Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson

avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."

Comments

It's not a Windows History.

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Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry. Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article,

The Roughly Drafted article is not supposed to be a Window's history, it's a Microsoft Marketing history. Versions of software are mentioned and compared to competing and promissed versions. The history presented is accurate as are the product descriptions. What's more important is how M$ prommisses everything their competitors have today, convince the press the promisses are credible, but fail to deliver for decades. To find the same information in Wikipedia, you need to combine the Microsoft specific information from these articles:

• Vaporware
• FUD
• EEE
• NeXT
• Apple Computer
• OS/2
• Cairo
• Longhorn

Or you could just have a memory and a brain. It should be clear to any Windows user that M$'s operating systems are bloated, insecure and feature poor. It is equally clear that the reason for their market dominance has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with technology. The author goes into some of those mechanics and why they won't work in the future.

The central thesis, that M$ uses vaporware to it's advantage, is clearly true. The similarity between Cairo an Longhorn mostly exist because Microsoft has yet to deliver on the feature promisses they made for Cairo. As the author pointed out, those features were available in competing products of the day and many are still not implemented in the new 10 Gigabyte sized Windoze.

Specifically, Cairo promised to deliver:

• an object oriented user interface, featuring direct manipulation of desktop objects like OS/2 already had
• an object oriented development environment like the one already offered by NeXT
• distributed computing features like those offered by NeXT
• an object or database file system that would replace the flat file system with a fully searchable object store
• a standards based messaging system like Lotus Notes
• a standards based directory system just like Novell's NDS

Yes, when I say many, I refer to the lack of standards and use "Embrace, Extend Extinguish" delivers after a decade of fumbling. You can run in circles forever with slippery M$ promisses, or you can get out and enjoy standards based software from innovators. This has been the case for decades.