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Windows 7 To Skip Straight To a Release Candidate
b8fait writes "The head of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows development confirmed that Windows 7 will take the unusual path of moving straight from a single beta, which was launched earlier this month, to a release candidate. Sinofsky fleshed out the plan today and hinted that just as there would be no Beta 2, the company would also not provide a RC2 build. In other words, there may be only one released build of Windows 7 before it ships, possibly much sooner than even some of the most aggressive rumors about Windows 7. How much different can Windows 7 really be with such a shortened beta cycle?"
For what is touted as a major OS release I really can't believe that a single beta can get the job done. Either they are rushing it, or it's really just a minor change to Vista.
Vista was shoved out the door too early without enough time to season. So for their second whack at it, which they've conveniently renamed to disguise the fact that it's a second whack, they're shoving it out the door too early without enough time to season. Consistency is a good thing but not when you're doing it wrong.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Windows 7 is mostly a marketing play. It should have been Vista SP2 with the usual bunch of very useful cleanups, accelerations and simplifications (i.e. what Vista should have been).
However, the name Vista is now such a disaster that they had to change the name.
I always thought that "Release Candidate" was english, meaning that it is a candidate for release? How can they then know how many such candidates that will fail to be release quality before hand?
If Microsoft skips a decent beta then either they don't put much value on beta testing anymore, or they are so eager to leave the Vista debacle behind that they are willing to put a RTM (Release To Manufacturing) sticker on beta-quality code.
This will make all Microsoft users beta testers, and Win7 SP1 will be the real release version
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Not very different. Face it, Windows 7 is simply Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft just can't call it that because of the bad reputation Vista gained thanks to MS's mishandling and misapprehension of what users actually want. What we're seeing isn't a shortened beta cycle for Windows 7, it's a longer-than-usual testing/beta cycle for a service pack.
If you knew you weren't going to release RC1, in what sense is it a release candidate?
-Dave
Vista was the beta.
Of course they're trying to rush the release of Windows 7, Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" is right around the corner.
I guess that Apple ad about Microsoft putting all their money into marketing instead of R&D was closer to truth than some people would like to believe.
Windows 7 is likely more aimed at XP users and people considering the unreasonably expensive switch to Mac.
I don't think it's really aiming to be the next big upgrade for Vista users, although I believe it will be anyway.
If you want to consider Windows 7 a SP, that's not a bad call, since it's built on Vista's backend directly. It's really an overhauled and re-imagined userland which really does warrant a version change. It doesn't act like prior Windows so it is fair to call it a new system, for user's sake.
I've been using the Beta for a while and it isn't a beta like say... an Ubuntu beta. This is a beta of a quality the open source world cannot obtain. We call this a release in linuxland. For this reason, I don't think there's anything strange about them aiming for a single RC.
Alternatively, this could easily be a case of an upgraded installer/software update tool rendering it unnecessary to separate RC releases. They might just upgrade the RC if they need another one.
I think the marketing angle on this is that Windows 7 is correct by design. Besides, Apple releases new versions of OS X that are basically service packs at full price all the time, and they don't even have large public betas. Consider that Microsoft has a far larger and more effective QA system internally than Apple. They CAN release like this-- they've got an army of internal testers aside from the millions of beta testers out there.
* Faster on Less Hardware - They did make it work better on older slower hardware with less memory.
But still slower than XP on the same hardware. Faster than Vista is not saying much.
This should be included into Vista with a service pack
The whole thing strikes me as Vista SP3.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Vista is the "New Coke" to XP's Coca-Cola, and 7 is "Coca-Cola Classic."
Maybe I'm just jaded/cynical, but isn't this a bit too convenient? MS goes from taking 6+ years developing a bloated, buggy, annoying OS to releasing a suspiciously stable, fast and well-supported OS in less than 2?
The timing of Windows 7's release being sped up may not help it.
Look at the economy in most countries right now. Many people have either lost their jobs or are fearful for their security. Most firms need maximum productivity with minimum overheads to survive the storm.
Could there be a worse time to launch a new product? Especially when said product is a dubious, at best, improvement on XP. As a home user, and not a gamer, I see no reason whatsoever to switch from XP. For business users, I'm thinking it must be corporate suicide to introduce a new operating system that adds little extra features, and yet has such a different interface that it will require some extra training, and a noticeable decrease in productivity. Never mind the additional cost of licensing and installation.
I simply do not understand how they can possibly think Windows 7 will be successful.
Except that XP does just about everything Vista does. Can you say the same for DOS?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm using the Windows 7 Beta right now, and previously I've been using Windows Vista.
