Microsoft Patents OS Shutdown

An anonymous reader writes "You would think that shutting down software could be fairly simple from an end user's view. If I ask you to shut it down, would you mind shutting it actually down, please? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, because you need to ask the user if they really want to shut down and if unsaved documents should be saved. And that warrants a patent that also covers Mac OS X. Next time you shut down Windows, remember how complicated it is for Windows to shut down. Perhaps that is the reason why this procedure can take minutes in some cases."

Comments

Re:Hmm

[jandrese]

Or the process where you get halfway through the shutdown, and then it stops for no apparent reason and you have to go and order the shutdown again to get it to finish shutting down.

Re:Yet OSX shuts down much faster...

[MrHanky]

Yes, but an Apple fanboy takes a lot longer to shut up.

More Information and Clarification

[Grond]

I can't figure out which patent or application the article is referring to. This patent issued to Microsoft last year and covers OS shutdown methods, so I think it's the right one. The first claim is this:

One or more computer readable storage media storing computer-executable instructions which, when executed on a computer system, perform a method comprising:
        receiving information from an application regarding a task that the application is configured to perform;
        receiving a command to initiate operating system shut down while the application is running;
        determining that the operating system shut down should be delayed due to a status of the application; and
        displaying the information received from the application on a graphical user interface during a period in which the operating system shut down is being delayed, the graphical user interface showing that the application is running.

Basically it covers delaying shutdown while an application wraps something up and informing the user that this is happening via a GUI. The more detailed claims cover the circumstances under which this might occur (e.g., a negative response from the application, no response from the application, etc).

This patent does not cover what Windows XP or OS X do in this circumstance. In fact, the behaviors of XP and OS X are explicitly mentioned in the specification, and the patent is meant to cover an improved method for handling the situation.

Re:BillG hated the concept!

[barzok]

He may or may not have understood the concept of in-memory caches and unsaved user work, but it didn't much matter to him.

I know it's easy & popular to rag on BillG, but toward the end of his tenure at MS, he did occasionally come out as an advocate for users & pushed for simplicity & fixing broken things in their ecosystem. Take this example from when he attempted to install Windows Movie Maker in January 2003.

But back to the shutdown thing.

As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down? When I tell my TV to power off, it just does it. When I turn the ignition in my car off, the whole thing stops. Same with my VCR, my cell phone, you get the idea.

As a non-naive user, why is it that when I tell my XP laptop to Hibernate, 5% of the time it just flips out, every application crashes, and I can't do anything, including just shutting the damn thing down until I've cleared all the "this program has crashed, how would you like to debug?" messages and then wait for the UI to become responsive finally to the point where I can tell it to shut down. And then takes 5+ minutes to actually shut down. When I close the lid on my MacBook, OS X puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. Why can't Windows do this? I can't just go to Standby because it drains the battery too much, so I have to Hibernate.