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Microsoft Submits Windows 7 for Antitrust Review
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has submitted the follow-up to Windows Vista to the committee that oversees its US antitrust compliance, to ensure the operating system is meeting the terms of the company's agreement with the government. According to last week's status report on the US antitrust case, Microsoft "recently supplied" the Technical Committee (TC) with a build of the OS, code-named Windows 7, and the TC will "conduct middleware-related tests on future builds" of the software. The move was revealed in papers filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Those on the TC so far are the only ones privy to what the follow-up to Vista will look like, and Microsoft is mum on details of the software. But recent company moves and revelations hint at what can be expected from the software, which is due for release in late 2009 or early 2010. Lets hope Microsoft learns some lessons from the "Vista Capable" dilemma!!"
As usual, M$'s software lags hardware by five to seven years. Expect a continued messy transition to 64 bit computing that will favor Intel, the other monopoly laggart.
This is a lot like the transition from 95 to XP. How many times did Bill Gates declare the "death of DOS" or "16 bit computing"? The messy steps between included 98, NT, ME and W2K. It took that long to marginalize competing software vendors but the real cost should be measured in intentionally wasted hardware. Non free and free software competitors continued to produce technically superior software such as DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, OS/2, BeOS and Apple, of course. The competitors all won the race to 32 bits by years but M$ used it's market position to shove them all aside. This is the lesson they thought they learned then.
Free software has handed M$ it's ass for 64 bit software and architecture independence. Almost as soon as there were 64 bit platforms GNU/Linux and BSD were running on it, Alpha, AMD, Intel, Sun and more exotic stuff. Lesser computers are also working. Thanks to the fantastic work of GNU it's just a compiler switch.
The problem for M$ is that we have all learned the same lesson and are sick of it. People are not going to just go along with things. They are not going to throw their hardware out again for another buggy version of Windows. Free software works all of it better now, so Windows 7 is just as dead in the water as Vista was. The industry is losing money, and their trust in M$ is gone.
No calls now, I'm
You're wrong about world perfect- MS Office has always been the premiere office suite. Have you seen Office 08? I don't get why Sarah Connor was trying to destroy The Turk-- it's obvious that Skynet won't start from a chess AI, it'll start when Microsoft adds just one too many features to Office and Visual Studio, and they become self-aware. The VS2008 installer is frankly terrifying with all the features flicking by in the installer animation, some of them are so insane and impressive.
A big part of antitrust is windows overrides default browsers and such, and forces it's own bundled applications on the user by making it difficult to discover how to make your software run well on the OS when it's not clearly documented (secret hooks only available to MS).
If windows media player is able to achieve better performance through some type of black magic that other media players don't have access to, how will this be tested on a pre-release secret platform? Same with browsers, office suites, or any other MS application.
Have these copies been distributed with the complete source code so secrets can be uncovered? Even if that was the case, who would pay for the man hours to sift through millions of lines of code? Even with a full source code audit, the released binaries could be completely different anyhow.
I think the only solution to restore fair competition is massive fines that go directly to marketing and development of competing platforms. Paying consumers who have been locked into the MS trap still leaves them trapped.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Dilemma. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
So why worry about Windows 7 now? It's years away - and it'll be essentially stillborn when it finally does arrive. By then, other better alternatives will be readily available for a far, far lower price.
So that's it? All that to-do about Vista and how it's the Next Big Thing and it's slated to be replaced by "Windows 7" inside of a year and some change from now? That'll mean that Windows Vista was in production longer than it will be in service.
WTF are you talking about, your post is full of non-sequiters.
>>Expect a continued messy transition to 64 bit computing that will favor Intel, the other monopoly laggart.
Vista and XP both shipped with 64 bit versions, specifically x86-64, which was developed originally by.....drumroll.....AMD! How exactly is ignoring IA64 for x86-64 favoring Intel?
>>Some nonsense about 32 bit computing
Windows 95 was 32 bit software. Maybe you mean using a protected memory model and pre-emptive multitasking(which is an operating system concept and has nothing to do with application software). Even Mac OS 9 didn't have this, and WinNT(which predates it by several years) did!
>>Free software has handed M$ it's ass for 64 bit software and architecture independence.
Guess what! Windows runs on more than x86: IA64, DEC Alpha and x86-64 come to mind as current and past platforms.
I think your point is that people don't have an incentive to buy a new computer or upgrade their operating system. You really need new killer apps to drive an upgrade cycle; lacking that, why should people upgrade?
Sinofski leads Windows Org now and he used to lead Office. Office code names for a while where Office 9, Office 10 etc.
Yes, God forbid a company should reform its bad behavior and be better corporate citizens. Can't have that, can we?
So would I. It's funny how so many people who have never touched Vista bash it. On the appropriate hardware (yes it's a beast hardware wise) it's quite nice. Then again I think OS X is nice on my Macs, and Linux is really nice on the couple of boxes I have it on as well.
Ah well. Wannabe geeks who treat their OS of choice as if it were a religion are at least amusing, don't you agree?
In 2012 windows will mess up and try to start a war like how the WOPR tried to in wargames.
The Windows for Warships was just the first step some hacker form the out side of the usa may try to take our war systems down buy go after windows systems or by trying to trigger a NMCI / EDS lock out and no one in the navy has the admin right to fix with calling the help desk. If they can take out the help desk then they can kill navy ships at sea.
Well, certain organisations have always had access to Windows source code (educational institutions, governments) on a "look, but don't touch" basis - after signing massive NDAs. So really, if it were going to happen, it would have happened already (more than once)
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
...and I'm sure I'm going to have half of slashdot jumping down my throat, calling me a Microsoft Sympathiser for saying this, but...
...shit like third parties having their way with Windows is probably a very big reason why Vista isn't as great as it could be. The media companies stuck their big noses in, and we got Protected Media Pathway or whatever it's called... I can't copy files around my computer without Windows having to check for copy protection or whatever it's doing, and the antitrust-friendly "Default Programs" thing has somehow managed to make it harder to set file associations than before.
The thing with Vista is; what it does well, it's really really good at. Windows Explorer finally does what I want it to do, and the audio mixing panel is a boon from the gods... it's just that all this is overshadowed by the stuff it doesn't do well, which is arguably not entirely Microsoft's fault.
I'd like to see what Vista would have been like if everybody kept their noses out of it during development.
Yup, market will choose a better solution. But it takes sooooooooo looooooooong. :/
hany
Windows ME was perhaps the worst version of windows to be release. They followed it up with XP which is possibly the best.
Lots of people are hoping that Vista was just a stopgap and windows 7 will have all the cool stuff promised (virtual registry, WinFS and other stuff I'm sure other people can remember)