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Report: Windows Blue Reaches Its First Milestone Build
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley has been collecting tips on Microsoft's accelerated Windows development schedule, codenamed 'Blue.' She reports that the program, which is attempting to replace the multiyear product drops for the Windows-branded desktop, server, phone, and network services products with a more agile release cycle, with better continuity across the suite, has just hit the first of two scheduled milestone builds. What's in the build? As with North Korea's nuclear program, details are scarce, but so far we have a Chinese Windows start screen; indications that the kernel number has been bumped from 'NT 6.2' (Windows 8) to 'NT 6.3'; and a job posting for a Windows Blue SDET (test engineer). Slashdot reported on Windows Blue in November."
... screen?
...chunks?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...It?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...me
Let me guess... they've gone further on their way to declare desktop applications as deprecated? With Windows 8, Microsoft has made it clear that it thinks that desktop applications are on their way out, and the only way to go is to make programs for Metro.
Oh, and I'll put this out there: won't run unsigned programs by default, though I suspect that this will be like OS X 10.8 and allow being turned off.
All part of boiling the frog.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Why is it that sometimes code names are better than the name of the final product? "Windows Blue" is a better name than simply "Windows 9". Similarly, "Xenon" was a better name than "Xbox 360".
Nintendo's fond of that, too. "Nitro" versus "DS", "Dolphin" versus "GameCube", "Revolution" versus "Wii".
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
If they don't then IMHO, this is a dead duck. They have a wonderful opportunity to stop the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cycle here
or the Patches on top of patches shell game.
If they don't grasp this then they are merely fiddling while the City of Redmond burns to the ground.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
As with North Korea's nuclear program, details are scarce,
Has anyone detected Xenon-133 that can be traced to Seattle yet, or did MS manage to contain it pretty well underground?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Steve Ballmer is flying the plane now. Tower is on the horn telling him he needs to gain altitude, but Ballmer thinks they said Attitude; whilst headed for the ground in a sweaty dance.
All the boys and girls from Neowin are on on that plane, living it up and having a damn good time. Unaware Ballmer is piloting the plane "This is your Captain speaking, we need more Attitude!" as cheers erupt. Bill Gates was unavailable for comments, as he thinks 'Blue' airlines is headed in the wrong direction.
According to the article, Blue is a Windows 8 refresh. I assume that to mean that it's going to add all the stuff that Windows 8 was lacking when it came out, particularly in relation to its mouse / keyboard and "classic" behaviour. But even metro is a bit shit on the desktop, lacking stuff like folders to group icons, zoom in / out, certain multi-select actions and so on.
Please enlighten me as to why you think I don't know what I'm talking about.
I just patched a clean Win 7 build and it took four patch/reboot cycles before I got everything uptodate.
Whereas my Linux Systems patch the lot in one go and only need to reboot when there is a kernel update. IIRC and I was running SLES I wouldn't even need to do that.
Or did I dream that I had to reboot my system so often in the patching process?
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
They will never, ever be able to remove support for the legacy desktop apps that is what keep customers from moving away from windows. What they WILL do however, is realize that home users don't really provide as much income as they should for microsoft. Apple is a shining example of a company that makes money from consumers, not business. Microsofts cash-cow is income from people using workstations and servers in offices around the world. So the question: How can microsoft make good business from consumers, without risking their revenue stream from business? Answer: by separating the tiers further. Make desktop/legacy a "premium" product, and sell the consumer OS cheaper by forcing users to adopt apps that give MS a piece of the revenue. I predict that the desktop will live forever, but only in the higher SKU:s of windows. Meanwhile, microsofts "Home"/OEM offerings of windows will steadily become cheaper and slowly move into an apps-only ecosystem.
Where in my post did I talk about wanting full Virtualization and Max performance? I didn't so please stop trying to read something that is clearly not there.
The question is
Do MS system require rebooting when applying patches?
Yes
Do other Operating System apply patches without the need for reboots?
Yes
ergo,
If MS is going to a continuious update cycle then they really need to reduce the number of reboots required after applying patches.
