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Why Windows Vista Ended Up Being a Mess (usejournal.com)
alaskana98 shares an article called "What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective." Ben Fathi, formerly a manager of various teams at Microsoft responsible for storage, file systems, high availability/clustering, file level network protocols, distributed file systems, and related technologies and later security, writes:
Imagine supporting that same OS for a dozen years or more for a population of billions of customers, millions of companies, thousands of partners, hundreds of scenarios, and dozens of form factors -- and you'll begin to have an inkling of the support and compatibility nightmare. In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect. An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product; the Windows organization was no different. Open source doesn't have that problem...
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
From article:
Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Really from the company that's actively pro active in sabatoging privacy and people owning their own software via UWP? So much so that Gabe at Valve wouldn't let the new age of empires onto steam because of the windows store and UWP issue.
I'm not sure you could say it "failed". It ended up becoming Windows 7, probably the best of the ms desktop os's ever, with a clean upgrade path to boot. So, if you think of it as "Window 7 v1"...it sure beat "Microsoft Bob".
From what I remember:
1. They tried to write big chunks of it in .NET which wasn't quite a mature framework yet, and...
2. They tried to component-ize everything into discreet, independent modules, and once they brought all of the modules together to compile as one coherent OS, it failed miserably
They are still trying to do step #2 - witness the ARM based windows they are still working on, and Windows running on the XBox One, etc..
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Mojave (Windows Vista SP1) fixed a lot of the technical problems with Windows Vista. Was Windows 7 worth the price of the upgrade from Mojave, other than for three more years of patches?
Windows isn't exactly a bastion of security. Maybe, just maybe if Microsoft didn't have a history of monopolistic actions themselves, those AV "partners" would have believed them. No sir, not everyone forgot your feuds with NOVEL where you intentionally locked them out of your API only to steal their ideas. Your "screw you" attitude toward OpenGL in favor directx. Etc.
Microsoft is still delusional about the "success" of Windows 10. If the EU goes after Apple over forced deprecation of hardware (battery gate), I sincerely hope they do the same for Microsoft. Windows 10 is a perfect example of it.
...it was a mess?
This seems to be the more relevant question.
I stopped there.
but still left the window for bad actors wide open.
No wonder security companies were so upset.
When Vista initially came out it was rife with performance issues and other flaws that were astonishingly bad and it was clear that it had been released prematurely. So I can understand the initial hate. But after SP1, its initial problems were corrected and SP2 made further fixes and minor improvements. I used Vista as my main PC's OS for nearly 8 years and I was quite satisfied with its performance and capability. So why the continued Vista hate so long after SP1?
Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect.
So, Microsoft is on the record admitting that Linux's "modular and pluggable" architecture is more sound than Windows' monolithic approach... Not to worry, my friends, the Windows folks won't be behind this 8-ball for long. The systemd folks are working very hard, on closing this gap.
By 2005, Microsoft was forced to give up on a 4 year project in which they had planned to produce an OS entirely wrapped in .Net. Longhorn. They explained at the time that the current hardware simply couldn't handle the bloat. At that point they were 1 year late to release on a 3-year cycle. Could that have something to do with Vista being messy?
And what about the last minute move to release a Vista version that couldn't support Aero, in order to do a favor for their friends at Intel, so that Intel could dump a big pile of 915 chipsets that were not Vista-ready?
The result of that was mass confusion, as people bought new computers that didn't look like the pictures of Vista. It seems the author is cooking up obscure excuses to hide the obvious problems.
The Open Source collaboration scheme is what he's referring to.. not the specifics.
The fact that so many different (and almost divergent groups are WILLING to help/contribute/collaborate on a single (overall) goal, without it quickly devolving into bickering, lawsuits, and enemies is really a miracle. And it has to do with the fact that most contributors see their efforts as something beyond JUST what they get out of it..
But that's different from a commercial enterprise where there is a definite check at the end of the road, and everyone is jockeying to make sure they get the first and largest cut of that check.. (and woe be he who gets more than what was expected or others feel is warranted).
You know why we dug into the fucking mess you call a kernel? Because it was a NECESSITY to get anything to work. The security of Windows up to 7 was such a catastrophic failure that the only way to defend against malware was to dig even deeper into your kernel because you had NO, ZERO, ZIP safeguards against malware actually doing something like this.