Is it really that much better? Here are the points I can think of it being better than Vista:
* Faster on Less Hardware - They did make it work better on older slower hardware with less memory. * Less Annoying User Account Control - It doesn't freak out every time I want to run a program from the desktop. This should be included into Vista with a service pack, imho. * New Starbar - I like it. Good Job Microsoft. But is it worth the upgrade?
Other than these things... why would anybody upgrade?
Oh... yeah, that's right... Everybody says it's "So much better." Right.
--Pathway
What has every new edition of Windows been other than a slightly better UI coupled with more support for more hardware? I mean, 2 out of 3 of your points are about UI, and from what I've been able to tell (also currently running the beta) it makes a fairly large difference. Finding windows/using more windows at once isn't a problem with the new taskbar, and as you said, it is slightly leaner than Vista was.
So why would anybody upgrade? Because the only real reason people ever upgraded their (Windows) OS was security (adjustable UAC helps with that tremendously) and UI. So, yeah, it really is "So much better" to those who don't realize how minimal of a change this is. In fact, its still "So much better" for those who do know how minimal the change is. Hell, I was an XP holdout til the beta. I even have an XP partition on my drive, which I've used all of three times. The UI in 7 just keeps driving me back towards it, and I feel that's the same reason people will upgrade.
That's not to say that Vista couldn't be essentially 7 - in fact, with a simple service pack, it really would be just a slightly beefier version - but since that won't happen, expect people to flock to 7.
The UI is the frontend to the entire OS. Even minimal changes, especially good, solid minimal changes (e.g., the taskbar), make a huge difference in the overall "feel" of the OS. Furthermore, they help increase the usability of the OS - and coupled with running faster, these two seemingly small changes can really help increase productivity on the OS.
So, sure, aside from all these things... why would anybody upgrade? Because only an idiot would discount these things.
Sure, and they can charge for it.
Brilliant.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Don't be messin' with Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate, dude!
-- thinkyhead software and media
The problem is, W2K and XP are pretty close to "good enough". They're a pretty decent compromise between performance, stability, features, backwards compatibility, and driver support.
As long as the latest Firefox still runs on XP, as long as my games still work on XP, there's little incentive to upgrade to Vista/Win7.
Thats because Windows 7 == Vista with some bloat removed.
UAT's a breeze when your codebase is shrinking.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
- Can XP transactionaly modify the filesystem and the registry?
- Can XP do the same composition in the UI as Vista?
- Can XP encrypt the hole disk ?
- Has XP Mandatory Access Control as Vista?
- Previous versions, ..., etc.
There are a lot of usefull think to do with Vista that people don't know how to use or that even exists.
Windows 7 is to Windows Vista as Windows 98 SE is to Windows 98.
Microsoft is good at selling a repaired version of the original software at full price. I don't know any other business that can successfully release a broken product and then charge their customers full price for what essentially amounts to a product upgrade. Only lawyers get more money for less.
Why is parent modded +2 insightful rather than -1 troll?
(I was going to write more, but then I would just be feeding the troll.)
...of being just are-branded? It isn't a secret that it is just Vista server. MS isn't trying pull a fast one here, pay attention to their business model.
XP -> Home version. Win2k3 -> XP server. Vista -> Home version. Win7 -> Vista server.
Why is it being released so quickly? Because they have be doing internal testing on the server components of the OS since before Vista was released. Also, they are supposedly stripping down a lot of the unneeded crap in Vista to make it run faster and smoother. How much additional testing do you need if you remove 30% of the code base?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Yes, different developers use "beta" and "RC" in different ways. With Microsoft, these terms have always been defined by marketdroids, not by engineers.
If Microsoft is only planning one beta and one RC, the most likely reason is that the company feels a need to rush this product to market with barely any of the pre-release hype that was done from Win95 and WinNT onward, through the multiple reviews of betas and RCs that Microsoft so lovingly nurtured in those halcyon days when it could dictate a schedule to its markets.
Those days are over. Their image is being battered by the Vista fiasco. Linux, especially the *buntus, are beginning to upstage them on the desktop. Several alternatives to MS Office have now become viable and are already stealing some niche markets. And Exchange Server is beginning to look a little shaky: there are other alternatives now.
With Obama billions to be pumped into the economy in a very short time, there are a lot of businesses that will be looking at renovating their IT infrastructure in the next 12 -24 months, and if Microsoft has no viable products at the beginning of this period... Well, it would not be the first company that had a meteoric rise, and ballistic crash.
Microsoft marketing needs to have Win7 in place, ready for purchase, in probably less than 3 months. It would be nice if Win7 actually worked, but that is secondary. Microsoft has enough ready cash on hand to smother any noise about performance concerns. It just needs to get the thing out there.
Apple makes a big deal (and charges more than $100) of each of their dot releases. OS 10.0, 10.1, etc. have been built on the same code base and have had minor (and some more-than minor) enhancements and tweaks. A couple of the OS X releases were really just service packs (or bug fixes) that shouldn't be called a new release or OS.
This still doesn't address the "why should I want Vista?" problem, which is that after 5+ years of service packs and patches, XP runs just fine for most people, and they don't feel the need to re-learn how to use an operating system (and get on the patch/sp/patch treadmill again) just because MS tells them they need a new one.
If your Engineering department is tasked to work on "Suckage prevention and remediation" instead of "Product improvement and useful feature additions," your company is going to be in the unenviable position of having to compete with previous versions of your own product, which is exactly where Microsoft is now.
Marketing can bang the drum and say "look how much better Win7 is than Vista!" But if Win7 isn't any better than WinXP, the market (or at least that section of it that has a choice) is simply going to ignore the new product and hang on to the old one.
I worked for a law firm up until recently, and it was only in the last year or so that they'd even begun to upgrade the machines to ones running Windows XP from Windows 2000. I would bet that they're still not finished that upgrade process. The in-house IT guy there has already said that they'd be upgrading to Vista over his cooling corpse. He's not likely to willingly upgrade to Win7 unless he's forced to by the boss, who is more likely to fight for a switch to macs than upgrade to a new version of windows. Granted, my tale is anecdotal and subject to the usual caveats, but I don't think I'm too far off base.
It's common opinion on slashdot that people will do as Emperor Ballmer commands, because they don't know any better, but that's not really true any more. Joe Enduser is leading the charge in the anti-Vista crusades, and Joe sees that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Joe is not going to just swallow MS's marketing line, Joe has gotten skeptical, and with Jester Jobs' own marketing team telling him how much better his computing experience could be, Joe is considering his options, and they most likely don't include polished turds.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
"really is a huge step forward from Vista"
Or they have finally realised that to make Windows "seem" better it needs to be faster in its operation. A more responsive UI etc.. isn't "a huge step forward" ... Its a bloody simple concept that has been overlooked by Microsoft since they started making Windows. Finally they have got a kick up the ass over Vista and now they know they now actually have to make it look and operate more reponsively. So it is a Rebranding and Relaunching after (finally (starting to)) fix what was so badly broken in Vista.
There is definately a big PR campaign behind this over hyping of Windows 7. You are just blinded by the hype, "A huge step forward" my ass.
Still, the bigger they hype it up now, the bigger the fall they will suffer, when people realise it doesn't live up to the hype.
Your summarisation of the changes is actually wrong, they did a lot more than just "disable a few processes on startup", the startup is one of the major changes to the kernel, it now uses a multi-threadded approach that can load several systems at the same time, as opposed to doing it linearly (And, for example, being forced to wait for a drive to spin up or whatever). That's just one example of what I'm referring to.
Secondly, you appear to have either contradicted yourself or proved my point, I'm not sure which:
Right - so which is it, are people being fooled, or is 7 actually a genuine step forward for Windows? On the one hand you're saying that Microsoft just paid everyone to give positive reviews, but with only a handful of exceptions, everyone I know that has actually TRIED the beta has been extremely impressed with it. I'm not talking about big fancy reviews on tech sites or whatever, I'm talking about a few friends, online buddies, forums, etc. The general consensus is that Windows 7 is good. That's what I'm referring to when I say it's unlikely Microsoft has "fooled" everyone.
But still, you claim they bought reviews (and you know, they may well have, I cant' say one way or the other) and that's the only reason there's so much positive feedback, but from my own experience, the positiveness has all been word of mouth and after the clusterfuck that was Vista, wouldn't it be really odd for everyone to suddenly say "errr...well actually, it IS quite good?". People were ready to jump on MS for Windows 7 being shit (And I believe you and a few other people here are those exact people), hell everyone likes to hate on the huge, evil, monolithic corporation, but as crazy as it may seem, they actually got a few things right with 7 and it easily stands apart from Vista.
But don't take my word for it, go ahead and install both Vista and 7 side by side and see what the difference is. Then install XP and see for yourself that 7 really is a worthwhile upgrade from it - and it's still in beta.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill