old stuff can migrate to a new machine.
So go ahead, laugh at Microsoft, har dee har, "u r d3layed AG@1N!" For your purposes -- programming, running a server -- Linux may be the best. Or Mac OS X for that plus video editing, publishing, and other tasks and price points that don't require the full diversity of Wintel.
But for most computer users, Windows offers wins because of its compatibility with an incredibly array of cheap hardware and an incredible back (and forward) catalog of software. Microsoft knows this, and THAT'S why they are going to wait until Vista is just right. Yes they screwed the pooch, but they are attempting something that neither Linux nor OS X can touch.
in history? What are you smoking. If you want to talk about breadth of hardware look at the BSDs. Linux is supported from 386's to supercomputers and not just clusters.
Look at the reality not the PR
Woohoo! If Vista ships in January, that means we'll get Leopard by Christmas!
There will 1/12 chance that Vista will be released in January, not 4/5.
Have you actually used it? There may be a ton under the hood that has changed, but up front, I find myself sitting here wondering if this just isn't XP with a different skin. It really isn't a worthy upgrade after using it. And certainly nothing like OSX on any sense of scale. They will need to really push why people need to upgrade because visually, i'm not seeing it.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You can run an application on Linux?
What does it do?
Yes, and every release of the Linux kernel breaks every binary module. And every release of a Linux OS breaks most of the software.
Don't kid yourself -- binary compabilitity is hard, and OSS sluffs it off because (A) it's talks a lot of work and (B) breaking things all the time make money for RedHat/Novell/etc.
from the wiki article : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista
According to Microsoft, Windows Vista has hundreds of new features, such as an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, improved searching features, new multimedia creation tools such as Windows DVD Maker, and completely redesigned networking, audio, print and display sub-systems.
I'd say 4 completely redesigned subsystems is a worthy improvement from XP.
What Bill Gates is not admitting is the fact that Microsoft foists the hard part of testing and correcting Vista (and other Microsoft Buggy Bloatware)) off on major applications developers and other organizations that have a huge vested interest in having computers running an OS that works, at least much of the time.
Microsoft sets the bar very low. Ask any Linux kernel hacker how often an OS has to be restarted after applications are installed/upgraded, maintenance is done, or someone with user-level access pulls a newbie stunt. heavily used Unix/Linux and (Open)VMS systems I am familiar with often stay up for months at a time. I frequently read about platforms running those OSes having uptimes measured in YEARS. I have never encountered a Microsoft operating system, be it DOS or Windows, that didn't crash or require a restart every few days (sometimes much more frequently) if it was serving any more important role than that of inefficient space heater. I *could* leave most of the NT/2000/XP boxes I've owned or administered on for many weeks or months on end, but not while doing the proper maintenance such systems require or if I tried to do anything that actually put Office or major 3rd party apps through their paces.
That Winblows needs to be rebooted for ordinary maintenance is a glaring example of how incompetent Microsoft's OS designers are. The registry is another. Then there are the sheer number of bugs that need to be fixed, security holes that need to be patched, etc. Let's not forget how slowly (and awkwardly) Winblows boots compared to most Linux systems... Do Microsoft's developers get their credentials by sending in cereal box tops, or what?
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Other than to have a gratuitous incompatible format change to force people to upgrade, why do people need a new version of MS Office?
Seriously, I am curious, if you are an Office user, what features are you missing that you would be willing to upgrade for?
No joke, after making us wait this long for it. If you'd gotten it out sooner, the expectations would have been easier to meet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What an amazing waste of money. Seriously, to end up with something that will actually make Microsoft software look worse, less secure, less productive and slower... I'm pretty sure I could do that for a measly billion dollars.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
Really? What about the tranclucent menus and their thing that works like the retarded cousin of Mac OS X Dashboard? Those are leaps beyond Windows XP. There's also the completely new Alt-Tab switching with thumbnails of the applications and the ability to turn windows on their side with labels on the windows. You can even make notes on the back of windows. That's not different from 2K or XP? Really?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
E17 looks really nice. I ran it for a few days. But its pre-alpha. Having cool feautes is worth nothing when you have to restart your WM every hour. I know it will get there, and be really nice when it does, but comparing features of pre-alpha development software with production releases is not helpful to anybody.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Windows is too much of a cash cow for Microsoft to be taking this long between releases - Microsoft is simply stalling until the Antitrust settlement is up, rather than actually change their business ethics. Here is a snip from wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust_c ase
Microsoft's obligations under the settlement, as originally drafted, expire on November 12, 2007. [13] However, Microsoft later "agreed to consent to a two-year extension of part of the Final Judgments" dealing with communications protocol licensing, and that if the plaintiffs later wished to extend those aspects of the settlement even as far as 2012, it would not object. The plaintiffs made clear that the extension was intended to serve only to give the relevant part of the settlement "the opportunity to succeed for the period of time it was intended to cover", rather than being due to any "pattern of willful and systematic violations". The court has yet to approve the change in terms as of May 2006.[14]
The extension will only cover "communications protocol licensing" - if it ever gets approved.
