Slashdot Mirror
Vista Followup Already in the Works
DesertBlade passed us an InfoWorld article, which has the news that Microsoft is already hard at work on the next version of Windows ... and we may see it as early as 2009. Possibly codenamed Vienna, the next Windows iteration will be coming a brief two and a half years after Vista's launch. This is the same timeframe Microsoft claims it would have utilized for Vista, had they not put Longhorn 'on the back burner' to deal with security issues in XP. Corporate Vice President of Development Ben Fathi is already discussing features for the next OS: "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
"It's too early for me to talk about it"
Translation: "We haven't figured out who we're going to rip off yet. Probably Apple."
Another Windows in two years, why bother upgrading?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There is no shortage of manpower at Microsoft. There is a severe shortage of vision, and managerial competence.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hmmm, abject failure to deliver on Longhorn and the fact that two years in they had to dump it because it wasn't going to work and do a simple retread of Windows 2003 with a bit of flashy OS X ripped off graphics is how I remember it. Blaming XP SP2 is simply trying to change history. They made all these great claims about how wonderful Longhorn was going to be and now they are claiming that Apple has copied all their great ideas and delivered them in a working OS while they have dropped most of them because they couldn't make it work. But Apple could. And Apple is the one doing to copying.
How about this for a prediction. The next version of Windows will be late, more of the same, still insecure and a desperate copy of whatever Apple was shipping in 2007.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
To be talking about this now. If this story gains traction then it will just hurt business adoption. Two years is nothing to wait out Vista and XP still works fine. Many small businesses I've personally heard from have not heard great things about Vista, this will scare them off even more. To take a page from Huggy Bear word on the street is...Vista is OK, nothing special and not worth upgrading to. News of Vista's early replacement certainly isn't the method I'd use to try and win people over.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I think you've got some network latency problems there.
There's a diminishing return on manpower. There's only so much the operating system can be fragmented, and each group can only be so large. That was part of Vista's problem - too many people having a say.
The more people you put on a project the more managers you require, the more meetings, the more decisions, more designs etc...
Larger code base means more bugs, more test time, more bug fixing teams etc..
You can't put twice as many people at a project and expect twice the work to result from it.
Most likely because dispite Microsoft's reality vortex they still at least have the balls to admit to themselves that software still has not been realized as an engineering discipline. It would be nice if a large software project could be broken out into little modules with clear specifications that any coder could go off and make but it usually can't. Lots of development is very iterative, which means everything is changing. Lots of time stuff just has to be built to see how workable or unworkable it really is in practice; but when I change my interface it breaks your module. Maybe that is a minor problem easy to fix or maybe its a show stopper, how can I know.
Most large projects seem to work best with a few core team people who know basically how everything works at least at some level and can then farm out small clearly defined tasks to others. Their total bandwidth is bound to be limited though and so more 'others' does not always help. Growing the core team won't help much either because communication between them has to be total and constant, that is going to take longer the more specialed and nemerous those guys become.
Look at the Linux kernel for instance. You have Linus and pretty small core team that has different specialties. I know all those core team guys have some familiarity with the entire thing and Linus absoultly does. You can tell that from reading LKN. Maybe Jens is a block layer wizard but he know s how the network and VM layers work. He has to know inorder to mange block layer development well. He then has lots of other people submitting smallish patches and fixes to what is primarily his project.
I think we can reasonably assume that the Linux kernel and core GNU stuffs, includeing things like Gnome, have more developers.[qualified] contributing then M$ can put on windows even if they wanted. While those projects do seem to progress more rapidly then Windows its not by any means in an earth shattering way.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"After Windows is finished, the dev team proceeds to work on the next version, while a team called Windows Sustained Engineering takes over the released version."
And therein lies the problem. There is zero incentive to do it right the first time. After all, once its' out the door, its someone else's problem.
The people who actually wrote it should be responsible for fixing it - not writing the next-gen fuckup.
Really? You mean that you checked the inventory levels in the computer, and noticed you only sold two copies?
Actually, I work at a large ISP located in the metropolitain area with subscribers across the country and we keep statistics of what OS people connect with (in our call center as well as various trackers on servers) so we can better support our users and we haven't noticed a significant (i.e. => 1%) portion of Vista installs...
