4) Dump iTunes. Seriously, talk about specification creep. When a music player now manages movies, television, that's one thing. But when it's your application manager and synchronization tool as well. Apple really needs to launch a new tool, call iLife or what not. Where iTunes would just be one category. I mean, I really hate having to go under music to find my TV shows and apps and such. LAME!!!
Not to be disrespectful, but are you frikkin' nuts?
Apple's success outside of the computer market over the past few years has been due to their ability to:
Get iTunes onto the majority of consumers' computers (thanks to the iPod's success)
Convince media publishers that all those eyeballs looking at iTunes every day want to buy things
Use iTunes as a distribution channel and the "hub" of people's digital lifestyle
iTunes is the key to Apple's strategy. They're not going to dump it, they're going to use it to continue to make boatloads of cold, hard cash. If you want to rename the application to "Apple Online Store", I'm sure they wouldn't mind you doing so on your own computer. But in my mind it's fair to say that iTunes is currently Apple's most important asset.
I love all the critique of what is obviously a pitiful attempt to produce one of them fancy web application things. I unfortunately can't add to the list here... being a late-comer to the discussion, the site is already offline.
But a lot of folks are missing the obvious opportunity here: government jobs are, frankly, the best thing going right now given the current state of the economy. How many Slashdotters have sent their resume to the Colorado DOL? They clearly need the help!
... To perform a right click with the Mighty Mouse you have to lift up with your left finger and click with the right.
This, in a word, sucks.
Have you used one for more than a minute or two? You'd be surprised how quickly you adapt to it; it's just another muscle-memory thing. When I'm using a more traditional two-button mouse, I find it quaint that it has actual physical buttons, and that the scroll button/wheel is only two directional.
Hopefully the MacBook trackpads are better. Sounds like they are.
I'll bet the physical feel is pretty damn good. I'm still amazed at how well multi-touch works on an iPhone screen, and I'm guessing the glass mouse will be very similar.
As a webapp developer, I'm still amazed how many companies are still refusing to support IE7. They do realize that IE6 is circa 2001 technology, right? Right?
Software in general, and the Internet in particular, is changing so fast not even the VC companies can keep up with it. I wonder why migration to IE7 (or any browser released in the last, say, 2 years) is taking so long.
You might not have searched enough. You may be interested in this plugin, which, to quote the page, is... specially designed for those that dislike the AwesomeBar.
The memory & performance improvements are more than enough to convince me to upgrade. And personally I think the new location bar is a step up, but I can understand how others might dislike it. HTH.
So when was the last time you drove a two-seater roadster with extremely limited storage space more than 100 miles away from your home? Better yet, when was the last time *you* drove 100 miles away from your home? My point being, it doesn't happen every day for most people. Even so, you can charge the Tesla from a standard outlet if you're away from home. But a roadster (electric or otherwise) isn't exactly the best choice for a road trip anyway.
That said, I'm looking forward to the day that either A) I have the expendable cash to afford a car like this, or B) the technology filters down to more typical consumer-targeted cars.
Let's take a look at a few reasons why Apple is currently doing pretty well in the smart phone market:
Exquisite User Interface. I'm sure you can do a lot with Android (haven't looked at the SDK myself yet, but am curious), but the fact is that Apple's UI is the result of a significant amount of R & D. They have a head start on anyone else attempting to do something similar.
iTunes Store/Music/Videos. With the iPhone, you get an iPod as well. Show me any other mobile device that has so clearly dominated its market in the last 10 years. If nothing else than a digital distribution channel, this is a huge advantage over any Android-based phone.
Visual Voicemail. Apple's requirement that their carriers tear apart their voicemail systems is a boon for the consumer. Some might even call it innovation:) While Android-based cell phones could mimic this, again Apple has a big head start.
Experience in the mobile hardware space. Apple is taking what they learned from their years of building iPods and leveraging it to build better phones. Using a strategy they are very familiar with, Apple controls the entire user experience. Android-based phones will be collaborations between companies, which may dilute the user experience. If you look at the desktop analogy, would you say a Windows Vista desktop is an "... Instant replacement..." for a Mac?