What did you expect us to do? Run on the crap you dared to call a kernel and rely on its nonexistent ability to defend against malware undermining it? That would make the whole idea of protecting the system absurd because the system's functions you're supposed to trust cannot be trusted.
The reason Vista was the mess it was? Because it was a damn atrocity from a security point of view. It tried its best to obscure and obfuscate its inner workings, mostly because as soon as you noticed just what they were like you realized that the problem is way bigger than you could possibly imagine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
SAID NOBODY EVER!
In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect
Try to run a 2.4 binary on modern linux. No fucking way. 2.2 or 2.0? You have to be out of your bloody mind.
Backward compatibility is absolute bullshit for Linux.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
How in the hell can Linux be considered "more successful" than even Windows Vista for any of those metrics?
Support for "a dozen years or more" is exceedingly rare within the Linux world. You're looking at RHEL Extended Lifecycle Support to get anywhere near that. Ubuntu LTS releases are only really supported for 5 years, as far as I know.
I think you completely missed his point - Linux was more successful precisely because it wasn't tied up in dozen-plus years of support.
.
Linux development has often devolved into "bickering, lawsuits, and enemies".
Just look at how much strife systemd has caused within the Linux community. Systemd basically tore apart the Debian community and project, and it still hasn't healed even after several years. There have also been numerous arguments regarding systemd in mailing lists, bug reports, and other discussion venues.
Then there are the numerous incidents where Linus has unleashed extreme anger toward other kernel developers for various reasons.
As for lawsuits, just a few days ago Slashdot reported that the IBM and SCO shenanigans are still ongoing. There was also some recent lawsuit involving Bruce Perens that Slashdot reported on. And there was some SFLC and SFC lawsuit that Slashdot reported on. And there was some lawsuit involving the GPL that Slashdot reported on.
This rosy, all-is-good idea that you've got about Linux and open source software is a myth.
From what I've seen of Linux development, and open source development in general, it's far more chaotic, argumentative and disjointed than closed source corporate software development.
Better topic for next article: Why microsoft ended up being a mess.
Vista was meh in every way. Win7 was an OS worth paying for. 10 isn't something I'd use if you *payed me*.
I don't see this trend improving from here either.
It bridged the 32 and 64 bit eras. Hardware companies used that as an excuse to discontinue product support en mass, and MS got the blame. Every compliant I ever heard about it boiled down to software and peripheral vendors successfully selling the idea that an inevitable transition was Vista's fault. You want to talk about a deliberately shit os, talk about 8.
How MS played the incompatibility card against DR-DOS
I don't know much about Silverberg, but I can say I never read an article about Allchin where he didn't come across as a world-class slime weasel.
Jim Allchin
Perhaps in 2023 (2017 + sixteen years) we'll all be able to let bygones be bygones.
UAC. People hated UAC. They didn't understand the point. They felt that 99% of the time, the problem was shitty MS code allowing malware in through broken MS software. They were right.
The other end is social engineering. UAC doesn't protect from that. Anti-virus/anti-malware software does. So, anti-virus makers were obvious upset because it was obvious any change MS made could be and eventually would have to be a prelude to MS entering and dominating the market, just to be sure everyone had it and they could "protect" the MS name.
Reading the essay, though, the development process was a shit show, and it's amazing there weren't a ton more exploits pushed through back then. The whole idea of robustness in Windows NT fell aside once every at MS was pushing for features and everything was meant to (or was going to be) run as Admin. Perhaps that's what the whole "usability" comment was about. Of course, it's bullshit. It was lazy Win 9x era design thinking.
So, Vista made it painful if you didn't do things the right way. They didn't really fix the issue. The put a band-aid over it and pushed the blame on the user. That internally and externally developers pushed to avoid the annoyance was a win for the users, in the end, but it still doesn't address the issue. The only way UAC makes sense is if every user is a qualified computer software engineer and the requesting code were put on screen to review. Instead, we have the joke where it's still the norm to allow unsigned (yellow box) code to run as Admin.
At least they dropped Internet Explorer development...eventually.
