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."

Comments

Components

[JBMcB]

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..
 

Re:Components

[freeze128]

I remember that as well, but all that happened BEFORE it was released to the public. It had the database filesystem, and all the components written in .NET operated way too slowly, so they spent a couple of years re-writing in C++, and dropped the database filesystem.

As I recall, the antivirus vendor problem that is mentioned in the summary didn't seem to come to light to the public until around the release of Windows 8 or so, when Microsoft got tired of dealing with support calls where a third-party antivirus had quarantined a critical component of windows, and the system wouldn't boot. That's when Microsoft got into the antivirus business.

Re:The summary is really contradictory.

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

legacy of trust

[epine]

How MS played the incompatibility card against DR-DOS

"It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. The AARD code trickery is well-known, but Caldera is now pursuing four other deliberate incompatibilities. One of them was a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows." Of course there was no reason for this. Brad Silverberg, the Microsoft exec who finally left the company last week, but who in an earlier life had been responsible for Windows 95, emailed Allchin on 27 September 1991: "after IBM announces support for dr-dos at comdex, it's a small step for them to also announce they will be selling netware lite, maybe sometime soon thereafter. but count on it. We don't know precisely what ibm is going to announce. my best hunch is that they will offer dr-dos as the preferred solution for 286, os 2 2.0 for 386. they will also probably continue to offer msdos at $165 (drdos for $99). drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)", which is clear enough, and it should be noted that the pair were both high level Microsoft executives.

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

After serving sixteen years at Microsoft, Allchin retired in early 2007 when Microsoft officially released the Windows Vista operating system to consumers.

Perhaps in 2023 (2017 + sixteen years) we'll all be able to let bygones be bygones.

Re:Mojave vs. Windows 7

[another_twilight]

Did you use Vista from launch, or after SP1 came out?

Vista had well documented flaws in copying and deleting that were addressed by SP1. Driver support was lackluster and combined with the higher system requirements, games performed poorly. In parallel, the labeling of hardware as 'Vista Capable' when it could barely boot had largely been resolved by SP1.

Vista Basic had a min-spec of 512MB and Home and up 1GB. Conventional wisdom of the time was that 2GB was necessary for anything like decent performance. That you didn't notice a problem with 4GB isn't surprising, but a lot of early adopters who met or even exceeded the recommended specification found Vista to be slow and unresponsive.

Any differences with XP just added insult to injury. It's easier to accept change when there are tangible improvements. The improvements in Vista were not immediately apparent to most people, but the poor performance was. Why would you bother getting used to a new OS if it was slower? If you want to compete with another product, even your own, you had better offer a benefit for people to switch away.

Blaming others

[peppepz]

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.