Look, I think Android will be a good platform, and that Google is going to put a lot of muscle behind it to limit Microsoft's reach in the mobile space and push their own interests instead. But saying "... Slap Android on a pure touchscreen phone... [and you get an]... Instant replacement for the iPhone..." is a big, big stretch.
... In connection with your payment of US$399 to OLPC Foundation, OLPC Foundation will provide you with one XO laptop, and a second XO laptop will be given by OLPC Foundation to a child in one of the least developed countries in the developing world....
Plus, those laptops had Vista on them. I assume you've had to buy two licenses of XP as well to make them usable. That runs the price up to, what, $600 each?
I wholly agree with your point here. I'm currently working as a technical team lead for a company in Los Angeles. The other 5 developers on the project are in Russia, 12 timezones away. Most of their English skills are decent enough, but the sheer distance makes working with them extremely difficult.
Our current arrangement came together because the remote developers' work on the previous project was of poor quality. They were doing the technical oversight themselves, and reporting status on a weekly basis. We never heard of any development challenges, or any of their solutions... just "We'll be done in 3 weeks" sort of status.
Needless to say, the result of the remote development was bad code. The application is extremely buggy, does not scale well, and would be very difficult to maintain. Surprise! So, what was the solution? Well, use the same remote developers to re-implement things, but this time make sure one of the local developers (that's me!) talks to them every day. We're a few weeks into what will probably be a 4 month project, and I'm having my doubts.
If my remote team were "less" remote, like in Atlanta instead of Russia, I think the situation would be very manageable. Integrating a remote team is a solvable problem. Integrating a remote team that is a half-world away and does not speak the language natively makes a difficult problem almost impossible.
javascript has nothing to do with either sun or java, except for the first four letters of its name.
Strangely enough, this is untrue. Sun actually owns the trademark on the word "JavaScript", and Netscape licensed it from Sun to use as the name of their new-fangled scripting language to run inside their browser.
...to call its value 'near infinite' is such an overstatement it's plain lying
Well, yeah... it's marketing-speak. They're all lies.
There are a lot of technologies and even some programming languages that would completely break the Internet as we know it should they be completely gone one of a sudden. Java is most certainly not one of them.
No offense, but that sounds like complete conjecture combined with lots of generalizations. Quick -- name 5 well-known websites that don't use Java anywhere in their infrastructure.
The switch is the center of the system. When you buy the switch, you also buy cabinets full of blade systems. Sun won't sell you the switch as a stand-alone component.
The blades in cabinets can be SPARC, AMD, or Intel; Sun will support them all. The first one will be delivered to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and will use Barcelona chips from AMD because it has better FP performance
The switch is built around Infiniband technology, which is an interconnect architecture not a company.
And not in the article, but IBM's Blue Gene uses processors that run at a whopping 850 MHz. Lest we forget, processor frequency != processing power, especially in a highly parallelized environment.
Somewhat off-topic, but there's another interesting iPhone rumor/tidbit floating in the ether today: A ZDNet Blog claims that Apple will be announcing sometime this week that they've licensed the MS Exchange ActiveSync API... which would signal that the iPhone is almost definitely compatible with Exchange Servers. For folks whose IT departments are in love with that particular software stack, I'll bet that will be big news.
I don't get why Apple thinks the average Windows user would want a significantly altered browser that looks nothing like the rest of the operating system he or she is using.
Because IE6 and IE7 (and to a lesser extend Firefox) have more clutter than is necessary in the application header and toolbar. Safari on Windows certainly isn't the unusual in the sense that they have a custom widgets or layout; but at least they're doing it for a reason. In the Apple UI world less is more; especially when you're creating a browser for non-power users who just want to read the news and browse Amazon.com.
Seriously: one of the points Jobs made while introducing the browser is that Safari makes a significant effort to stay out of the way of the web pages it is displaying. That's why the icons are so simplistic, and the URL, tabs & bookmarks bar are (vertically) quite small compared to other browsers. To roughly quote the keynote, the browser shouldn't be the star of the show, the web pages should.