LOL!
Odd... I don't have to restart it. It "just works" for me. What kind of problems caused you to have to restart E?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Here's the problem with Microsoft...they're spending 8-9 billion on Vista, but will only see a very slight fraction of return on the investment. Few people will upgrade to Vista, but instead will adopt Vista when it comes with their new PC. Microsoft could just keep XP and these same people would've paid roughly the same amount for it on a new PC as they would with Vista on a new PC. In other words, Microsoft since becoming the overwhelmingly dominate OS has no incentive to improve Windows unless they can release something so major that it provides an incentive for people to upgrade. The problem is that doing a major release like that would be *extremely expensive* and risk losing customers due to the radical change. This is why the *next* version of Windows after Vista will be even more of a headache for Microsoft.
Yeah, I'm sure that Apple wants to give up their lucrative hardware business for a not so lucrative software one. That's a good business strategy. And maybe after that they can give away free iPods and money!
Release OSX for generic PC. It'll kill their (perceived) "hardware business" (in practice is just expensive dongles for their OS and software suite) but it would pretty much nail M$ to the wall.
Now I admit I'm a huge Mac fanboi and would be just fine never touching another Windows box in my life, but Apple would take many tears and years to integrate the hardware support that Windows has. One of the reasons I love Apple, "Don't do it all, just do what you do damn well."
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
Depends on your perspective. I can marginally improve the odds even more by saying that there's actually a 31/365 (8.49%) chance instead of 1/12 (8.33%). Of course, neither of these comes close to a 4/5 (80%) chance.
They will need to really push why people need to upgrade
The push is called Windows Genuine Advantage.
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
You want corporate evil? Look at fellows like Carnagie and Rockefeller. There's a couple of great examples of the "robber baron", and we still name civic centers and auditoriums after them. Gates isn't even a blip on the radar next to those two. Granted, he's beyond obscenely rich, and there's no mistaking his business practices for anything resembling fair, but he really is quite tame by comparison to some of America's more revered/despised business leaders of the past.
American history is replete with such men. It's the inevitable result of the free-enterprise system.
Not so lucrative?
In perhaps your tiny world, but think how many *nix freaks would love to run OSX on beigebox pcs. I know I would. I suspect that it wouldn't even really damage their hardware business all that much.
Think about it--how many people would buy the hardware just for the added support, comfort and perceived (and at this point, only perceived) superior reliability? I know a lot of folks would. A good portion of their market wouldn't really even understand what this option meant. Others would, but they are the cost-conscious type who would very likely never purchase a Mac in the first place. They might, however, purchase OSX at a reasonable price (that is, lower than Windows!).
I think that offering their software could only increase their profits. It would very likely seriously damage their relationship with MS, and that is very likely the real reason that the cost/benefit ratio doesn't quite pay off just yet. One day it will, however, and then MS needs to watch out.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I am personally running Office 2007 Beta and its quite nice. A few hiccups here and there, but nothing that stops the functionality of Office.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
MS recognized this fact. They have an "early adopter" program for corporations, which my company is participating in. Basically, the corporation, with X number of total desktops, agrees to have some number of them (for us its 1000) upgraded to Vista within Y months of the Vista release date (for us I think its 3 months.) For that, MS commits Z number of hands-on, on-site engineering support, to help with software issues, compatability, builds, etc (Vista has a somewhat cool PXE boot process for bare-metal installs; no more Ghost images.) I forget what our Z is; I'm only tangentially involved in the process. My point is that MS is playing both fields; they give corp's resources to figure out build issues, which gets the corps running Vista more quickly (which lets MS make bigger claims about # of deployed desktops) and in turn, I'm sure, any software related issues get pushed back to the software corps for further investigation. And, all that being said, most of us are still wondering why we're MS's guinea-pig/bitch for an OS that /really/ doesn't get us that much. (The only thing I'm looking forward to is native 802.1x supplicant support so I can do Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC). BTW, their version, called NAP, sucks wind. Secure DHCP and private IPSec tunnels to the server. ptttttphtp!)
If I'm not mistaken it is already 3 years late NOW....
I suppose this is news only because it isn't another obvious pushback of the target release date. Other than for purposes of laughing at/scorning Vista, who really cares when it comes out? My twelve copies of Win2K and I certainly don't.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
What he really meant was that it would be 80% DONE by January. That means, if they release it in January, it will be the most complete and stable OS ever released by Microsoft.