If they don't they are going to piss off a lot of users with the increased reboot frequency.
not that hard really is it?
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
If they don't then IMHO, this is a dead duck. They have a wonderful opportunity to stop the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cycle here
Please... While this is a problem for some, I'm willing to bet the amount of revenue they've lost because of it is incredibly low.
Microsoft are in serious danger of scaring off their massive army of third party developers, exactly the people who have guaranteed them success over nearly 20 years. THIS is their major problem. Metro and the Microsoft App store is a massive "fuck you" to us. This is especially true if you're invested in OpenGL. The amount of work required to bring a professional OpenGL based engineering suite over to Metro is massive.
Code Blue?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I really hope that's not true.
I had to use a computer today with XP and the "classic" windows theme. Sure, the operating system has come a very long way but the UI is definitely going backwards.
WIMP is a sound UI paradigm and "classic" theme makes it very clear and intuitive. A few modern gradients, higher DPI and a new set of high resolution icons would have made it a sheer delight.
With the touch-optimized, flat, giant controls, modal paradigm you can't really do anything other than the most basic things and even that's confusing.
This sounds about right, it'll be interesting to see how quickly consumers take this up. I haven't met anyone yet who actually wants to use the 'Metro' interface, much less buy thier software throuh the Microsoft store. Of course I've read plenty of 'I use Win 8 and I don't see what the fuss is about' posts in various tech forums, but even from those people I've never heard anyone extolling the virtues of a 'killer' Metro app. Until such things exist, where is the compelling reason to make the switch? I fear the only answer is that we will be steadily 'forced' to use the new interface with subsequent versions of Windows.
I currently use Windows for productivity and gaming, this Metro crap I can see being the reason I move to Linux for my productivity stuff, and if Steam for Linux takes off with enough publishers, possibly my gaming as well.
I've never loved Windows, but I've never really hated it either (well maybe sometimes), it's always been 'good enough' to do what I want it to do, as soon as it starts to tell me how I should interact with my desktop, and where I should buy my software, well thats the point at which it ceases to be useful for me, and probably a great many others.
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
I use windows 8 and don't get what the fuss is about. I basically don't use the metro interface and don't intend to ever do so until I can do ALL my work in it. That is, I don't dislike the UI per se, but dislike having to switch back and forth. I don't really care if MS gets a share of what I pay for applications either, but here is the chicken and egg problem: I won't buy any metro apps until I use that interface. I won't use that interface until I can use it exclusively. I won't use it exclusively until all my applications are there.
Paragraph one wrong. Paragraph two right.
It's Microsoft, they adhere to a pattern which if you're a big company making lots of money simply have to be on guard for. If MS shows up and offers a strategic partnership, show them the door and smile, it means what you have is worth lots and MS wants to steal it. If you lift the hood on your products and invite them in then instantly your days are numbered and you will eventually lose.
- Look at FB and MS. That's nothing but win for MS. Half of FB is powered by Bing! and now look at what's happening with Skype. Plus they doubled their money when FB went IPO.
- Look at Novel and MS. MS win. Nothing but bullying and win for MS. Linux being licensed back to MS, Freakin Maddness!!
- Look at Norton and MS. MS win. Strategic partnership that turned into MS Security Essentials and killed Norton's consumer market.
- Look at Zune and MS. Tragic fail. Apple was smart to not let peering eyes in on that one.
- Look at Xbox and MS. MS win. Get the game makers on side and now MS is making their own award winning games like Halo.
MS wins more than it loses and it's up to "who" lets them win more than if the company is second rate. Simply put, they come a knocken send them packing or you'll pay for it! I don't like their way of doing business but it's how I see them.
A little bit of Nokia a little bit of MS's strategic partnering, a couple years later you have Surface ...
Same process, same Borg like attitude .. same old Microsoft.
