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Preventing Another Vista-like Release With Windows 7
CRE writes "An article at the OS News site details how Microsoft could best avoid Windows 7 becoming another Vista-esque release. The author advises Microsoft to basically split Windows in two. Windows 7 would be a new operating system based on the proven Windows NT kernel, but with a completely new user interface, with backwards compatibility provided by VMs. In addition, to please business customers and other people concerned with backwards compatibility, Microsoft should create 'Windows Legacy', basically the current Windows, which will receive only security and bug fixes. Relatedly, APCMag is reporting that Microsoft has moved Julie Larson-Green (the driving force behind Office 2007's Ribbon UI) over to work on Windows 7's interface."
The driver situation is going to be just crazy. Its bad enough now with windows.
...Microsoft has moved Julie Larson-Green (the driving force behind Office 2007's Ribbon UI) over to work on Windows 7's...
Oh, no...
As for the future Windows, I say build it to be a VM store, capable of taking on the personality of any VM---allowing you to have new fancy features as well as the legacy Windows (heck, maybe they should include everything, all the way to DOS, Win3.1, etc.). You don't really `need' an OS (assuming they figure out ways of enabling you to efficiently use the hardware from VM)---you might have a `primary' image that you use all the time, and a buncha others provided for compatibility with previous versions.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Deliver all the features you promise, and a few extras, when the time is right.
It's that simple.
Whether or not the Vista release was successful or not is generally troll bait but from my personal perspective it had none of the things I wanted and featured many things I didn't. I certainly won't be touching it until well after SP1 and even then only if there are several great games for me to play. It was a release "failure" to people like me who expected some goodies and a new Windows iteration but Microsoft delivered a more restrictive operating system. No thanks!
crazy dynamite monkey
If they're planning on making the next Windows UI mirror Office 2007 then count me on the list of people likely to never buy it. The Office 2007 UI is horrible and badly done. Never before with MS products have I felt the desire to kill someone after using a software. Well except for that time I tried using MS Plus but that's a whole nother article.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
They created a whole new version of VB, relegating VB 6 to maintenance mode. Anybody who knows a VB programmer knows how popular that decision was. The Wikipedia article on VB doesn't even mention VB.Net!
dom
with backwards compatibility provided by VMs
That just gave me an interesting idea: Why doesn't MS ship fully functional versions of previous OS's, wrapped in a VM, with newer versions? What would they lose? I know I'd be far less worried about upgrading to Vista if I knew I could load up a built-in VM of DOS 6.0 or Win98SE or WinXP and play all my favorite shareware games from the '90s as easily as the latest-and-greatest. Same goes for here at work...it would be nice to know that some of our older software could just be loaded in a VM until the vendors catch up with Vista. As long as they maintain security on the sandbox itself, they wouldn't need to worry overmuch about keeping the old OS up to date, and it's not like people would be buying Vista just to exclusively use it to run XP, but it would make for a much more obvious upgrade path than the current hard cutoff in backwards compatibility.
Unpleasantries.
Like MSFT couldn't make their own version of wine in half the time, or even use a VM. OS X did. the OS 9 for PPC VM was advanced enough to play OS 9 games in. Yes I did. Are you saying MSFT isn't smart enough to make such a compatiblity layer? Not even the MSFT basher in me believes that.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Its worse than that for Microsoft. The cost to develop a new OS has increased exponentially (with the complexity) since their 3.1/95 days. That trend isn't going to reverse, and it is going to become impossible for Microsoft to innovate and profit from the OS alone. That is why widespread support for ODF can break them, and why they are fighting it so hard.
The OSS model is working a lot better at spreading out the complexity and costs of innovating within an OS. Its simply a more sustainable "business" model than Microsoft's.
Two versions: server and workstation. That's it. No more "ultimate" or "home" or any other stripped down versions.
For Server: no client access licenses. When you buy a copy of the server software, you can have as many clients as you want. Each server version is capable of everything, including clustering, load balancing, and everything else.