Or, in the real world, this would mean they ship it to MSDN then, wait for the inevitable problems to surface, and officially release it in time for March Madness!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Really? Try this program:
:(){ :|:& };:
Warning: Don't try this if you don't want to risk your computer becoming completely unusable.
(The above program may contain an error...)
I'll probably be modded down for this...
...and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.
Really? What about the tranclucent menus and their thing that works like the retarded cousin of Mac OS X Dashboard? Those are leaps beyond Windows XP. There's also the completely new Alt-Tab switching with thumbnails of the applications and the ability to turn windows on their side with labels on the windows. You can even make notes on the back of windows. That's not different from 2K or XP? Really?
...
Um, my son has a Mac mini, which does all those translucent menus and things. I don't see why I have to pay at least $2000 to buy a new laptop that won't crash when running all that cruft I don't care about, just so MSFT can push out a new OS release.
If I wanted those features, I'd have bought an iBook.
Looks like MSFT is forcing me to go Linux
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company's next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January"
Didn't they give an 80% go-ahead for release in November just a few months ago?
Binaries suck. Binary packages are a kludge.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Transparent windows? Already supported by XP, but not widely used (in fact, I'm only aware of Digiguide making proper use of it). However, you can get plugins to force transparency on other programs.
Alt-tab switching with thumbnails? Check out Microsoft Windows XP Power Toys.
Turning windows on their sides? Well, I must admit, that is new one one me, but I can't (yet) see the benefit (same with transparent windows - tried it, didn't like it).
Alt tab with cool little pictures of the apps has been a powertoy for quite some time (2002 iirc). So, no, not completely new.r toys/xppowertoys.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powe
There have been dozens of third party apps that do the translucency - it hasn't caught on because it is, quite frankly, annoying and hard to read / tell the difference between a greyed out menu item and one that is not greyed out.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Gerard 't Hooft.
Okay, so there was a little bit of text
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Sorry,but I get tired of people who aren't dealing with the situation to just sit back and say "thats not a problem you don't know what you're doing", "RTFM",... ect. There have been so many times, I've heard this while I've been working on getting n obscure piece of hardware working. It doesn't always work like the documentation says it should. Heck, thats often true even in the windows world. You can't just declare that the problem does not exist. It may not be Linux's fault, but it might be. Its not perfect, but as you said its better now than it was and always gets better. I think part of the problem when people face Linux problems are a combination of the fast lowkey release cycle ( how do I know when linux supports my digital camera ?) , and people who tell them that its their fault when stuff doesn't work.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
No it wouldn't, because the huge installed base of corporate users wouldn't care about switching to Mac OS anyway (especially since it has no advantages over Linux that they'd care about -- and you don't see them switching to Linux, either).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Curious minds want to know!
How important is binary compatibility when one has source code?
Yeah, software is not lucrative, especially not office suites and operating systems. I mean there has never been ANY company which ever succeeded in that market without forcing the software to run only on closed-architecture hardware. Nope, NO one has ever succeded at that, and there have certainly never been any people who have become billionaires in that exact market. Nope, it's definitely a losing business strategy, certainly not anything you would ever see result in a Fortune 500 company. No, you're right, Apple is best off avoiding that market altogether and not focus on software licensing. It's a silly idea. ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Clever strategy: "We want to make sure our focus groups are happy." Now, if they don't ship, it's because they care to make it perfect. If by a miracle they actually do ship on time, yeah right, then they have pulled off a miracle. Either way, they look good. Before, it was just do or die. Very effective politics, mr. Gates.
Currently hooked on AMP
"He said Microsoft was investing $8 billion to $9 billion in developing Vista and the company's next version of Office" ... "We're not sure, but, we think we spent 8 billion ... [ Looks to Banker ] Er... 9 billion dollars"
Wait
I'd sure like to see them file taxes.
A billion dollar discrepancy? Please.
thats never stopped them in past, why should they start now? hell they just ended support for windows 98, and it wasnt absolutely right, after all these years.
...development methodologies, and perhaps even business models.
;-) but it costs MS money rather than making it money. Even when rolled into larger releases (service packs) marketing needs a product with a large jump in functionality/performance for customers to justify purchasing an upgrade.
;-). I don't think MS would open the source code to their big money maker though. They've got to go with something more Agile-like in their development approach though, and big, shrink-wrapped, widely-deployed releases run counter to that. So MS has to eliminate their reliance on that outmoded form of deployment. That means they have to wean themselves off the practise of selling boxes with little shiny plastic discs in them to make their money. Microsoft is going to have to get SERIOUS about moving to a subscription model, electronic distribution and a more modular product. They'll also have to accelerate their release schedule to something like yearly, and set upgrade pricing accordingly (so that you pay more if you skipped 5 years but something like $20 per year).
