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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.
Lots of revisionist history going on here.
Microsoft was just getting used to separating user space functions, which had turned XP prior to SP2 into an eggshell, so easily exploited that even bad script kiddies could pop a bubble and p0wn a machine.
Virus makers were a red herring. So were driver makers. It because impossible to regression test Windows because the software communities had build so many dependencies into the system, which were changed just as quickly by Microsoft.
Vista was simply a turd. There's no better way to describe it, and it's only after screaming hostilities did Microsoft pour sufficient resources to fix it so as to negate Vista into the more stable Windows 7-- which killed a lot of legacy problems, but also software compatibilities, libraries, functions, and functionality/behaviors.
Microsoft needed the money-- back during the phase where they made money on CALs and discrete licensing fees. In the middle of it, chaos ensued. It was a disaster.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Yes it was worth it.
The same cannot be said of W10.
Windows 10 isn't worth the price of "free."
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.
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.
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.
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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?
It depends on who you ask. Vista demanded a lot more from the users, with the much stricter access controls. Because users hates having to make decisions, this was severely dialled back in Windows 7.
If Vista had received the same additions and bug fixes that Windows 7 did, but without the dumbing down and trading security for convenience of W7, I would have chosen Vista as the superior OS of the two. But support died down quickly.
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.
I remember our tech lead in 2003ish insisted on following MS's API and structure recommendations, which included warnings that certain calls and other aspects would be deprecated in the future. Our software worked perfectly in Vista. Many products by bigger companies failed with security ot other issues. By post-hoc fixing some of their issues, you could get them working in Vista. Win7 had the advantage of arriving after all those companies fixed their software. I'd imagine tht had far more to do with it than "MS pouring in resources".
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This comment is almost literally the entire problem encompassing the Linux platform.
"Just recomplie" (Natch)
Sure. No problem for me, or you.
Tell the average user that who just wants their laptop to recognize their wireless card which requires a niche patch to the kernel to fix, or worse yet someone foolish enough at the end user side to be convinced to run Linux and needs software that they rely on that DOESN'T require a BS in CIS to install when their computer inevitably shits itself.
Want to know why "the year of the Linux desktop" hasn't happened and won't in the foreseeable future? Read. Your. Comment. AGAIN.
This signature is lame.
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.
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
In my last job we ran some binaries designed for RedHat 6.2 (kernel 2.2 if I'm not mistaken) on RHEL 6 with kernel 2.6. Worked just fine. The thing that keeps binaries from running isn't usually the kernel; it's the C library and dynamic linker loader. In my case I had to set up a complete RH 6.2 chroot environment to run this app in. Think about that. Redhat 6.2 user space running on a then-current 2.6 kernel.
I'm fairly confident the same binary would, with the chroot environment and supporting libc and ld.so, run on RHEL 7, and probably would work fine with kernel 4.x (though I doubt it would work with selinux without some serious tinkering).
By and large, the Linux kernel is quite compatible with older binaries, if you can get a linker and libc version that work with the binary in question. Certainly it's much more compatible than you claim.
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.
That is the crux of the issue: "from what I've seen". The problem is that you don't see corporate software development. Who knows what chaos happens behind the veneer of the corporate facade. Not only that, but also take into consideration the influence of politics, marketing, and just plain management incompetence on the development of their software.
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out. This is because it's inherently a meritocracy. I have no confidence that this is the case with corporate software development.
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.
A Slackware user's child: "What's a systemd?"
Ezekiel 23:20
Omitting the key sentence in the post you're replying to: "Although you don't have to, since all the distros already have."
+3 "insightful" instead of -1, "Can't fucking read". Yep, this is Slashdot.
And I'm gladly telling average users that, if they are stupid enough to not do due diligence. Buy stuff which is compatible, or suffer. Not to mention that if your hardware needs some funky driver under Linux, it's probably going to be an unreliable POS under Windows too!
As for the rest, Linux doesn't need a BS in CompSci to install, and it doesn't shit itself. Shitting itself is Windows territory. All it takes to install Linux is a rudimentary understanding of the OS and compatible hardware. The exact same premisses as for Windows, the main difference being that you have a slightly higher chance of having your piece of hardware "kind of" working out of the box with Windows, and a massively bigger risk of being left at a later point with a fully functional device but no working driver, as opposed to your having drivers which improve over time. Really important to people who just needs to get shit done, you know.
Why Linux doesn't take off has nothing to do with these non-issues. It has everything to with inertia, lack of mind share and general resistance to change, fear of the unknown as well as outright corruption and sabotage from Microsoft and their stooges who realize that the day people get rid of them, they are fucked.
That said, I'm off to a customer setting up their office with openSUSE later today. Windows 10 with it's incessant spying, vulnerability to malware, inclusion of crapware and planned obsolescence proved too much, for no material gain at all.
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out
That's the theory, but it's often not true. Often the person who has commit access to the branch that people use gets to push their code, instead of the person with out-of-tree patches that are technically superior. Or the person who simply keeps arguing after the people who are correct have got bored and moved onto productive things wins out.
This is because it's inherently a meritocracy
The term 'meritocracy' was originally coined to refer to the way that British class system created the veneer of selection on ability but actually selected based on in-group characteristics. If that's what you actually meant, then I'd agree. Particularly for the Linux kernel, but also for a lot of other open source (and proprietary) software projects.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Vista sucked because they had to fix all the problems stemming from XP being designed as a single user, non networked OS
XP was a direct descendant of NT, which was always designed as a networked multi-user OS. The problem with XP was that, unlike 2000, it aimed for strong Windows 95 compatibility (NT4 and 2000 could run sensibly written Win32 apps) and that included applications that expected to be able to write their configuration files in C:\Program Files\AppName, rather than in the user's home directory, or write to the Local Machine part of the registry instead of the Current User part. Win32 had APIs for doing this correctly from the start (and a lot of apps used them correctly), but a lot of crap just dumped stuff in the wrong place and didn't bother checking for errors so crashed when it didn't work.
The big change around the time of Vista, from security perspective, was the shift in trust domains. In a classic NT (or UNIX) setting, you have a system administrator who has full access and is responsible for installing and configuring software, and you have other users that have their own home directory to play in. The purpose of the OS's security model is to protect the user from other users and to protect the integrity of the system from other users. In a modern system, this is no longer true.
The change is actually the opposite of the one you suggest: computers have become single-user devices, but that user now embodies multiple trust domains. Users run things like mail clients and web browsers that take untrusted data from the network and they want the OS to prevent a compromise in one of these programs (or, ideally, in one part of one of these programs) from being able to access or damage their other data. UAC, which Vista introduced, was part of this shift. There is no longer a separate administrator user (as a user interface - there still is as a kernel abstraction), the user can do whatever they want to their computer but only intentionally. They don't automatically delegate this power to every program that they run.
The end goal for a modern system is for apps to run with very limited privileges, including no access to the user's home directory except for individual locations that are opened using a powerbox abstraction (i.e. open / save dialogs that are owned by a different process that grants access to the locations to the limited application) and explicit privilege elevation for the few things that require it.
The big flaw with UAC was that it only works well as a UI paradigm if the user is asked to elevate privilege rarely. Basically, [un]installing software or doing system configuration should be the only times a user should explicitly be asked. Unfortunately, the whitelists were very incomplete at launch and so users were just trained to click yes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Windows 10 is awesome. Why wouldn't you want to use it?
(Cortana is threatening to release my browser history if I don't say this.)