Clearly, you're not aware that there are now open source Linux drivers for the nvidia Riva TNT, so Linux is more successful in every way. 1999 was the year of Linux on the Desktop, but nobody noticed because of Y2K.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What this tells me is that he still does not understand the true nature of why Microsoft cannot deliver anything quickly or reliably. Everything in Windows is interconnected, like a huge pile of spaghetti. That is the root problem. They need to cut all those interdependencies so that modules can be built and tested in isolation. Until they do, they will continue to fail (and fail hard).
The tag line should have been "Windows Vista. Not that there's anything wrong with it..."
I got a new laptop in 2007, with then new Vista. I also put Vista on some of my household machines. I hated it at first, as you said. Then, it improved with SP's, and it got better, as SP's tend to do. And, as time went on, I got used to it. I learned to live with it. Yet I rarely had a session where I did not have some reason to swear at it. On my main desktop machine which was my computing center, I continued to run XP (I loved XP, still do). Work with anything long enough, learn its quirks, and you can learn to live with it even if not love it. In the end, it turns out that Vista preserved the majority of computing paradigms that MS introduced with 3.11-95-98-200-XP, so once you got over the shock of what changed, it wasn't really so bad.
There were some big objections such as UAC, "min spec" debacle, security, etc., but there were also a zillion little sniggling things that were wrong. Technical architecture aside, an OS has two components, what's under the hood, and the user interface. Regardless how well or poorly it did with under the hood architecture, there was no reason to alter user paradigms that everyone knows and uses, especially since MS had invented or at least promoted and entrenched so many of them. Imagine suddenly all autos have the steering wheel and driver switched to the opposite side. Imagine that suddenly screws, nuts, and bolts have an entirely new system of thread sizes, that suddenly the qwerty keyboard is replaced with some new scramble of letters dictated by Steve Ballmer. I do a lot of work with font design. Vista suddenly broke font handling. File management via Explorer was suddenly deficient. Utilities such as Classic Shell came about not just because a few old fogies could not keep up with changing times, but because there is no reason to break basic functional paradigms just to be different.
Regardless who "invented" this, that, and the other OS feature (Xerox, Apple, IBM, MS, whatever), MS had its pivotal role. When MS made those earlier versions of Windows, they were not constrained by prior notions of what it should be. Right or wrong, they worked through the issues, and tweaked the interface, to get something that worked and people liked or at least got accustomed to. When Ballmer and Vista were in play, they tried, for better or worse, to fix core architecture problems, but they were not obliged to fudge the user interface paradigms, but they did. In so doing, not only did they disrespect and disregard the entire world user base, but they disrespected their own company forebears, second guessing what 20 years of MS engineers had developed before them. A lot of it was just change for change's sake, dumb and misguided.
Anybody could have learned to live with and adapt to the UAC prompts if that is all it was, or just corrupted font handling, or any other single thing. But, everything all piled up made it unpleasant, even after getting used to it and accepting that it was not too different than prior versions. It was different enough, and mostly for no sound reason, and that is why it was hated. It was better than Win 95. It wasn't better than Win 2000 or XP. Good riddance.
It's the collaboration model that is often the problem with Linux et. al. Thousands of libraries or drivers with tens of thousands of developers many repeating same libraries or applications over and over again introducing interesting and sometimes clever bugs, misfeatures, and incompatibilities. Linux et. al. shows that sort of loosely coupled organizational architecture. I'm not saying Linus et. al. sucks. I am saying Windows and Linux both suck, but both suck in interesting and sometimes imaginative ways.
Linux et. al. should be more cohesive with better couple, while Windows should loosen up and decouple a bit and become more modular. Maybe they can meet in the middle and we could have WinLux.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
vista was actually a good OS. it had a file copying bug before SP1, other than that its only fault was that it was too modern and advanced for the time. vendors were selling still old hardware, and in some cases selling hardware that was too slow for the OS.
people actually required having a faster computer than they had, so it ran slower than 98. fast foward a few years later, almost the same OS with a nicer skin and some UI enhancements was released to public fanfare. it was called windows 7, and was built on top of vista.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
And to force Microsoft versions of API's onto ISV's. It didn't just happen, it happened because of how Bill, Steve, etc ran that business. MFC was forced into the OS and onto developers because other compiler vendors, who were cross platform, we providing great cross platform frameworks. So MFC was embedded into the OS and ISV's were hammered into using it and the compiler vendors were not allowed to ship MFC with any other famework. Gone are the competing compilers and cross platform frameworks.