BTW, one of my favorite features already after fiddling around with it for an afternoon is the ability to drag a tab off of the tab bar to create a new window, and drag pages onto an existing tab bar to create a new tab. One of those intuitive UI features that other browsers haven't figured out yet. Also, I'm developing a JavaScript-intensive application at this point and can report that it is fast -- surprisingly fast -- compared to other browsers. I never really trust benchmarks of anything, but real application performance bears out the same results.
Plus, even 0.4.2 is quickly aging. Dojo 0.9.0 is readying for an alpha release sometime soon, and will be a great step forward for the library. For my money (or rather, the time it takes to learn & leverage a new technology), Dojo is the best thing going in terms of JS libraries, regardless of their AJAX-y leanings.
The learning curve is higher than the others, but the upside is also much, much greater. With a formal 1.0 release scheduled for later this year, and a ton of momentum (both within the community and corporate backing), Dojo is here to stay. And that's a good thing!
You've got a good point that the AJAX-y experience wouldn't be optimal on a web browser inside a cell phone. It'd be pretty crappy... but then again attempting to do most business-related things on a cell phone-based application is typically a last resort, so I still think there is some applicability here.
I have a Palm 700p as my main cell phone. While I don't use the Office-compatible apps too often, but it's handy in rare instances. For instance, a client emails me a Word document detailing changes to a contract... it's great to be able to open the document on my phone, read it, then email or call them to discuss. That scenario is within the realm of the possibility of a web-based AJAX app, even on a mobile phone, isn't it?
I admit I've never used the genuine Office Mobile apps. But neither of us has seen how well the browser on the iPhone (or the keyboard, for that matter) work. If it's as good as the hype (well, at least close), it may be able to bridge the gap. Should be interesting to see....
Sure he is... assuming your office only uses desktop-installed versions of MS Office software. But what if the iPhone had a full-capability web browser installed on it, and you used one of several web-basedOffice-like applications, and your company had web-based email & calendaring interfaces, and used IM for business communication as well?
Suddenly that non-business iPhone looks pretty darn business-capable. Microsoft has already stumbled several times in recent memory by dismissing the ability of these internet tubes to route around their monopolistic strategies... how many more of these mistakes can they afford to make?
I think I'll take this opportunity to predict the demise of Apple, Inc. In fact, I hear Michael Dell is going to buy the company and give the money directly to the shareholders, or something like that....
Seriously though: Apple has made no bones about the fact that it's focusing more and more on lifestyle computing at the expense of their traditional computing product lines. This has to be one of the more extreme examples of that fact: Apple would rather ship a phone than keep their operating system schedule.
Plus, I'd guess they're not feeling too much heat from the Vista release, so why rush it? The current OS (Tiger) is, in my opinion, still way out in front in terms of features and usability.
Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple
on
Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I just interviewed with a small growing company. Every single desktop they had were Apple..... Considering they could have had *just as good* for cheaper that did the same thing... I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do....
I wonder, since they are a small company, how big was their IT department? I run a small S/W consulting company (me, a few subcontractors, support folks for large projects), and we use Apple for pretty much everything except when a client requires something else. We have no IT guy. We have no virus scares. We have no FAQ for how to connect to the shared NAS box.
Sure, we could buy cheaper hardware, but then we'd have to worry about it and waste billable time dealing with the associated pain points. I can say that, for a small company, an Apple/OS X infrastructure is definitely cheaper in the long run.
If I remember right, the speed required for water to be "solid" isn't even close to terminal velocity. It's around 40 MPH or so. This comes from lots of water skiing....
But the 'Water is soft, Dirt is hard' quote is when they're describing how to manage the final touchdown (at around 18 MPH). So at that point, the water would be pretty soft.
Re-writing the whole thing would have probably cause more harm than good. Just my personal two cents.
