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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."
The power switch?
I always wonder why Microsoft cannot afford to (or just will not) put more manpower on the job.
A company like this should be able to look at security in XP and develop Vista in different teams at the same time, shouldn't it?
"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."
I am not too impressed by the name of "Vienna", especially since I happen to like the place.
I think something along the lines of Windows Hindenburg would be more appropriate. Or does anyone have a better name?
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
"we got nothing, someone think something up quick so we can steal it."
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
you're going to start hearing more and more
And you'd better going to start forgetting pretty fast too, since what you'll hear probably ain't going to be what you'll get. Or maybe it will. Or not. Well, after the last few years of windows feature hypes, it's hard to believe anything. That is, if you care to even bother.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I just don't understand why they are announcing this new version so soon after the release of Vista. The reviews I have been reading about Vista already make me think twice about wanting to upgrade; now that I know they are bringing in another OS in a few years' time what is the incentive for a typical MS customer like me to upgrade? Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.
For those that do want to upgrade there is already a built-in lag before doing so anyway (at least for the sensible ones), either because they need to buy new hardware or because they will not install a new OS without some of the early bugs being ironed out and a service pack being released.
If we assume that MS actually delivers this new OS on time (which is a big if) there is not that long a wait between the time after lag for people to upgrade to Vista and the time this is released. Won't this reduce uptake on Vista? After all, if we are already happy with XP, why not wait?
Anyone already using Vista care to comment?
Company developing new product!
Is anyone surprised by this? I bet people at Apple are already working on the successor to Leopard, which isn't even out yet. This is the way things are done.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I'm not so sure of that, vista adoption has been faster than Windows 2000 adoption in american business ( http://news.com.com/Report+Vistas+business+sales+s tronger+than+expected/2100-1016_3-6149468.html ) to be honest thats going to drive sales. Most people I know like things to be the same, My pa uses outlook 2002 in work and refuses to upgrade to 2003, I can name several other family/friends who use a set OS/Office apps in work and so use the exact same ones at home (sometimes newer if the UI isn't much different.)
Vista's adoption rate has surprised me, only two other tech savy people I know have got it and yet the store in which I work is filled with new upgraders, a online group I'm part of has formed a vista discussion group and even a few of my university mates have also made the plunge. To be honest its worrying, I upgraded because I found one or two features useful and got too used to ribbons (from running the beta of Office) many people have upgraded because the people on the news have been going on about how wonderfuull Vista is.
I was doubtful that Microsoft would get 100 million copies of Vista out the door by the end of the year, but am not so sure now. BTW does anyone have and idea of the number of activations of Vista so far?
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.
WTF is this a story? Company launches product and starts work on next product. No shit sherlock.... I would suspect that while the new OS moves from the blue-sky phase to getting actual code cut the R&D dept will be work on its replacement....
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
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.
We walked in the cold air.
Freezing breath on a window pane,
Lying and waiting.
The man in the dark in a picture frame,
So mystic and soulful.
A voice reaching out in a piercing cry,
It stays with you until
The feeling has gone only you and I.
It means nothing to me.
This means nothing to me.
Oh Vienna
Disabling enabling? No way.
They've probably been fleshing out the feature list for Vista's successor since the first day a developer copy of OS X 10.5 reached the grubby mitts of a Microsoft employee. Don't expect the real work to start until spring, though, when it's released with its 'top secret' features.
Go ahead and mod me down, bitches, but after this tasty tidbit you know I'm probably right. And they did the same thing to Go Corp, BTW.
~Philly
MS and Hollywood want to lock us all up in a tiny little can of DRM control, just like a bunch of Vienna sausages.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Until Microsoft gets off their "stupid" backwards compatibility hang up Windows will always be bloated and "swiss cheese" (no offense intended against the Swiss). Why would someone wish to run an 8 or 16 bit program from 17 years ago on a machine and OS that did not exist at that time is beyond me... I have stated this before and drew flame for it... Some lamer complained that they could not "afford" another computer to have a second OS to run old stuff on. I have more than 15 computers out of those I only bought and paid for 3 (three) all the rest are off the side of the street or dumpsters. They all are bootable at least to one OS. Most are multi-boot win98/Linux. They range from a Pentium 200 up to P4 3.0 even a couple of dual xeons (yep trash out of a dumpster complete with a 64 bit Win XP, CAD/CAM loaded also with the latest Office..OUT OF A DUMPSTER) It ain't hard to have more that one machine and very many OSs... If it is still an issue see vmware..... Windows will be broke till they do a "redo" form scratch...
Well, Microsoft gets torn apart enough for antitrust, do you think they want to be blamed for a coup as well?
I had this exact same problem on a
Abit NF95
AMD64 3700+
BFG 7600 GS OC 25mb
Creative Audigy SE 7.1
2gb Cosair Value DDR ram
I tried everything but Vista would hang on the install almost every time and the few times it installed I had the exact same errors you've listed. as far as I can make out it was the ram/chipset driver, unplugging one of my ram sticks (leaving 1gb) allowed Vista to install properly. Using anouther motherboard and all the other same components on a Asus A8n-SLi Deluxe motherboard (Nforce 4 chipset)and it installed fine. Trying the same components on anouther nforce 410/430 chipset board (a DFI Lan Party) caused the exact same error.
The really weird thing is now Vista is installed I can put the second 1gb stick in my Abit Nf95 and don't suffer the issues you mention. Since its only happened on one chipset and two boards which support a maximum of 2gb DDR ram I'm assuming the installer is seeing somethign different and going wrong when it configures Vista.
In short if you have 2gb of ram and a Nforce 410/430 chipset try removing a 1gb stick and installing again, then once its installed replace the 1gb stick.
While I'm not a management expert, I agree with you: have waves of teams moving from Dev to Maintenance status as each project and product progress. That puts incentive to make software you're proud of, documented for the next phase of development and with the original experts able to make sure that it works and is fixed when foun to be broken.
But... I'm in a pessimistic mood and will point out the throw-away attitude pervading capitalistic western culture, which means that bugs are a motivator for people to pay money for an upgrade to the next edition.
Hypervisors are the way to go for the OS of the future. Microsoft has had this vision for years. It was the foundation of their Next Generation Secure Computing Base, NGSCB, aka (ominous music here) Palladium.
Palladium got embroiled in the whole DRM controversy but there are good reasons to go this way independent of DRM. The idea is that you have a regular OS running, a Vista type OS, and then you launch your hypervisor. The hypervisor digs its way under the OS, takes control, and the OS is then packaged up and is running in a virtual machine. This is what they call "Late Launch" and is the key to one aspect of the technology I will explain below.
Now, here is the big win. You can create a new class of software, "applets" (maybe "virtlets" would be a better name) which interface directly to the hypervisor instead of the big legacy OS. These run in separate VMs so are immune to corruption of the big OS. They are simple and use a minimal API from the hypervisor so the chances of getting the code right and bug free are much greater. You can now use these for security oriented features you'd never dare to dream of on a monolithic OS. Think of Internet voting as a good example of what kind of security we are talking about. A more prosaic example is ecommerce - in a future world where people get their credit card numbers stolen all the time by malware there will be a real need for a secure way to shop online. Hypervisors and virtlets give developers a chance to start with a clean sheet of paper on the security front, while still maintaining full legacy backwards compatibility.
Then there's the kicker. Part of the goal of Late Launch is to use the TPM chip to measure (hash) the hypervisor and each VM separately. It means that each VM has an identity that it can securely attest to using a certified key embedded in the TPM chip. That Internet voting app? It can connect to the voting server and the server can verify that it is running in a clean state. Any corruption would be detected and show up in a bad hash report from the TPM chip. Malware can't fake that report because nobody can fake it, not even the user (meaning, he can't be fooled into faking it either - this is the flaw in EFF's "owner override" proposal, but that's another story).
This is all happening, folks. Intel's Lagrande Technology, now called TXT or Trusted Execution Technology, is rolling out as we write. This was the gating factor for all this technology and is probably the real reason it didn't appear in Vista - the hardware wasn't ready. But it's going to be there and it will be ubiquitous in a couple of years (at least, as ubiquitous as Vista-ready PCs are today). The next OS will take advantage of these features (and analogous ones on AMD, code-named Presidio) and will provide a whole new paradigm for security. This will leap beyond anything Apple can do and they will be playing catch-up, unless of course they start heading in this direction themselves.
To me as a security person, this is the obvious, inevitable path of OS development and is the only plausible thing Microsoft could be talking about. It should be very exciting to see these ideas brought to market in real systems.
You forgot Windows 2000 in late 1999. Which was certainly more useful than ME...
"Windows is a damn good OS."
Do you _use_ Windows? I wasted 2 hours a few days ago finding out that I have to rewrite a bunch of scripts because Windows has an insanely short maximum command line argument length, and if you hit it it chops off your arguments and sticks a "D" at the end. Several times a I have coworkers come to me to have me run batch jobs on my Linux box because it will take me 2 minutes to do something that Windows make incredibly difficult. When they ask me to adapt my scripts to Cygwin/bash, it always takes me longer to deal with the stupidities of Windows than it took me to write the script in the first place.
Windows is a mediocre appliance. It is a terrible operating system.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Disclaimer: I work for a small, independent web company in the UK. I have never knowingly had any contact with anyone working at MS, and I have never received any freebie from any company other than the crap that's handed out to everyone at conferences. I have been to two conferences, JavaUK06 (Sun) and XP Day (a bunch of extreme programming advocates). I am neither a shill nor an astroturfer for MS or any other company (Hell, I wouldn't even shill for my own company, and I have shares in it)
I've briefly played with the Vista betas and RCs, and I like it a lot. I didn't find UAC particularly intrusive, and I'm a sucker for eye candy and have a (year old) machine that's perfectly capable of running Aero with all the bells and whistles. I have other stuff I need to buy now, and I'll probably wait for the first service pack in any case, but I fully intend to buy Vista, probably an OEM copy of the Ultimate edition.
Don't let your prejudices blind you to the fact that some people genuinely like things that you do not. The habit of accusing anyone who claims to like $unpopularThing of being a shill is immature and tiresome.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I suspect that Microsoft are announcing shiny new software for some future date is that they're worried about Leopard.
Reviewers are already pitting Vista against OS X 10.4 and finding them neck-and-neck, with Vista coming out ahead on some features and OS X coming out ahead on others.
A lot of people are expecting the upcoming OS X 10.5 to blow Vista's features out of the water. Microsoft don't want Vista to look like a lame (but profitable) duck for a few years, so they're going to pump up the next big thing. To paraphrase their past vapourware strategies - "don't buy from them, stay with us and you'll get all their features anyway, soon, soon..."
"We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release."
Is that just a complete lie, a total re-writing of history? I've never heard anything other than the story of years of painful work going nowhere, resetting to Win2K3, jettisoning features and finally making progress. I've never heard this bit about slacking off for a couple of years, not really trying and then picking things back up later on.
So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna?
According to Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers."
"It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
This comment reveals that Vienna is truly vapourware - they've not even reached the whiteboard to block out the big features.
How can Microsoft let executives like this go out and give an interview with no spiel? A quick elevator speech is all that's required. Just something about "new filesystem database to revolutionise files" or "rich media" or even "exceedingly wealthy media born with a silver spoon." Anything is better than this sort of "well, gee, I dunno, didn't think you'd ask me that, hmm... nope, nothing's come to mind."
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.