Famously, Internet Explorer was embedded into Microsoft Office help system and into the OS. Yes, ti kill off that cross platform threat which was Netscape Navigator.
Microsoft did not want an easily supported system, they wanted it convoluted and intermixed and IIRC Bill Gates even said it in some email or something exposed through one of its many court cases. It makes it hard for companies to leave Windows and it also gave Microsoft's own software developers an advantage when they knew what new parts of spaghetti was going into the next release. They couldn't stand having another word processor company being ready with the latest features advertised in the new OS before or with Microsoft's own products. Nope, they would keep things moving right up to the last minute all the while their own developers knew what was gong on and was ready at OS release time. Other vendors had to quckly make changes, get it tested, get distribution media made and marketing materials updated. About a 6 month delay.
So don't be fooled thinking it was an accident that Windows is a ball of spaghetti. Vista was just a big ball and they were caught trying to compete with the fact that Linux scaled well from handheld and embedded all the way up to super computers and they needed to pack lots of features into Windows Vista to even try to make it look like it was something to want. Apple was kicking their butt too and people were getting sick of rebooting, virus's, ctl-alt-del, etc and running Windows XP in virtual machines. Bloating Windows also helps slow some migrations to virtual machines.
To me that's a red herring because various programs broke in Windows XP SP2. Microsoft chose to keep supporting XP because they chose to keep supporting XP. Clearly as time progressed, they started breaking things as they added new features. But, they clearly also chose to keep the bigger improvements in the new Vista code base.
Ie, to avoid letting users get all the new features as they were made, they chose to segregate them to try to lure people into a new version. Otherwise, all they have left is people choosing to update to continue to get security updates. They only need those because their software--like most software--is full of security holes.
That's not an issue with Linux because most releases are pretty arbitrary and the whole LTS stuff is more about trying to isolate the bigger churn of code from the user for testing purposes and the like. Ie, effectively it's trying to isolate the alpha/beta code by trying to separate out the more well tested stuff (by the community) from the rest. Hence, support extends to the degree at which distros actually listen to their community and incorporate changes more than anything.
From: billg
To: pascalm; russw; tomle
Cc: philba
Subject: Dr dos
Date: Thursday, September 22, 1988 12:41 PM
You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app
would do that would make it run on MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS.
Is there any version check or api that they fail to have? Is there
a feature they have that might get in our way? I am not looking
for something they cant get around. I am looking for something
that their current binary fails on.
This is a fairly urgent question for me and I have received
nothing.
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/ho...
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Woe? Son, we call that #winning!
People needed antivirus software from your "friends" because your OSes were vulnerable in the first place, having a track record of being hackable by displaying a picture (e.g. the wmf bug) or by being present on the Internet (e.g. the "blaster" bug). Also, people could accuse you of abusing your monopoly position because 1) you had a monopoly on the desktop OS market and 2) you had a history of taking advantage of that position; both being problems that you could fix at any time if you really had any interest. Accusing antivirus vendors of being the cause for your OS requiring twice as much RAM as its /successor/ is inelegant and the accuses themselves are unbelievable to me.
Collaboration and the "many eyes" in the Linux still hasn't been able to create any applications that would cut into the MS domination of Office related applications. There are hundreds of Linux security related bugs that have not been detected by the "many eyes" who are suppose to be keeping there eyes on things. And for some reason MS gets hammered because they do not produce perfect applications while the Linux applications gets kudos for being "good enough". A fair comparision between closed and open source needs an equal bar set. Users don't give two shits about the underlying operating systems. They are only concerned with running applications.
create an operating system that's not the most-hackable crap sandwich on Earth, and then there won't be a NEED for anti-virus software and you won't be fighting the vendors of such software as they try to wedge into the OS to patch the holes your lazy architects and coders put in there in the first place.
Vista was a disgrace, as are all the more-recent versions of Windows, albeit for different reasons (mostly the user-spying)
You may laugh, but it's actually a pretty big win for Linux.
In a business environment, you do not want to throw out working equipment, such as printers, networking equipment, etc because there are no drivers. It's disruptive and it gets expensive real fast. If it ain't broke, don't fix it is the mantra, and Windows will never let you do that.