He continues: It is not our fault, the beta testers keep causing problems, which we then have to fix.
Well, the beta testers FIND problems, which I suppose causes problems for BillG. In any case I suspect that the development methodologies used by the Windows team have not scaled sufficiently to handle a project as large as Windows Vista. They appear to be trying to move towards an Agile-like approach, which explains the difficulty in pinning down a release date as well as the dynamic nature of the list of new features. I find that both feature sets and completion dates are pretty much impossible to put in place for large projects that are moving from a traditional approach to development/management towards agile methods.
Problem is, Microsoft's main revenue stream is from two very large, closed-source, commercial, shrink-wrapped, widely-deployed products (Windows and Office). Such projects by their very nature do not fit well with Agile development methods. Agile can handle large, closed-source and commercial projects with the right considerations. However, shrink-wrapped and widely-deployed run quite counter to how Agile is supposed to work.
Agile is "release early and release often", and Windows is huge, infrequent releases from a revenue generating standpoint. Releasing early and often does happen (it's called "Patch Tuesday"
Agile is also about big-time end-user involvement. Shrink-wrapped, widely-deployed Windows is about end-user ISOLATION. MS will give you the big picture of what's new in Vista, but won't let you test drive it unless you have special "beta tester" status--and beta testers are not typical end-users. If you are merely a normal Windows user any meaningful requests for changes in functionality are deferred to the next release; after all, if it is a feature worth adding, changing or removing then it adds to the worth of the next upgrade.
So what should MS do about Windows? Perhaps it would help if the beta testers that "keep causing problems" had access to source code, so that even if only a fraction of them had the technical ability they could submit fixes themselves
I think it'd be best if Vista had a "windows update on steroids", so that not only could you get hotfixes or service packs but you could also electronically purchase and install an upgrade to the next version of Windows whenever you wanted. I don't think this will happen though because MS wants to have ultimate control over the "user experience". MS will move to a subscription service I suspect, but it'll involve MS making all the decisions about what is and isn't installed/upgraded/activated on your computer. Content with MS Office 15? Tough luck--Office 16 is out and you're getting it--and if you cancel your subscription your copy of Office 15 will be deactivated.
It might take awhile, but I think Microsoft's very closed model of doing business (including but not limited to actual software development) is becoming obsolete and they'll either die sticking to it or they'll hit a wall and radically change.
But the consumer Windows line before XP, was horrible with regards to stability.
No sir, we've also received the buggiest, least secure development platform ever... IE!
If they're that cost conscious, why would they buy an OS when one came "free" (yes I know it's not free, but the cost sure as hell wasn't itemised on the receipt) with their computer?
There are new features. They restored Calendar to Windows. Last seen in Windows 3.1.
Um...and Chess.
In Win95 microsoft faced even more difficult problems with app compatability. So thats exactly what they did in a few cases, they wrote windows around a few applications taking into account some bugs that the programs had and made specific hacks so they would work in win95's protected memory system. I Hope they've learned their lesson. Xpo to vista should be as easy as 95 to 98 right? Its off the same code base at least. Not like 3.1 to 95 or 98 to xp.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The new Microsoft is more than happy to ship .Net upgrades that break older code.
As for Apple not having respect for developers, which companies ships every OS with a copy of the development tools? Just because they are a little more agressive API wise does not mean they do not support developers.
And Linux of course is the original "I liked the product so much I wrote it myself" kind of system that is by developers, for developers. If Linux has a problem it's that it only truly respects developers and other people are allowed to tag along for the ride!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That would be funny, if it weren't so blatently wrong. Vista run on cheap hardware? I don't think so.
I got an old PII 350mhz machine for absolutely nothing. Just because it was old, and by M$ standards not usable.
It's now running flawlessly with Puppy Linux. The desktop looks just as good as an XP, if you call XP good looking, and did I mention that it was free? Not just the PC but the OS as well. Doesn't get much cheaper than that. Oh, and it runs my M$ software too, thanks to Wine. Let's see Vista do that legally and run my favorite Linux apps.
"In a world that exists without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
Between lunches, overseas meetings, and long distance phone calls you might get away with writing Notepad for only a few billion or so. Anything complex is going to cost more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's news because it's the setup for the real pushback to come later - they'll say "Oh, beta testing has revealed new changes and since like we said we wanted it to be perfect we're pushing it out to July 2007.
Personally I think they have an internal drop-dead date of a week before the next version of OS X ships.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder what the re-training costs will be for the new version of office?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hah. You called Aero incredible. AHAHAHAHA.
That sounds like gambling. And, online at that. And someone's spent $8-9B on it?! Sounds like it's time to make a law against that sort of thing...
That is all.