For Workstation: one interface. It could be new or old, whatever, but exactly one. If it's new, we all need to learn the new version. Don't like that? Get Linux or a Mac.
Finally, both server and workstation should support a single hardware compatibility list. If your hardware isn't on the list, you can't load it; update the list monthly through Windows Update. There is Driver Signing already, but you can get around it by ignoring the warnings. Eliminate getting around the warnings.
...but, by introducing different product lines in their OS, Microsoft will only confuse the customer, and they're way too smart and customer oriented to allow something like that to happen.
What they really ought to do is something more like what Apple did with the Classic Mode environment for supporting OS 9 applications, which ran within OS X. Thing is, MS will probably have to support theirs indefinitely, while Apple was able to successfully kill Classic Mode within about 5 years.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Windows XP was the dramatic rewrite of Windows on a new core, if you are running XP that was almost 10 years on the making.
Microsoft has already failed at all of these things people want them to do, you have to look elsewhere and fast because Windows 7.0 is just one release after Vista (6.1) it is going to be mostly the same. Microsoft Research hasn't fixed major architectural flaws. The sloppy security of the app platform is just one problem. For example the apps are all hard-coded to 96 dpi and nothing has been done to move forward. Displays with 300 dpi are essentially print devices, MS hasn't got any printing chops, even Word is only WYSIWYG by 1980's standards. MS also does not have a Web 2.0 browser or a lightweight browser or modern media support (MPEG-4) and their 64-bit transition is a disaster.
This guy is the kind of dreamer Microsoft feasts on. He's so full of excuses for MS yet bitter also. He wants a reward now for all the years he did free grahics driver QA. Sorry, that time is gone for good.
The problems with Windows are all at the Win32 layer. This is a huge problem for Microsoft, since their biggest competitive advantage is backwards compatibility. There is a lot of Win32 software around. Hardly anyone runs Windows because they like Windows, they run Windows because they need to be able to use some bit of Win32 (or, in some cases, Win16) software, and trust Windows to do this more than WINE.
Ever had a hardware failure on OSX? You only get those when there's a bogon overload in the RDF generator.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://www.mhall119.com
If they're planning on making the next Windows UI mirror Office 2007 then count me on the list of people likely to never buy it. The Office 2007 UI is horrible and badly done.
Lemmie guess, you've used pre-2007 MS Office a bit?
In user testing, Microsoft found that for people who had used old-style Office, the success rate for old-style and new-style UIs was the same (though they bitched about it, as you are). For people who had never used it before, the new-style UI had a much higher success rate.
I know a bunch of people are religious about "if it doesn't look like MS Word 5, I hate it!", but Ribbons mean more people can use it, and more importantly, that *new* users can use it. All you old-style users will be dead, eventually, and keeping UI-backwards-compatibility will be as useless as CPM-backwards-compatibility: upgrade to keep up with the times, or die out.
Normally I can't stand Microsoft apps but this time they've got it right.
Interesting that MS users tend to be short-term orientated (won't put up with apps not working from one version of windows to the next), while OSX users tend to be long-term orientated (put up with the short term problems because they realize in the end, the better design is the right thing to do.)
Your attempt at defending Vista is admirable, but I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you. I've been using Vista for a few months now, and I can say for sure, certainly from my perspective, it most certainly is not an improvement over XP. Unfortunately, since my "upgrade" to Vista, the pace at which I get that stuff done is noticeably slower. Perhaps it's due to me just getting used to it, or perhaps it really isn't a productivity booster. My feelings lean towards the latter. I've already disabled UAC, don't use Aero, turned off the sidebar, and tried as much as possible to trim it down to the point that it now just looks like XP with a new start menu. As far as I'm concerned the "improvements" Vista have brought are completely superfluous to the computing experience - there is no "must have" feature in Vista for me, and I'm sure many others. That and the fact that it runs like a dog even on the hardware I'm using which is little over a year old convince me that Vista is a major flop, despite what sales numbers might say.
