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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."
This article has a confusing title, given that dominance of the Cairo graphics library these days.
Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.
Daniel Eran. Just Say No.
Cheers,
Ian
I shit you not, I was listening to the Wizard Of Oz on TV in the background when I opened this story.
Coincidence ?
I think not.
On a serious note, if it worked before, why do anything different ?
Are you trying to tell me that Microsoft doesn't have all the money ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
That's part of competing -- to give your customers EVERY reason to pick you over someone else. Any good business does it by:
1. Providing a product that meets the current needs of their customers.
2. Providing a path to new features/efficiencies for their customers' futures.
3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely.
4. Providing a proven ROI for a short-term and long-term focus.
Microsoft, to me, is not a monopoly -- except when the State is involved (providing patents and copyrights and trademarks). I'm against those monopoly provisions, but those are "legal" ones. Without them, Microsoft's power over competitors would be equalized. You can't blame Microsoft for taking advantage of what you, the voters, allowed them to utilize. The judgements against them calling them a monopoly are only there because you, the voters, let those policies become standard based on Microsoft's given legal priviledge over competition. Nothing prevents competition from doing what Microsoft does -- except than the competition would rather use THEIR monkeys in government to try to stem Microsoft's growth.
As we see in the relatively free and unencumbered market of the web, Microsoft doesn't have any sort of monopoly -- people are free to choose what they want, and they do. In fact, the long tail effect shows that many products openly compete with Microsoft -- both legally obtained products and illegally obtained ones.
The whole Vista issue is a non-issue. Everyone who cries foul against Microsoft refuses to see that the products they prefer just don't meet the top 4 items I listed -- in fact, some of them fail most or all of them. No one will invest in a product, even a free one, if it doesn't offer those items. Many Microsoft products do -- but not all of them. Vista will succeed only because consultants will like its standardization, manufacturers will like knowing there is a standard interface for their hardware/software to run on, and resellers will like it because it has always worked well enough for both the casual and the power user.
Who cares about it looking like past products? If it worked for Microsoft in the past, why wouldn't they follow through with similar performances -- and making new ones to try to produce a better selling product?
Article rambles all over the place, seems more to be pleading for reader to look at previous articles by author rather than make its higly convoluted point. Reads like a lot of sour grapes about historical irrelevance so I assume the author is just looking for hits by trying to be inflamatory.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.
6 /s04_01.htm
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/i38
4.1.1 Systems Flags
The systems flags of the EFLAGS register control I/O, maskable interrupts, debugging, task switching, and enabling of virtual 8086 execution in a protected, multitasking environment. These flags are highlighted in Figure 4-1 .
NT (Nested Task, bit 14)
The processor uses the nested task flag to control chaining of interrupted and called tasks. NT influences the operation of the IRET instruction .
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If an individual has a message they feel is important that they want to get out, I don't see an issue with posting a reference or two. Flooding a board is another story.
...and flooding is what's taking place. Yes, a post such as "here's a new and interesting Apple-related blog, please come and have a look" would have gone down fine. Instead we get every single article he writes for this blog being dumped as a rhetorical question into a group which specifically forbids advertising, and then he never engages in any discussion regarding it. The regulars of the group have all asked him to stop. He just totally disregards us.
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Advertising revenue. He's abusing a community discussion group to take every opportunity to dump links to his advert revenue-driven blog. The group does not exist for his enrichment, as we say on there: uk.comp.sys.mac.adverts is thataway -->.
Cheers,
Ian
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, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.
Factual errors aside, I think he's trying to say:
Microsoft announced it had big things in development, didn't quite release all of the things they announced. This is fraud. Microsoft bad. They did it on purpose, by design. We're onto you guys, you won't fool us with Vista!
He references The Mythical Man-Month as if this would give him some kind of software development street cred. I don't buy it, mainly because he doesn't seem to have ever been involved with any software development project.