I wholly agree: from the external perspective, it sounded like a lot of the developers fell into the classic S/W development trap: re-write something for the sole reason that "We can make it better this time". Very rarely does this ever fit a customer's actual desires... but developers almost always want to do it anyway (myself included).
I'd love to hear the internal perspective of how the 'reset' decision finally came about inside Microsoft. Who took responsibility for it? Did Microsoft's upper management shoot the messenger, or did they reward them for making what must've been a very contentious decision for solid business reasons. I'm sure that'll make for an interesting book if someone ever cares to write it.
Do you really think Microsoft has been delaying the Vista release in order to make it the best Windows release to date? That seems ignorant of the history of the project to say the least. Here's what I remember:
The Longhorn project was officially started in 2001 (or possibly earlier). Longhorn initially had a number of OS-level features that would've made it on par with some other OS's in the same time peroid, had it been released in its original time window (late 2002, I believe). By my recollection of events, they originally started with the Windows 2000 Server codebase, and attempted to bolt the new fancy features onto the side of it. The effort failed miserably.
By 2003, Microsoft had realized that doing "add-on" development to Windows 2000 was a lost cause, so they literally called a do-over: this time they started with the WinXP Update 2 codebase. By the start of 2005, they were still having serious trouble getting all the new features to play well together, so they started removing them one by one. By 2006 all of the exciting new OS features had been removed, except for the new display API. This became the new feature set of the Vista release: eye candy.
Feel free to correct my from-memory summary of the history of the project. But my point is that they weren't polishing the silverware until it shone brightly; they were just trying to get the dinner table set before it was time for breakfast.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend's response when I read the quote to her:
"I'm a girl who doesn't think I've seen anything good having come from Sony in a while."
Zing!
4) Dump iTunes. Seriously, talk about specification creep. When a music player now manages movies, television, that's one thing. But when it's your application manager and synchronization tool as well. Apple really needs to launch a new tool, call iLife or what not. Where iTunes would just be one category. I mean, I really hate having to go under music to find my TV shows and apps and such. LAME!!!
Not to be disrespectful, but are you frikkin' nuts?
Apple's success outside of the computer market over the past few years has been due to their ability to:
iTunes is the key to Apple's strategy. They're not going to dump it, they're going to use it to continue to make boatloads of cold, hard cash. If you want to rename the application to "Apple Online Store", I'm sure they wouldn't mind you doing so on your own computer. But in my mind it's fair to say that iTunes is currently Apple's most important asset.
I love all the critique of what is obviously a pitiful attempt to produce one of them fancy web application things. I unfortunately can't add to the list here... being a late-comer to the discussion, the site is already offline.
But a lot of folks are missing the obvious opportunity here: government jobs are, frankly, the best thing going right now given the current state of the economy. How many Slashdotters have sent their resume to the Colorado DOL? They clearly need the help!
... To perform a right click with the Mighty Mouse you have to lift up with your left finger and click with the right.
This, in a word, sucks.
Have you used one for more than a minute or two? You'd be surprised how quickly you adapt to it; it's just another muscle-memory thing. When I'm using a more traditional two-button mouse, I find it quaint that it has actual physical buttons, and that the scroll button/wheel is only two directional.
Hopefully the MacBook trackpads are better. Sounds like they are.
I'll bet the physical feel is pretty damn good. I'm still amazed at how well multi-touch works on an iPhone screen, and I'm guessing the glass mouse will be very similar.
As a webapp developer, I'm still amazed how many companies are still refusing to support IE7. They do realize that IE6 is circa 2001 technology, right? Right?
Software in general, and the Internet in particular, is changing so fast not even the VC companies can keep up with it. I wonder why migration to IE7 (or any browser released in the last, say, 2 years) is taking so long.
You might not have searched enough. You may be interested in this plugin, which, to quote the page, is ... specially designed for those that dislike the AwesomeBar.
The memory & performance improvements are more than enough to convince me to upgrade. And personally I think the new location bar is a step up, but I can understand how others might dislike it. HTH.