And while a RivaTNT might be a bit too extreme, however, I'm changing out an old computer currently. Not because it's old (it is), but because I can't justify buying a new graphics card for it. It's being replaced with a A-10 9700 for this very reason. I doubt I'll have to mess with it again in the foreseeable future.
I think it's the other way, kernel needs to dump stupid shit Monkeyshit Corp.
Doesn't exactly flow on a business card, does it?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
initial support from hardware partners was the "mess"... microsoft understating hardware requirements (which those same partners then built upon) were a "mess"...
the OS itself worked. and worked very well once the drivers issues were addressed and once people realized what the requirements to run it actually were (note that vista, 7, 8, and 10 all shared approximately the *same* requirements.. vista was the first, hence the 'growing pains').
vista was also the version of windows to not get spammed with windows 10 'upgrades' (or forced into it)... vista was a success, it's that its reputation never recovered from the initial stumble out of the gate (which was no fault of the software itself).
i'm still running an original vista system, purchased at the time after OEM release and before GA. it's still got the original factory load. it's never given any problems at all, and it still gets used every work day (just not so much on the internet anymore... i have an 8 for that.. no way is 10 seeing the light of day here. it's linux, not 10, that will replace the windows 8).
Sometimes multiple options are good (and Windows 10 has Edge and IE), but I'd agree that sometimes it can lead to a dilution of effort. The irony is, that for all those that suggest that Linux is 'communist,' it's a market place of ideas more closely attuned to capitalism, in terms of the non-kernel elements of a distribution. The inner workings of a company are more like Five Year Plans. I am not sure how you'd want to compare Linux kernel development to an economic or political system.
1. User Access Control -
The OS ceaselessly asking me 'are you sure?', 'are you sure?'. How can I be sure? Give me a realistic option instead of just 'yes' or 'no' (maybe offer to sandbox the process and help me check if it runs OK).
2. Vista’s desktop search indexing (Windows search) -
Ah, here was the OS pretending to be both goggle.com AND google's database for your local filesystem. Indexing slowed 80% of new laptops to a crawl -- especially cheap, high-volume AMD-chipped laptops from the likes of Compaq, HP, Acer.
The summary is white noise. It doesn't say anything about why Vista was out the gate. Only that it would be hard to support post-release. Every system is hard to support post release though.
The obvious reason Vista was not stable (and could not be stable) is that 64bit Win Api did not support atomic 64bit operations in Vista version of the Windows runtime. The 64bit atomic operations only gained support starting with Win7 (64bit). So there was a bunch of 64 bit Vista application code written without atomic operations. In multthreaded environment that essentially guarantees that sooner or later corruption will occur. Given that the pipelining can reorder operations, there was no sure way to lock this down without slowing down critical sections of the code significantly. This is not the kind of code that most application developers are used to writing. So there it was.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This is related to Vista how, exactly? As an ad hoiminem of choice?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Programming is haaaaaaaaaard!
The summary is really contradictory. I'm seeing this in there:
How in the hell can Linux be considered "more successful" than even Windows Vista for any of those metrics?
That's easy. linux started off from a more solid base. A base borrowed from the Unix world and drenched in gn00 ideology, but it was fairly solid. windows, OTOH, has always been a jumble, a thing barely usable by a single person and certainly not amendable to large scale deployment without specialist cookie-cutter tools. It's the much more lego-like, adaptable nature and a rudimentary but functional concern separation that makes linux an easy winner in this comparison.
Support for "a dozen years or more" is exceedingly rare within the Linux world. You're looking at RHEL Extended Lifecycle Support to get anywhere near that. Ubuntu LTS releases are only really supported for 5 years, as far as I know.
You're comparing distributions to the whole windows thing. The other extreme is to compare only the kernel to the whole windows thing. Both are misleading.
If windows stops supporting something, you're SOL. With linux, you can patch it right back in. Takes someone knowledgeable, but you can do it. Much easier on long term support for obsolete things, but less of a cookie-cutter approach.
I doubt that any Linux distro has been used by "billions of customers" or "millions of companies".
It's not commonly found on the desktop, but that doesn't mean you're not using services provided on top of it daily.
Android might fit this definition, but Android probably shouldn't be considered "Linux", given how deep down the kernel is hidden. Nearly all Android users have no idea it's there, and even many Android app developers probably don't know it's present.