Many software projects start with ambitious and optimistic sets of features. And by many, I mean all. The bigger the project, the more ambitious the scope. "Yeah! Our next generation Operating System is going to have an OBJECT FILE SYSTEM and DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS and JUST IN TIME COMPILATION and ADAPTIVE HEALING and ADVANCED AI COMMAND INTERFACE and VOICE RECOGNITION. The future is NOW! We're awesome!" Developers believe the hype and do a lot to generate it. And if they believe it, and they're implementing the fucking thing, what chance do marketers have of looking at it critically? None. So they tow the line.
Result? The ambitious wildly impractical story is impossible to keep quiet. Sure, you can certainly fault companies for announcing features well before they're release candidate quality, but ambitious features getting cut because project deadlines are slipping happens all the time. Aside from the bad press that's generated from missing your release date, and the investment you blew developing features which don't get commercialized, there aren't many other downsides. If you can afford it, who cares?
I can totally imagine cutting these features if I were the project manager and we missed our release date; the decision process would go something like this: what is the most expensive feature we're developing right now that has the lowest return on investment that if we cut, would allow us to release much earlier? "Object filesystem" probably makes the top of everyone's list. It gets cut it in a heartbeat. What, was marketing hyping the shit out of it this whole time? I hadn't noticed, because I haven't left my cubicle in 36 months. Tough it out, marketing clowns.
1990-1995: Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
Along with Ashton-Tate and Lotus Development, Microsoft was considered one of the Big Three software developers of the 80s. Apple courted all three to develop software for its new Macintosh.
Ashton-Tate managed to run itself out of business, and Lotus was eventually bought up by IBM in 1995, leaving Microsoft as one of the largest and most influential developers of desktop applications.
Microsoft's position as a vendor for both DOS and office applications gave it certain advantages over its rivals, particularly when Windows 95 appeared and obsolesced not just previous versions of DOS and Windows, but also competing developers' existing applications, including DOS standards WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Rapid advancements in technology created a wildly chaotic market, where simple announcements of future plans could trump real products. Given the prevalence of misinformation wars in the tech industry, it's no surprise that Microsoft applied its vast market power to become one of the most notorious sources of FUD and vaporware.
Innovations in Vaporware
Previous articles have considered Microsoft's vaporware attacks on QuickTime and the Newton and PenPoint OS.
While many companies in the competitive tech field announced products they were ultimately unable to deliver, Microsoft applied an innovative, two handed approach to playing the vaporware game.
Rather than just bluffing its hand like other companies, Microsoft played the game with a set of cards in one hand, while waving the illusion of another set of cards in the other hand. The fake set of cards were highly distracting because they looked like a much better hand than anyone else could possibly have.
Standing around the card table were a number of analysts who all expressed how impressed they were by the cards Microsoft waved in the air, and made regular remarks about how foolish it would be for anyone else to stay in the game. The worst part was that many of those analysts could see Microsoft's real hand, and knew the company was bluffing.
Microsoft's NT Plans Prior to Cairo
In 1991, Apple was releasing the Mac System 7 and Tim Berners-Lee was using his NeXT to build the world's first web server and browser.
PCs were still using the character based DOS in a slightly faster version than was released a decade earlier in 1981, although Windows 3.0 was beginning to provide DOS PC users with a rough approximation of Apple's graphical desktop.
After witnessing sales of Windows 3.0 take off, Microsoft began its schism with IBM over OS/2 3.0 development. Microsoft's new plan involved an entirely new operating system based on its contributions to OS/2; the new OS was referred to as Windows NT.
Unlike the existing DOS based Windows 3.0, NT aimed at being entirely new and modern in every respect, untied to DOS or to the existing x86 PC architecture.
Microsoft initially targeted NT to run on the i860, Intel's new 64-bit RISC processor that was supposed to usher in the future. The i860 was a modern design and carried none of the legacy baggage of the standard x86 based PC.
It included graphics acceleration features similar in principle to the forthcoming PowerPC Altivec and Pentium MMX; those features resulted in the i860 being used by NeXT to power its high end NeXTDimension video card.