I have met a few people excited about the Metro screen. But these people barely know how to use a computer and to them, Metro is a lot easier to find what programs they want to run. I personally don't mind Windows 8 and Metro although the first thing I did was set the default for all Metro apps to the full version and pin my most used programs to the taskbar. Any time that I need another program, I simply hit the windows key, type in the first few characters of what I want and hit enter. Metro pops up and goes away quickly.
Totally hilarious reference to North Korea - but c'mon - Microsoft is run like an open source software project compared with Apple. What's interesting is that consumers seem to greet Apple's secrecy and paranoia with an almost Willy Wonka like fascination.
Yes I get that win8 is OK and you can work around the metro screen, it's the direction that I don't like. Optional work around today, walled garden tommorrow, my tactic is to not buy into it and hope that enough people do the same thing.
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
It would be nice if the Windows application management interface was a _little_ bit more like a package manager, though. It would be great if you could scan through the list of installed programs and see which ones are dependencies for other installed programs and which are not. Then, you could go through removing leaf nodes from the dependency tree until you run out of things that aren't needed, with confidence that you aren't going to be breaking stuff that you actually use.
My pet hate are all the minor dot releases of VC++ frameworks installed by various games. I'm sure I don't *really* need them all, but damned if I can figure out which are expendable.
They went back to a monolithic windows to getaway from the compatibility issues. This approach will just add to market fragmentation and destroy the one thing MS still has left on the PC. I think you are going to start seeing real push-back. In a mature market, products shouldn't go obsolete in two years. Hardware should go 3-4 years (power users), and an OS should double that. There just isn't business logic to need to update things that often. Same goes for home; most people's needs just don't change that often/quickly.
In the datacenter, applications *shouldn't* care about one OS instance rebooting. In practice, many do and companies find it cheaper to just fix it at the platform layer. I think this mindset is decreasing however so the datacenter uptime issue becomes less and less important. However, in the consumer electronics space, it is killer. I woke up a windows 8 laptop to have it *immediately* start rebooting to install patches. I really wanted to use it *then* but I had to wait 15 minutes, no prompting, no nothing; just straight to a 'please wait' screen. If that had been a business presentation, that would have royally screwed me. This is not exclusive to MS though. I frequently try to whip out a PS3 game I haven't played for a while and the console won't even let me play it single player until I endure an update process that makes me *wish* it were windows.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And other platforms (e.g. Ubuntu) handle this by recognizing when a package was installed to fulfill a dependency and implements an 'autoremove' to remove packages acquired to fulfill a requirement that has since been uninstalled.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
First of all, I saw a screenshot of a warning about a disclosure for a Windows 8 beta. So, how exactly is that solid proof of a Windows Blue or 9? Anyway, as if Apple had more reasons to not be used in a business environment, their insistence on constantly changing the OS every year with a big release and then breaking half the legacy apps is the real killer. There are businesses (mine for example) that are just finishing or even starting testing Windows 7 to replace XP. Now we have to test 8 and then 9 and then 10 all in one year each? I think we'll have to hire someone to do just that full time and then never actually deploy a new OS because it will have changed to the next one by then. I thought they'd pull a post-vista and come down off their crazy train and take 3 years to build something that wasn't a useless piece of shit. But nope, they're opting to piss people off twice as badly but on a yearly basis and stick with that awful interface. There goes the Microsoft "every other" cycle.
"She reports that the program, which is attempting to replace the multiyear product drops for the Windows-branded desktop, server, phone, and network services products with a more agile release cycle, with better continuity across the suite"
This is just plain retarded. Why have "agile releases" of corporate software? We can barely afford to upgrade server OS and applications every 5-10 years including all of the time/labor for the upgrades! Now they are going to release Server OS, Exchange, etc every 12-18 months? I call bullshit.
Hell, Microsoft can't even have their flagship Exchange 2010 product run on Server 2012 yet....and that is 6+ months after Server 2012 was released. Now I'm supposed to believe that Microsoft will have interoperability between 5-10 server releases with 5-10 different flavors of Exchange, SQL, etc?
I can't even imagine trying to manage that mess - it's difficult enough now.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson