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Why Vista Took So Long
twofish writes, "Following on from Joel Spolsky's blog on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, Moishe Lettvin, a former member of the Windows Vista team (now at Google) who spent a year working on the menu, gives an insight into the process, and some indication as to what the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu actually did. Joel has responded in typically forthright fashion." From the last posting: "Every piece of evidence I've heard from developers inside Microsoft supports my theory that the company has become completely tangled up in bureaucracy, layers of management, meetings ad infinitum, and overstaffing. The only way Microsoft has managed to hire so many people has been by lowering their hiring standards significantly. In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991–2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product."
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. You do not need 255 different ways to tell a laptop to "close up for later use". A true geek would want to be questioned for each process about whether it needed to be persisted or killed. This is a problematic mindset.
That is all.
A bunch of reasons: :)
1. I like having my computers available instantly when I want to use them.
2. Turning a machine on and off many times can be harmful, so it is said. Others say it's a myth. I don't know who to believe, but it seems feasible that this could be so.
3. I run back-ups and virus checks during the night.
4. The computers work on protein-folding during their idle time.
5. My machines are in my bedroom, and they keep me nice and warm at night. Besides, there's nothing like the low purr of case fans so send you off to sleep
The UI isn't all that terrible. Joel Spolsky is making a mountain out of a molehill. Look at the screenshot he gives in his article. Here's what I notice:
1) There's a power button. That shuts things down fully. ("I am going away from my computer now, but I'd like the power to be really off.")
2) There's a lock button. That leave it running, but keeps others out of your stuff. ("I am going away from my computer now.")
3) There's a menu of choices if you care to look at it, and the button is much smaller than the other two and has a nondescript arrow icon on it which makes it much less attractive to non-techie users.
Yes, his suggestions for combining lock with switch user and sleep with hibernate are good, but I don't think what they actually implemented is all that difficult to understand. His problem is that he's "one of us" and went looking for all the extra options. Most people will never click that arrow to make that menu appear. Ever. It's kind of unfair, even to Microsoft, to rag on something for being unfriendly to non-techies when non-techies are never going to even see it. Usually Joel Spolsky's observations are spot-on, but this time I'm going to have to give him an F for eFfort.
Of course, there's still vendor lock-in, which pushes in the opposite direction (decreasing the power of those competitors and increasing the price of Vista), but competition is far from absent.
You're partly right. The "Longhorn reset" - when they decided to largely throw out more than years worth of work - came about because they were overly ambitious. They were trying to re-write major portions of the platform. They realized that doing so was not only going to be too difficult/take too much time but that customers didn't really want that. So they did a reset...significantly reduced the origional ambitions of the project so they could get it done. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is in the eye of the beholder. In my mind it was probably good because, despite the rantings of some on /. and elsewhere, Windows actually works pretty well for most people and organizations. Re-writing the whole thing would have probably cause more harm than good. Just my personal two cents.