Unfortunately, the i860 didn't work out for Microsoft. All that remained from its efforts to build a new operating system based on the processor was the i860's code name: N10, which is widely repeated to be the meaning of NT. Of course, Microsoft and IBM had also long referred to OS/2 3.0 as "NT," for new technology, so the idea behind the i860 as the source of NT's name might be historical revisionism.
No Operating System Experience
Microsoft struggled with the complex reality of building its own operating system without IBM. Up to that point, Microsoft had only been delivering tepid updates to MS-DOS, which it had licensed from a small
What did Windows 95 actually add? The only thing I can think of is Win32, but really, even Microsoft seems to be admitting this isn't a lot -- they are giving away free upgrades to XP 64-bit to anyone with a legit 32-bit copy of XP Pro.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.
Ya, A high traffic web site vs. the company that runs 90% of personal computers.. They are done for. In other news, the Java platform is posed to take over as the predominant OS.
Microsoft makes operating systems and office/productivity apps, and that's about it; nothing magical or "next generation" about that.
Don't expect "next generation" and you won't be disappointed.
BTW Linux is still staring at its own navel...
You're using her as bait, Master!
Please give me back the 10 minutes reading that article took me. I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it. That guy is such a flaming Apple apologist, he can't even get his head around the fact that despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001) before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same. Apple nearly died waiting for its vapourware before it bought NeXT. And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s. He forgot to mention Windows 3.1, which was one of the most important Windows releases ever, because it proved to the world that Windows could succeed. WordPerfect thought it couldn't, and died. Most sat on the fence for Windows 3.0, because while it was pretty, it was horribly unstable and lacking in essential OS features.
Remember they were included in Cairo in some form in 1995. Vaporware as usually described, is announcing something that don't exist in the hope of warding off the opposition from entering the market and also with the full knowlege that such feetures are not implementable in a realistic timeframe. Else why haven't we seen the pre-announced features even now in late 2006.
.. [be] the Cairo desktop itself .. Cairo's Object File System (OFS) makes the whole hard disk a single huge docfile that exposes its internal objects to the user"
.. Almost all this technology is expected to converge in Cairo"
. html
"The top level will
"In Daytona's successor, Cairo, OLE structured storage will be able to attach to, and extend, the file system",
"Microsoft's future object-oriented file system for Windows NT (see the sidebar "A Peek at OFS"). Ultimately, we could be looking at a distributed file system based on this technology
"Object File System Lets you create a pseudodirectory that unifies local, network, and Internet files"
http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002430
was Re:Better Windows history here...
davecb5620@gmail.com
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Why do you think SPAM implies commercial benefit? One of the earliest spammers was an 'evanglist' - sending out generic jesus-freak messages.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If something is factually wrong in the article, why don't you point it out?
Sounds like you are just dismissing anything that doesn't fit your narrow world view.
Being a monopoly is NOT illegal. It is leveraging the monopoly in an anti-competitive manner that is illegal.
Items 1, 2 and 4 on your list are just good business sense. Monopoly or not.
But "3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely." is illegal. If you leave off the word "solely" its ok, but when your "incentives" come off like strong-arm bullying, and the "solely" provision is the primary objective, that is anti-competitive. That is also what Microsoft was (repeatedly) found guilty of.
And from what I've seen and heard of Vista, application of the other three items is questionable.
Windows 3.0 gets polished and becomes Windows 95? hardly, as these two Operating Systems are vastly different, with their only real similarity being they both run on top of DOS.
Windows XP gets polished and becomes Windows Vista? Again, hardly, as again they are VERY different. XP And Vista are much closer than 3.1/95, but they're still worlds apart. Feature sets are very different, capabilities are very different, overall user experience is VASTLY different, and checking things out under the hood a lot has changed, and it's kind of interesting to see just how much. Yes a lot of features were unfortunately dropped, but there is still a lot here to chew on.
I saw earlier a comment saying the blogger is a spammer. Somehow, that wouldn't surprise me. It's an MS flame article though. Can we mod front page articles -1 flamebait? ;-)