Well that's cause it is incredible. The performance just amazes me everytime my coworkers show me how glacially slow an enhanced desktop can be if you really try hard enough. Compared to E that is...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Boy, do I feel badly for the sucker CIO's who bought into Microsoft's annual payment program so they could receive free upgrades when releases. Promises were made about releases of Windows and Office within 2, "no more than 3 years." "And if you don't sign-up, you'll have to pay full retail." Full retail is looking like a bargain right now vs. paying MS 25% of the cost each and every year, for ever. I am sure those CIO's, especially those from larger organizations, have demanded their money back.
Touche. Glacially is a great descriptor for it too. Enlightenment looks cool, I'll have to try it out on my Ubuntu install.
I'm sure Apple does not want to play the "infinite possible hardware configurations" game. That is a support and development nightmare. They just don't have the infrustructure for it. Also, one of the biggest draws of te Mac is that they Just Work. Not only do they Just Work, but the OS is tightly integrated with the hardware. There is no question of compatability. Release OS X for the beige boxes and all that is lost. OS X would most likely go the way of OS/2. Remember OS/2? Wasn't OS/2 significantly better than Windows back in the day? Remember IBM's proprietary PCs? If IBM couldn't pull it off, how could Apple?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Sometimes it would crash inexplicably. The configuration editor crashed a lot. Sometimes I would minimize windows and they would disappear. I'm back to using e16 for now.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
to remove all vestiges of Clippy.
First there was VistA, now they are waiting for Vista. VistA helps the sick. VistA is open source.
:)
Thanks,
GerardM
PS if you do not believe it, do some googling.
there are official, supported versions of MS office for Mac OS. that, plus increased security and less maintenance effort could convince them to switch.
What ? Me, worry ?
Does that mean MS will release Vista Nov. 13 2007, sometime in 2009, or in 2012?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
What if they, you know, kind of built their own or got an untainted box, no MS tax then.
e17 has been stable enough for me to use as a backup WM when I break KDE, or when I want something that doesn't swap thrash on a 1GB machine.
Could they not use BSD drivers since they have a reasonable level of hardware support. I thought that might have been a small factor of them going BSD anyway, it makes doing things properly easier since they'd have a reasonable hardware support base rather than starting from scratch.
Shit Bill, in my day we just called 'em bugs.
AFAIK, Darwin's kernel is a heavily modified microkernel-ish version of BSD. I'm sure they could port the drivers, but I don't think there quite enough hardware support. Also, it isn't just about having a driver there for a given piece of hardware. Particular combinations of hardware can be problematic. Microsoft, with all of its resources and vendor support, can barely pull it off.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Is this the first of a number of announcements that push the release date further back? We've seen the same before from them, when the release date for Longhorn slipped from 2005 to 2006.
My current bet is thus at late 2007.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The fact that WV Beta 2 runs slower on my 2.66 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM than XP runs on my 7 year old 600 MHz P3 is really pretty pathetic. There's a big difference between the minimum system requirements and what will actually run well. It's funny how this OS has been delayed for years, had many features stripped out, and it still crawls on semi-recent hardware, whereas I can get equivalent eye candy with any Linux distro, and it all runs quite speedily on that same P4. I got sick of trying to deal with Vista after a couple of hours, then switched back to Ubuntu, and have no plans to try Vista again any time soon.
The one improvement I saw, though, was being able to browse my local workgroup/domain with one click instead of having to click though "My Network Places --> Entire Network --> Microsoft Windows Network --> [Domain Name]". That was nice. But not worth the DRM, slowness, and everything being completely rearranged.
I keep hearing that Microsoft removed all of the features from Vista, but I can only think of WinFS. What are the other removed features?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
just in case EU will ask for a different verion of vista.
OSX Tiger's supposed "slam-dunk" features were Spotlight and Widgets, and Vista has its own versions of those. So those of you that were orgasming over Tiger (and many here and in the media did just that) should find Vista compelling as well.
(Doesn't apply to me, as I found Tiger underwhelming and am still running OSX Panther.)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
...if it weren't for you meddling beta testers!"
-g.
Vista to be twin-packed with Duke Nukem Forever and released in time for Christmas.
For a bunch of people who think Vista is a piece of crap or Microsoft sucks or Linux is "1337", why would you give a flying monkey shit if the OS is late? You obviously won't be USING it, so the fact that it is late, early or on time should be of no concern to you, let alone enough for you to take time out of your busy (LOL) day to post a comment about it.
Ironic, no?
The major reason to shift the date bar is so that people can change their budgeting and roll their expected Vista expenditure into next year.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Kerosene, gasoline and diesel have been used in devices which have lead to literally tens of thousands of deaths. Further, these products are dangerous if mishandled. Granted, these behaviors were predictable; nonetheless, I see (diesel fuel + fertilizer) approximately equals (M$ Windows + malware).
They practiced quality control only in the face of government force - then, they learned that this was actually good for business and incorporated quality control in their corporate mindsets. Microsoft, unfortunately, has learned the opposite lesson. Can't blame 'em for learning now, can we?
My whole point really is what we mainly know, where the hell do they waste all the cash to get so little return for it?
I'm thinking they could save 7/8 of the cash by just hiring 1000 programmers for 10 years to refine their own Linux or BSD!
We wouldn't have this problem under, say, socialism or communism. Even a monarchy would probably have either siezed Microsoft or broken it when its size and power became a threat to the crown.
OK? No. But inevitable. If you value your capitalist American free-enterprise lifestyle (and I do) then you shouldn't be too disappointed when that system produces firms such as Microsoft, and powerful men such as Bill Gates. You can try to fix it, but in the end you have to take the good with the bad, or else go to another system. I know which one I choose (hint: it ain't going to another system).
For what it's worth, Microsoft really is committed to correcting the security flaws in all of their products. It's economic good sense. Never mind the meme of:
1) Invent buggy operating system,
2) Wait for malware to reduce system to molten slag,
3) Sell the cure
4) Profit!!!
because that's not the reality. Microsoft is painfully aware that Linux is biting gradually into their market share primarily because of security concerns. They're not the "evil empire" most people make them out to be. Rather like the Borg, I think - they really believe that they are trying to improve the standard of living for all races, as it were. Never mind if they want it or not - freedom is irrelevant.
And, no, I'm not saying that Microsoft cares one iota about any flaws in their software; but they do care about the potential loss of business those flaws can and do cause. That's the free enterprise system in action. And FWIW, XP ain't half bad for workstations and personal computing. I wouldn't bet my servers/services on that, but as desktop OS's go (hate to say this, but) they're still leading the pack. No, I don't want to hear how your KDE/GNOME desktop lets you do everything you want, because for 90% of the computing world (number made up; anybody got a real number?), those don't let you do everything you want - hellfire, I even know people who can't adapt to GNOME/KDE for occasional computing needs, let alone day-to-day use.
Bill Gates got rich selling people what they want, pure and simple. He took advantage of the free-enterprise system, which makes him at worst detestable, at best a businessman.
But if they did not release Vista, those new PC sales would slowly transition to their competitors (Mac, linux, solaris) as XP became more dated... at which time they would be dead.
They do have an option of simply releasing early and often and evolving XP... essentially delivering Vista over the course of years to it's customers. That's a very nice and user friendly model, but has the drawback of not having big media fanfare every few years.
I'm not in favor of free ENTERPRISE, specifically. The entities that should be as free as possible are individuals, and the markets themselves.
Monopolies are every bit as destructive as over-regulation.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
...Duke Nukem Forever. The first DirectX 10-only game.
Perhaps I've had different experiences from you, but I completely disagree with this statement and your comments that followed. Lately I've been developing in-house applications, particularly ones intergrated with Office applications, and two of the most irritating problems we've had are directly related to bugs in Microsoft's API's that have existed for years. In one example, Word randomly fails to load plugin and template code for no apparent reason, causing unpredictible problems later on. In another example, Outlook events don't fire properly, preventing unmanaged code from cleaning up cleanly (yes, 5 years after the great managed .Net framework was released, Office still uses hacks to integrate it).
Overall though, this isn't the real problem. Most software has bugs at some point. The biggest problem I have with Microsoft and its relation with developers is that the company has invented a new level of obscurity in open bug management. If you pay thousands of dollars for a Microsoft support contract, it's sometimes possible to get attention from Microsoft, and a bug might be reported internally if someone decides it's worth it. It's just as likely that you'll be given a workaround that ignores the real problem and just makes your own code harder to maintain. Most problematically, there's no real open-ness about the process at all for anyone stuck on the outside, and trying to find out the current status of possible bugs is just as annoying. I've lost count of the number of times I've received an obscure error message, and a quick search of Usenet has revealed that hundreds of others have reported seeing the same thing: nobody really knows what it means, nobody has a fix, and nobody has a clue if Microsoft knows there's a problem.
I also dislike the way that Microsoft uses its products to drag developers and systems integraters, kicking and flailing, on whatever path it's decided to follow. Want to get all old .Net v1 apps recompiled in .Net v2? You can't. Want to support PC's that don't have .Net v2 installed and still use VS2005? You can't. This is a real pain, because we've found that in an environment where .Net code integrates with MS API's (MSIE in this case), having .Net v1 and .Net v2 installed on the same PC makes things very unstable, and it's a pain trying to get tird party libraries updated to the new environment. Yes, open source projects do the same -- usually on a smaller scale -- but other projects at least have an open development process that makes it much easier for developers to find out what's changed, why their code isn't working, what they need to do to update their code, and to easily search for and report bugs if appropriate.