That's pretty revisionist.
Just like the piece, by the by. "Oh we've had such a struggle!" Yeah well that's because you started off without a clue. With but a modicum of that, even borrowed clue (like linus did--had he had a clue of his own we might well had a workable microkernel by now... but then again, maybe not) you can forego many of the problems that embattled every bestest windows release ever, and still does.
Even stupidly simple things like the realisation that VBA is an obvious virus vector. Yes, that's applications, not windows, but for that company not separated, as it really ought to. I vividly remember discussing that announcement back when with other techies, and the conclusion was unanimous and instantaneous: There will be macro viruses, the only question is how long it'll take. A few days, as it turned out.
That's a multinational with the then richest man on earth at its head, and they come up with obviously bone-headed stuff like that. Not only that, they put it right in the market, too. In other words, things like security just doesn't interest them. As at least one VP has admitted. But this sort of thing has domino effects, and so their unwillingness has cost everyone including themselves quite dearly in the meantime.
Even then, Android isn't used because of the Linux kernel. Android is used for all of the software that runs on top of the kernel.
Same with every other OS. The OS is just the foundation. But a better foundation does get you a better house. Witness the difference in stability between windows and, oh, macos x. Darwin is a bastard *BSD, which provides that foundation. The point of using macosx is the upper layers that provide the uniform graphics that make the applications a se
Vista was nowhere near as bad as Windows 10
I'm sure there's lots of technically competent people working on Windows. There's also probably many managers who want to do things right. Sadly, politics and economics issues always interfere and thus we get the user-hostile Windows 10. It's a pity because it could be a great OS for everyone.
Want to back that up with any evidence? Of all of the pieces of Windows, the kernel is probably one of the better ones. The UIs built on top of it are pretty terrible, but the kernel is one of the better designed ones. I'd recommend Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for an overview of the NT kernel and its similarities and differences to a *NIX one (though, of course, the book will leave you believing that the way of comparing operating system kernels is by their relative inferiority to MINIX).
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Android might fit this definition, but Android probably shouldn't be considered "Linux", given how deep down the kernel is hidden.
Given that the kernel is the heart of the OS, it has to count. It's irrelevant what users perceive to be the truth.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
I've spent more than an hour total waiting for a windows 10 update to complete before the computer being ready to be usable. It's not vista the only windows which is a mess... tough of course,,, Microsoft doesn't give a sh. about user computers being usable the most, so for their accounting only internal messes are real messes.
By the way every three or four days I update Linux (arch - manjaro) without even noticing other than a green color in my notifying bar and the following password input.
No. Ben Fathi is on the record as that being his personal opinion. He hasn't been at Microsoft for a decade, he's just retired from being head of engineering at Cloudfare and was CTO at VMWare in-between. So a pretty experienced guy to hold that kind of opinion, but he still isn't representing Microsoft when making that statement.
During the failure of Vista, it opened the door for Apple, while Linux more or less just stayed consistent in its growth, and innovations.
Linux was keeping its pace, more or less undeterred by Windows. Microsoft failure caused it to go behind for a bit, so it seems like Linux was catching up, while it was just going at its same pace. Apple on the other hand, took this period of weakness from Microsoft, and pushed hard and gained a lot of extra ground. It made it so every kid wanted a MacBook and an iPod. While having a PC was the boring cheapo alternative.
It took Windows 7 for Microsoft to gets its groove back. But by then Apple had a lot of momentum.
In this article I was surprised about the talk of Linux during this time. Because Linux wasn't really doing anything new or interesting, they were just going further at their pace.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
w... Windows 8 and 10 have made everything 7 and earlier appear wonderful, even though they were still shit.
As some don't look at AC posts I'll repeat: Microsoft isn't admitting anything, one person have that as his personal opinion.
"...Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem..."
... the complexities of the market, then they should have left the market. Instead, it appears that they knowingly foisted a broken product upon one of the largest markets in the world.
They were desperately trying to rip-off the then new OS X without benefit of the years of development Apple had put in? Pretty much. It was actually kind of sad and obvious at the time.
BTW Windows 7, which even MS haters grudgingly admit was a pretty good product, is really "Vista 2" based on Microsoft's internal version numbers for Windows.