So when was the last time you drove a two-seater roadster with extremely limited storage space more than 100 miles away from your home? Better yet, when was the last time *you* drove 100 miles away from your home? My point being, it doesn't happen every day for most people. Even so, you can charge the Tesla from a standard outlet if you're away from home. But a roadster (electric or otherwise) isn't exactly the best choice for a road trip anyway.
That said, I'm looking forward to the day that either A) I have the expendable cash to afford a car like this, or B) the technology filters down to more typical consumer-targeted cars.
Let's take a look at a few reasons why Apple is currently doing pretty well in the smart phone market:
Look, I think Android will be a good platform, and that Google is going to put a lot of muscle behind it to limit Microsoft's reach in the mobile space and push their own interests instead. But saying "... Slap Android on a pure touchscreen phone ... [and you get an] ... Instant replacement for the iPhone ..." is a big, big stretch.
You mean by guaranteeing something like ...
... from the Terms and Conditions of the Give One Get One program.
Plus, those laptops had Vista on them. I assume you've had to buy two licenses of XP as well to make them usable. That runs the price up to, what, $600 each?
:)
I wholly agree with your point here. I'm currently working as a technical team lead for a company in Los Angeles. The other 5 developers on the project are in Russia, 12 timezones away. Most of their English skills are decent enough, but the sheer distance makes working with them extremely difficult.
Our current arrangement came together because the remote developers' work on the previous project was of poor quality. They were doing the technical oversight themselves, and reporting status on a weekly basis. We never heard of any development challenges, or any of their solutions... just "We'll be done in 3 weeks" sort of status.
Needless to say, the result of the remote development was bad code. The application is extremely buggy, does not scale well, and would be very difficult to maintain. Surprise! So, what was the solution? Well, use the same remote developers to re-implement things, but this time make sure one of the local developers (that's me!) talks to them every day. We're a few weeks into what will probably be a 4 month project, and I'm having my doubts.
If my remote team were "less" remote, like in Atlanta instead of Russia, I think the situation would be very manageable. Integrating a remote team is a solvable problem. Integrating a remote team that is a half-world away and does not speak the language natively makes a difficult problem almost impossible.
javascript has nothing to do with either sun or java, except for the first four letters of its name.
...to call its value 'near infinite' is such an overstatement it's plain lying
Strangely enough, this is untrue. Sun actually owns the trademark on the word "JavaScript", and Netscape licensed it from Sun to use as the name of their new-fangled scripting language to run inside their browser.
Well, yeah... it's marketing-speak. They're all lies.
There are a lot of technologies and even some programming languages that would completely break the Internet as we know it should they be completely gone one of a sudden. Java is most certainly not one of them.
No offense, but that sounds like complete conjecture combined with lots of generalizations. Quick -- name 5 well-known websites that don't use Java anywhere in their infrastructure.
- The switch is the center of the system. When you buy the switch, you also buy cabinets full of blade systems. Sun won't sell you the switch as a stand-alone component.
- The blades in cabinets can be SPARC, AMD, or Intel; Sun will support them all. The first one will be delivered to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and will use Barcelona chips from AMD because it has better FP performance
- The switch is built around Infiniband technology, which is an interconnect architecture not a company.
And not in the article, but IBM's Blue Gene uses processors that run at a whopping 850 MHz. Lest we forget, processor frequency != processing power, especially in a highly parallelized environment.Somewhat off-topic, but there's another interesting iPhone rumor/tidbit floating in the ether today: A ZDNet Blog claims that Apple will be announcing sometime this week that they've licensed the MS Exchange ActiveSync API... which would signal that the iPhone is almost definitely compatible with Exchange Servers. For folks whose IT departments are in love with that particular software stack, I'll bet that will be big news.
h.264 files are about 1/2 the size of h.263 files, which is what the flash player uses. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
So, better video with smaller downloads. I think it's a bit of a yawn-inspiring feature, but that might just be me.
I don't get why Apple thinks the average Windows user would want a significantly altered browser that looks nothing like the rest of the operating system he or she is using.