Even though I develop on a Windows platform, I make a conscious effort to avoid locking the development into Microsoft tools. eg. Even though SourceSafe has improved quite radically in the past year or so, I don't want to lock our code into a SourceSafe repository. I use Subversion instead, because I have a lot more confidence that Subversion will continue to run, independent of the OS/version running underneath it. I also have a lot more confidence that I won't end up having to upgrade or re-write a bunch of random other applications simply because Subversion needs an update.
If Microsoft would just shut up with all the market-babble and open up their development process in ways that would allow people to directly contact developers, report and comment on bugs, and allow others to reliably support their products, things would be so much easier. I doubt this is ever going to happen, though, primarily because it'd seriously cut into Microsoft's control of the market and main source of income.
MS Vista released in January will be bundled with Duke Nukem Forever!
it would pretty much nail M$ to the wall.
Like OS/2 or BeOS?
Been there, evaluated that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of course, "Beta" has become somewhat of a buzzword. Often what should be a "Release" is labelled "Beta" to give it a "Cutting edge" feeling.
Fanbois Alert: I think Apple started that with OSX Beta and now Google have taken it on to a whole new level. However only Apple could charge for a Beta and get away with it - so they did.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
you said: Well duh, Just quit testing! yes becuase everyone wants an operating system won't work! this is one of the few times that I've seen a software company delay a product to keep betatesting and you want them to stop. nice!
""Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company's next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January. He is also hopeful that the next version of Office will ship in December. The holdup, he says, is due to constant revisions due to beta tester feedback.""
In some circles; they call them bugs. Who knows.
In four out of every five realities, Vista was seen to be released at least six months from now.
&laz;
(and yes, I have paid for a couple, even added $100 to my first Dell to upgrade to Win2K
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
Everything I've seen in Vista so far is essentially XP with SP3. This is a no brainer for virtually everyone. I've had it up and running the day after it went publicly beta and have used it extensively comparing the old way and the new way. This is XP with SP3 security. How on earth could this cost them between 8 and 9 billion dollars? The vast majority of this has to be in writing their proprietary DRM systems and all the supporting mechanism. I'm not willing to pay $200-400 for this when it won't even support good old standard hardware found in every day machines. Forget about the AERO interface on the vast majority of notebooks being sold today. The Aero interface doesn't even support most average 128mb video cards. Companies like nVidia aren't going to go back and implement drivers for older cards for XP when they've a policy of removing support from modern drivers. A gforce 4200 ti with 128 mb ram won't work with the AERO interface. Requiring people to double or even quadruple their RAM to run it is way out there. Delay the thing and give us more than just a newer version of XP with more security--when you consider that we already paid for the security to begin with. If Microsoft hadn't been so negligent in the way they designed XP we'd not have the security problems we have today. For goodness sake--9 billion dollars for XP with SP3? That's just outrageous. To demand we spend serious dollars upgrading our hardware for XP with SP3 and a different looking interface (which does exactly the same thing as XP) is a too big of a demand for most people. Let's get real, most people don't need Vista and almost no one needs to relearn the whole interface because Microsoft wants to redesign the interface without menus. XP is here for a long time to come. To arbitrarily cancel it 2 years after Vista comes out is sort of like price-fixing--considering Microsoft is a monopoly.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
They might, however, purchase OSX at a reasonable price (that is, lower than Windows!).
Actually, higher than Windows. Much higher. Remember that the Macintosh has a level of perceived value, even among those who have never used a Mac (maybe especially among those) that is phenomenal for a personal computer company, and that Steve Jobs would be a fool to throw away. Shipping OSX for PC-compatibles at less than the cost of Windows would cheapen the name and lose a lot of the elitism that drives the entire Macintosh market. No, if Apple ever does sell OSX on the open market unbundled from Mac hardware, I predict that it will be priced substantially higher than Windows, and I further predict that there will be a landrush of people trying to buy it. I'd be one of them. Apple has no need to play the discount game right now, but give Microsoft a few more years to play catch-up, and Apple may very well wish that it had released OSX for the PC market a bit sooner.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Once you buy a development product it turns out you need a toolkit, and a subscription to their support group. And a new version of the product. Oh, and before you do anything useful you have to buy their entire range of development products, subscriptions, and services because the feature you must have to solve the problem is lost in the Redmond version of RPM Dependency Hell.
Of course, the system is so thoroughly integrated that your output will run in Windows only, ever.
Before you finish, of course, you'll need to re-up everything again because of version creep, or a library vulnerability.
And naturally it will turn out that several showstoppers will prevent you from completion because they rely on submarine IP from developers lost in the void, or an interface to a driver that's mysteriously under NDA.
If you miraculously complete, and your product is popular, you will be invited to Redmond to participate in a fruitless discussion about licensing your IP. Strangely, similar software with 80% of the functionality will be included with the next version of Office. Take another look at all the in-house software projects developed with the Redmond stack you've ever seen. Was even one ever current, feature complete and reliable? I thought not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I gaurentee you that in January 2007, Windows Vista will not be released. I am going to go as far as to say thay it will not even be released in the first half of 2007. I am going to quote this post during that time.
...Vista will be successful, no matter how angry us geeks get. Solely because it will come preinstalled on all non-Apple machines beginning this January. (Ditto for Office 2007, but to a lesser extent). Schools would upgrade to Vista and Office 2007, just to keep up with the latest in Microsoft's offerings. Businesses might upgrade. Regular users who don't read the news and don't know anything about Vista's lost features, delays, and OS X would think that Vista was the best thing since sliced bread. And, we're all going to have to use it, whether we like Vista's and Office's new interface or not. Short of telling people not to buy non-Apple computers after January, there isn't much that can stop Vista's success.
The operating system market sucks now of days. Windows still has its security issues, Mac OS X is locked to Apple machines (if only Apple had more variety with their hardware), and Linux still has some kinks to work out in terms of drivers and the UI (although it is getting better every 6 months). There is no OS/2, BeOS, or NEXTSTEP to escape to like there was 10 years ago or so. Hopefully things will get better in the next few years. But for now, get prepared for Vista; it's coming, no matter how much we don't care for it.
Perhaps I'm just another unrealistic young idealist, but I digress....
You bought a Tandy?
With great power comes great fan noise.
This is 2006.
Any camera which doesn't act like a USB disk is a crappy camera.
No sig today...
Check out the code, and compile using the new compilers or VS2005? Sure, you may have to code around the published breaking changes, but that's why it's a major version change. Or maybe you don't want to recompile - you just want to run against the new framework? Well, then, just target the new framework version - no source required. Of course, don't be surprised if one of the breaking changes bites you in the ass - that's why Side by Side execution is there. If you're having problems with it, work around it or file a bug.
Unless you use Microsoft's open/shared source MSBee, of course.
I don't think there's a formal system for directly contacting developers, but most of the higher profile development tools group maintain a team blog or have developers who blog on blogs.msdn.com, and of course there's always the Microsoft monitored newsgroups. There's also a legion of MVPs and Regional Directors, who - while not employed by Microsoft - often have knowledge and MS contacts way exceeding your own. These folks are usually very active in the community and are not hard to find.
As for reporting and commenting on bugs, that's what the Product Feedback Center is all about. And yes, Microsoft even comments on them. They tend to mark them as By Design or Won't Fix a little too often for my tastes, but that's their prerogative.
As for others "reliably support[ing] their products", I don't know what you think the legions of MCSEs and their like do all day - but I think it boils down to supporting Microsoft products.
And now that I've been informative and laid out all the information you need, I'd like to ask you how is it that you're able to so confidently assert these shortcomings of Microsoft when you apparently can't even use Google (or even MSN gets this one right) (try searching for ".NET breaking changes" and see what the first hit is - oh, looky - the breaking changes from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0) or even attempt to keep up? Is it the case that you are simply that ignorant of your own ignorance? Are you just a troll? Do you have such deep hated fear and loathing of Microsoft that it prevents you from being rational? Or do you have such a high opinion of yourself that you figure if you don't know about it, then it doesn't exist?
I don't think Microsoft can be blamed for your ignorance - there are plenty of other .NET developers who know about this stuff, and we're not doing anything magical. It's called keeping up to date, reading, and researching - the price you pay for being a technology focused professional
A very very tiny 80%, methinks. And an overwhelming 20% that it'll be ready next Oct.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
www.technocracy.org
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Then Windows 3.0.
Then Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - which ultimately ended up becoming Windows NT. WFW was just Windows 3.0 with networking added. Windows NT was just WFW with a ton of bug fixes (and that's a lot; individual bits don't weigh much).
Those of you who think you know everything are really irritating to those of us who do.
Don't know about Carnegie, but
From Daniel Yergin's The Prize, p. 50:
In the mid-1870's, five to six thousand deaths a year were attributed to such accidents [from bad kerosene]. Regulation was spotty and slow in coming, which is why Rockefeller insisted on consistency and quality control, and why he had chosen the name Standard.
That Vista will get released to OEMs sometime next June, and hit retail shelves sometime in July, just in time to face off with OSX 10.5 in the back to school computer sales rush.
Windows NT was just Windows 95 with networking slapped on.
Or else, why do you think NT shot up to SP4 so fast? SP5 and SP6 took longer to fix routine bugs.
NT - Never Tested.
NT - No, Thanks.
NT - No throughput.
NT - Not Today!
NT - Now Thrashing.