Vista = Windows NT 6.0
Windows 7 = Windows NT 6.1
In other words, Windows 7 was basically what they hoped to ship as Vista; it took them another dev cycle to get it right.
(And Windows 7 still shipped with a filepath limit of 260 characters....)
paying full price for a beta. I especially don't like it when said beta is my operating system. I _really_ don't like it when motherboard manufacturers and system start to prematurely drop support for the working OS (Win XP) under pressure from the OS maker.
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Vista was a mess, but nowhere near as mess as desktop Linux.
Maybe they can meet in the middle and we could have WinLux.
It would still be better than windows.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I bought Vista for a new build back in the day, and actually ran it for some time (until my next build).
Vista has a lot of hate, but I ran it for a long time and for the most part it was a good OS.
To my mind, Vista had exactly one problem, which they fixed after a couple years. The problem was a lack of compatible drivers that were pre-loaded. I'm pretty sure even after SP1, it still was missing a ton. Don't get me wrong, the drivers existed, only you had to go manually find them and install them yourself, which was more than a bit of a pain in the ass, particularly if you had to do more than one clean install. Once you visited the various hardware websites, downloaded and installed updated Vista driver, Vista worked pretty well.
Why did it have such bad initial driver support? Well there are a number of different reasons...
#1 First of all, Vista was the first OS to follow the most popular and long lived OS of all time in Windows XP. So yeah, there were a lot of people not prepared.
#2 You could argue that Microsoft didn't do enough outreach to the hardware folks for specifications and deadlines, I don't know specifics, but it could be a cause.
#3 Lazy hardware folks just putting off new drivers until the last minute, missing the release date, and just posting it on their websites.
If Vista had the bulk of the drivers available on websites preloaded on the install disk, or even by SP1, I doubt people would be making such a big deal about Vista. It WAS a pain in the ass to install, but not because of the OS itself, but rather all the various drivers to be individually loaded.
Sure it had it's various things like UAC and such, and many while annoying were good ideas. Can you say the same for the tile UI of 8, or the various BS like the app store and Cortana in 10 that you and everyone else just ignores?
My experience, paying for Vista Ultimate was a waste of money for an alpha quality OS that didn't properly support the latest hardware I purchased and purposefully locked you into an inferior OS with hard to remove resource hog processes.
My wife kept a Home Vista on her laptop until it finally died out unable to repair because of lock-in from the start. Still going on obsolete hardware with Ubuntu Linux. Wife suddenly happy with OS since she got email and browsing, and not those nagging popup dialogs from annoying OS. Win-Win!
No More Windows or Micr0s0ft. I do keep a Win7 in VirtualBox, but at this stage, it's more for acheological value than anything useful.
That is demonstrably false. There's "kinda linux" on mobile and there's the server space. Other than that, linux doesn't even exist. Still.
i'm so sorry, but i disagree with what you say.
" needs software that they rely on that DOESN'T require a BS in CIS"
That is akin to saying, that before you go into a warzone, you don't want to spend x months training and preparing. You just want to go in and win gloriously.
Ease of use of windows has its price - bad performance, spying by vendors, ugly un-customizeable interface, eternal security problems etc. All these things are a consequence of the dumbed down interface that hides all the glorious details.
IF linux was just as accessible to people who shouldn't own a computer, namely those without CS degree that don't care about details of implementation of the software they use, it would be a clone of Windows and not fit for any purpose. Just as windows is.
Complexity is a filter, that filters pubbies away. Savour it.
like a huge pile of spaghetti
Poettering, are you reading this?
Have gnu, will travel.
In a business environment, you do not want to throw out working equipment, such as printers, networking equipment, etc because there are no drivers. It's disruptive and it gets expensive real fast. If it ain't broke, don't fix it is the mantra, and Windows will never let you do that.
You don't want to throw out Lab equipment worth $10's of thousands because the newest MS Windows doesn't support the old drivers and the the manufacturer won't upgrade the drivers. Same for production lines in the $100's of thousands and up for the same reason.
If you've ever run Windows 8(or higher), you may have noticed that the disk I/O is amazingly fast. This is the problem that Vista really stepped in, with SuperFetch, and all their different ways to weigh down the I/O subsystem. Windows 7 didn't really seem to fix that, but they did take the load off, and that made all the difference.
