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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!!"
...each copy with secret water marks throughout the software, traceable back to the folks that signed the NDA that promised the left AND right nut should they spill the beans.
ya, can't imagine how that doesn't happen more often.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
From the business pages of the Wall Street Journal, it appears that many countries in the EU are ditching Microsoft and going with Linux.
So one wonders if this will all become moot at some point, as the invisible hand of the marketplace chooses a wiser solution.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Free software may have had 64-bit versions - but was there any advantage over the 32 bit versions? Negligible in most cases. 32-bit software reworked to run on x64 isn't exactly cutting edge. Then once you had a x64 OS, you just ran 32-bit apps on it in compatibility mode.
No, in the real world people count on their Windows apps to run their daily business. In your dream world, who is creating the everyday business apps to compete with the Windows counterparts that run nearly every business in the US?
What exactly does this discussion have to do with the "Vista Capable" debacle?
Sure, Vista is a slow, bloated operating system that offers very few tangible improvements over its predecessor.
However, the "Vista Capable" debacle grew out of the fact that Microsoft's marketing droids decided to vastly overstate Vista's ability to run over slow hardware.
Had Microsoft been a bit more conservative with their estimates (subtly admitting that their operating system is a cow), there never would have been a legal issue. Vista on its own isn't a great product, although its faults do not constitute a breach of the law (had the product been absurdly unstable or insecure, that might have been the case, although by most accounts, Vista either holds the line or improves over XP in these regards).
TFA discusses the possible engineering & design decisions that are being put into Windows 7 as new features. Odds are that many of these features haven't even been coded. Likewise, given that the design document has *just* been finalized, I can't imagine that the marketing guys have had much (if any) time to figure out how to spin the new product.
Here's a hint: Look at the features that were dropped from Vista (some of them were actually quite innovative).
Personally, I hope that Windows 7 is a decent, solid operating system, and corrects for Vista's faults. Microsoft has had a tendency to appropriately compensate if one of their products flops. NT4 spawned into a beautiful desktop-ready os with the release of Win2k, and after destroying all evidence that Windows Me! ever existed, Microsoft launched XP, which is arguably the most successful desktop operating system to date.
Also, Apple needs a kick in the pants. They're getting complacent, and the Quality Control on the last few releases of OS X have been abysmal by their former standards.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You lost me at Lotus being superior software.
It's a nice manifesto, but it's more about how you'd like the world to be than how it actually is or will be anytime soon.
I also have good feelings about Windows 7. Vista had really good features but failed in lot of ways for me. I really feel that Microsoft recognizes Vista's faults, listened to the real critics of it and this will show as such in the new version.
This is not a sarcastic statement.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
For the past 20 years Microsoft has been doing everything they can to screw the competition. Not only has it ended up costing computer users around the world money, it has held back innovation and progress all so they could lock-in their customers. I don't want them to reform. I really hope they produce more crap and keep on doing so until people stop using their software. A few anti-monopoly lawsuits wont change this. The retailers are as locked-in as the computer users themselves. When Microsoft fails and dies we will finally have a real choice on what OS to buy our computers with without the Microsoft Tax.
With Microsoft having been chosen as the exclusive Homeland Security contractor, what is the point of this pretense over antitrust? Even before this absurd contract, it was cogently pointed out (by Ralph Nader and Jamie Love; see: http://www.linux.com/feature/23279) that the government shouldn't be putting its eggs and our tax dollars in the Microsoft basket. Now, of course, Washington is in bed with the devil. And it's pretty hard to tell the devil he's not a good lay.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html
http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/apples_mac_os_x_leopard_is_64_bit_done_right_unlike_vista/
There's no incentive now. Releasing Windows 7 won't change that.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."