PC sales for the week of Vista's release are up 173% compared to the week previous, and up 67% versus the same week in 2006.
Sure, but hardly any of those PCs run Vista. If the point you were trying to make was about Vista selling more, quoting sales of PCs that haven't shipped with Vista is hardly the way to do it...
A lot of this is because of the massive FUD campaign against Vista that seems to be prevelent in the media....Hasn't anyone noticed that people said the EXACT SAME THINGS about Windows XP? Antivirus and CD burning programs were incompatible. Hardware support was sketchy. Games didn't run as fast. Everyone was going to stick with Windows 98, because it was "good enough".
Hasn't anyone noticed that MS saied the EXACT SAME THINGS about every other OS they've sold? "It's the most stable," "Easy to migrate to," "Most secure windows evar!" etc? Maybe people are finally starting to exercise caution? Maybe people are starting to think it's "just marketing"? Nah.. can't be.
There were complaints about how much XP Pro cost ($299/$199 upgrade). Five years later, and the "business" version of Vista is still $299/$199 - effectively, it's actually cheaper than XP professional was at launch.
Sure, now they have more competition, and realize they actually have to live up to their TCO claims, and even gain consumer goodwill, clean up their image. Even MS have acknowledged this. But wait'll you see how many tie-ins they have to get you to eventually purchase Ultimate if you want to do get a coherent experience, or even make use of otherwise "free" features in other software (since they tie-in to the convenient and already available Ultimate features... how many apps require WMP but actually really need it? Same with IE? Come on, there are more efficient and secure stacks for this...), etc.
Yes, just like XP Home refuses to upgrade over Windows 2000. This is neither new nor unexpected
Are you kidding? It's these kinds of artificial limitations that MS are really pissing off their users with.
At this point, I think you are just making shit up.
Vista isn't going to change anything.
Ah, the first thing you've said that I can fully agree with...
It is too early for most users to upgrade, but Vista isn't going to destroy the internet or eat your children. It's a solid, stable OS.
That's what they said about Windows 95. I'll believe it when I see it.
Hasn't anyone noticed that people said the EXACT SAME THINGS about Windows XP? Antivirus and CD burning programs were incompatible. Hardware support was sketchy. Games didn't run as fast. Everyone was going to stick with Windows 98, because it was "good enough".
I don't remember anybody wanting to stay on Windows 98 (!), but I know lots of people who stayed with Windows 2000. My company finally upgraded to Windows XP, and AFAICT it's exactly the same but with a new paint job. I'm sure there are internal improvements (like reasons that the networking control panels are impossible to navigate now), but functionally, it seems identical. We would have saved a week of work, each, if we could have stayed with 2000. If Vista is going to be the same story, which it sounds like, why would anybody upgrade?
Apparently, my previous assertion that you don't work at a large store is true - none of the major stores allow customers to return opened software.
He said "large", not "major". You're replacing his words with different words that support your point. You can be a large store but not a major one.
Crap on Vista all you want. [...] It's Windows, people, with everything that being Windows entails. If you liked XP, you'll probably like Vista. If you hate Windows, buy a Mac or use Linux - Vista isn't going to change anything.
Alan Perlis said "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing". I believe the same is true of software: if it's still "everything that being Windows entails", it sounds like Windows 2000 with yet another paint job.
When talking about Microsoft's software development, it really helps to drop the marketing names and use the version numbers.
... see Windows ME)
1995 Windows v4.0 (the first real Windows GUI)
1998 Windows v4.1 (now includes Internet Explorer)
2000 Windows v5.0 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, but not ready for all users yet
2001 Windows v5.1 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, now for all users, no more DOS versions, NT is now as good as DOS in every way)
2007 Windows v6.0 (world's largest and most highly-anticipated security patch, plus immature new GUI with outrageous hardware reqs)
The problem I think they are having is that they don't ever build anything with enough quality that they can iterate on it. They shipped Windows Vista v1.0 instead of shipping a true Windows v6.0 with six generations of steady evolutionary advancement in features and functionality.