I remember trying to do fresh installs and copy my old files back or even just copy from one folder to another and it would just sit there apparently doing nothing for long periods. Several times I was on the verge of screaming at my PC "What the F#@$%^*@! are you doing that is taking so long?!!!"
I think Windows 10 is also a mess
though, of course, the book will leave you believing that the way of comparing operating system kernels is by their relative inferiority to MINIX
LOL- half way through your post, I was going to reply with exactly that... Good to see I wasn't alone
I've seen people say that Vista was completely unnecessary and existed to fix things that weren't broken. That is, of course, reductive.
It certainly had its problems, chiefly in its UI changes (and the performance issues those changes caused). But on the backend it addressed a lot of significant issues, from creating a viable 64-bit ecosystem to major security improvements (including ASLR and DEP).
Ultimately, it paved the way for Windows 7, which I think it's fair to say is the best version of Windows overall.
At least the consumer releases:
Windows 3: Garbage
Windows 3.1: Much Improved
Windows 95: Garbage
Windows 98SE: Much more stable
Windows ME: TOTAL SHIT
Windows XP: Finally NT!
Windows Vista: Steaming pile
Windows 7: Damn near perfect
Windows 8: WTF Microsoft?
Windows 10: I know a bunch of you hate it, but its better than 7 in many ways including performance.
zosxavius photography
let's cut to the chase. all that really matters is this: is there any existing operating system which you would want implanted in your body to help run critical functions, or augment your brain? until one of those is created, they are all basically shit for brains, literally.
That just makes an already crappy day crappier. :( But you are right. Systemd has the potential to break Linux in such a way as to force us to come up with something better, and I don't mean a better systemd; I mean a better OS than what systemd will have forced it to become. I don't think that outcome is inevitable, but I do think it an unavoidable consequence of the direction Red Hat and most of the other major distro vendors are following, unless they change that direction, which would be painful now, but will only become more painful over time the longer they wait.
Nonaggression works!
XP was an operating system that was used to create a black box. For example, a Casino slot machine, an ATM, or some other fixed task system. (Elevator management system). XP survived because it was stable and limited in use. It did not survive as a "office system host", because the newer software would not function on XP.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Avast and avira are actually really solid products as long as you uninstall their "click here to clean internet, oops you have to give us money" add-ons and never ever for any reason call their customer support line
What lessons were learnt, were learnt half heartedly- PM (Program Manager) org wasn't defined neatly- they could pick up any task, so they picked up nothing- only conducting scrums which would be often be two hours long. What kind of scrum would it be? "I'm blocked at X point" "Because of who are you blocked?" and the finger pointing witch hunting would begin.
What lessons were learnt when MS teams didn't learn the art of working together? What was lacking? the dev culture. The Ballmer's regime had seen lots of privacy keeping tactics developed within teams- people didn't want to lag behind in the stack ranking race, knowing that someone who scores less than 3 would never be able to make up.
Lessons which were learnt were not circulated to top management. No workable strategies were defined, no steps were taken to improve work culture and no grass-root level changes were incorporated in the working of teams. Losing teams were always fire fighting and managers and program managers would keep on asking the SDEs and SDE IIs about what features could they add. It was chaos everywhere. Why did this happen? because the top management wasn't clear of the goals. They couldn't break the goals into small, workable chunk, always blaming the reportees that they were not able to break the work chunk. Even in the article, the author mentions about product being monolithic- why would a product be monolithic? because the higher ups didn't have the structured thinking to break down the issue (read "design") at hand.
The author conveys that he's not ashamed for the handling of affairs at that point of time- the fact that the CEO himself had to pay attention to WinFS file system itself is a signal that things are going towards grave, and there's a need to go back to drawing board.
The problem is not about managing thousands of people for a product, the problem is sitting together, and discussing openly who'd do what, and stick to that plan. Wherever there's no plan, chaos fills in the gaps. This was what was happening at Microsoft in many of the orgs. The HR policies, combined with oldies trying to be new blood, and ignorance / arrogance combined with lack of structured thinking was and is still killing the company which got in spotlight for a while.
Why wasn't the time spent at the beginning of the cycle, and close monitoring, and meticulousness maintained are never the questions on which the author ponders! When you are not pondering, you are not ashamed. When you're not ashamed, you don't learn. And then you rant. Even here the vision is not 20/20 in hindsight.