Install was easy if not quick. The UAC pop ups were expected and not so annoying to begin with. I started clearing them and changing the factors that caused them. Everything I did caused another one. I started trying to get my SLI and dual screen setup to work. Vista would never see the second screen. I went to download the latest nVidia driver (~60Mb) via IE 7. It took it nearly 12 minutes over my 15Mb FiOS connection. Installed the driver and still Vista would not see my second monitor. That did it for me. Three hours was enough time wasted when I should have been surfing at the speed of light and playing.
Installed XP and updated it in less than 2 hours. Downloaded the same ~60Mb patch via Firefox in less than one minute. By hour three I was playing World of Warcraft faster, more smoothly and more richly than I'd ever seen it before.
I could have eventually worked through the technical glitches, but there's no way I can improve Vista and IE 7's sluggish performance THAT much.
I'm ambivalent, at best, about the 31 Flavors of Windows. But it raises an interesting point...
Old computers that still kick A55 and would be a shame to throw out. I have a PIII-400 that stills does what it needs to, and a Mac 8500 that still does nearly everything I ask, except that IE Mac doesn't work on most sites. What we need to do, sometime <BLINK>REALLY SOON</BLINK> is to freeze a subset of computers and OS forever into an R2-Unit standard.
Recall that the R2 unit loaded into Luke's X-wing was the SAME unit that Obi-Wan used. How likely is it that ANYTHING we have on a computer now will even physically plug in, let alone work in 40 years. Some computers can do 90% of what we need from now until at least 20 years from now. Can we PLEASE pick a set of standards and let that class of computer be supported? For example, ATA-100, USB 2.0 (or Firewire800, I don't care), DVI, RJ-45... I have peripherals in my garage with no computer capable of connecting them. I still have a copy of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter... as if. Something. Anything.
And Windows Whatever. XP, XT, 2KSP17. I don't care. That way, as we retire, the Geek Squad can say, "Do you want us to replace your computer? This one's seen a lot of wear." "Not on your life. That G4 Titanum and me have been through a lot together."
PS: The blink tag was fake.
Your ignoring the big performance hit and high hardware requirements for Vista. Granted 2k is slightly faster than XP on the same hardware but unlike Vista you don't need to make such a quantum leap in order to get XP to run as quickly as 2000.
Also XP brought us things like a built-in firewall, clear type, remote desktop, 64bit support, etc.
It also brought some unwelcome things like product activation and DRM, but on the whole it is widely agreed that XP is a respectable upgrade over 2000. This is where your argument pretty much falls apart, it is not widely agreed that Vista is a worthwhile upgrade over XP, in fact it is quite the opposite. So your statement that "But XP, in its current state, has no selling point." isn't really true. If it had no selling point then why are people still clamoring for XP and why are we seeing vendors who had moved to Vista had to cave in to the huge demand to bring XP back?
That simply did not happen on such a large scale with XP. I remember the XP haters(I was probably one of them) and the complaints about speed when XP first came out but they pail in comparison to the revolt I'm seeing against Vista. IMHO this is new and different then any other MS transition to date. Or maybe I should just say this is the worst Microsoft OS transition to date and when you look at what happened internally during Vista's development cycle nobody should be surprised at the outcome.
Your right that in 200x when Windows 7 comes out that these same old arguments will crop up, but unless MS pulls a rabbit out of their asses with Vista SP1 your going to see a huge amount of users sticking with XP until Windows 7 comes out.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Exactly. New Coke was actually better. Blind testing proved that people loved it. It failed because people were terrified and resentful of change. They didn't hate the soda. They hated the change. The very idea of change made a delicious beverage taste bad.
There might be a lesson for those who long for large scale Linux adoption in that story.
Actually "New Coke" did fail because of taste. When New Coke was "enginered" it was tested for marketability by with "sip tests" (i.e. people taking a sip of the drink and comparing it to other versions). "New Coke" was sweeter than "Original Coke", therefore more people prefered it to the other candidates when taking sip tests. But when "New Coke" was relesed and people drank the stuff for real the taste was too sweet to bare.