Because IE6 and IE7 (and to a lesser extend Firefox) have more clutter than is necessary in the application header and toolbar. Safari on Windows certainly isn't the unusual in the sense that they have a custom widgets or layout; but at least they're doing it for a reason. In the Apple UI world less is more; especially when you're creating a browser for non-power users who just want to read the news and browse Amazon.com.
Seriously: one of the points Jobs made while introducing the browser is that Safari makes a significant effort to stay out of the way of the web pages it is displaying. That's why the icons are so simplistic, and the URL, tabs & bookmarks bar are (vertically) quite small compared to other browsers. To roughly quote the keynote, the browser shouldn't be the star of the show, the web pages should.
BTW, one of my favorite features already after fiddling around with it for an afternoon is the ability to drag a tab off of the tab bar to create a new window, and drag pages onto an existing tab bar to create a new tab. One of those intuitive UI features that other browsers haven't figured out yet. Also, I'm developing a JavaScript-intensive application at this point and can report that it is fast -- surprisingly fast -- compared to other browsers. I never really trust benchmarks of anything, but real application performance bears out the same results.
Plus, even 0.4.2 is quickly aging. Dojo 0.9.0 is readying for an alpha release sometime soon, and will be a great step forward for the library. For my money (or rather, the time it takes to learn & leverage a new technology), Dojo is the best thing going in terms of JS libraries, regardless of their AJAX-y leanings.
The learning curve is higher than the others, but the upside is also much, much greater. With a formal 1.0 release scheduled for later this year, and a ton of momentum (both within the community and corporate backing), Dojo is here to stay. And that's a good thing!
You've got a good point that the AJAX-y experience wouldn't be optimal on a web browser inside a cell phone. It'd be pretty crappy... but then again attempting to do most business-related things on a cell phone-based application is typically a last resort, so I still think there is some applicability here.
I have a Palm 700p as my main cell phone. While I don't use the Office-compatible apps too often, but it's handy in rare instances. For instance, a client emails me a Word document detailing changes to a contract... it's great to be able to open the document on my phone, read it, then email or call them to discuss. That scenario is within the realm of the possibility of a web-based AJAX app, even on a mobile phone, isn't it?
I admit I've never used the genuine Office Mobile apps. But neither of us has seen how well the browser on the iPhone (or the keyboard, for that matter) work. If it's as good as the hype (well, at least close), it may be able to bridge the gap. Should be interesting to see....
That exec has it pretty much spot on.
Sure he is... assuming your office only uses desktop-installed versions of MS Office software. But what if the iPhone had a full-capability web browser installed on it, and you used one of several web-based Office-like applications, and your company had web-based email & calendaring interfaces, and used IM for business communication as well?
Suddenly that non-business iPhone looks pretty darn business-capable. Microsoft has already stumbled several times in recent memory by dismissing the ability of these internet tubes to route around their monopolistic strategies... how many more of these mistakes can they afford to make?
I think I'll take this opportunity to predict the demise of Apple, Inc. In fact, I hear Michael Dell is going to buy the company and give the money directly to the shareholders, or something like that....
Seriously though: Apple has made no bones about the fact that it's focusing more and more on lifestyle computing at the expense of their traditional computing product lines. This has to be one of the more extreme examples of that fact: Apple would rather ship a phone than keep their operating system schedule.
Plus, I'd guess they're not feeling too much heat from the Vista release, so why rush it? The current OS (Tiger) is, in my opinion, still way out in front in terms of features and usability.
I just interviewed with a small growing company. Every single desktop they had were Apple..... Considering they could have had *just as good* for cheaper that did the same thing ... I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do....
I wonder, since they are a small company, how big was their IT department? I run a small S/W consulting company (me, a few subcontractors, support folks for large projects), and we use Apple for pretty much everything except when a client requires something else. We have no IT guy. We have no virus scares. We have no FAQ for how to connect to the shared NAS box.
Sure, we could buy cheaper hardware, but then we'd have to worry about it and waste billable time dealing with the associated pain points. I can say that, for a small company, an Apple/OS X infrastructure is definitely cheaper in the long run.
Or, if you could actually download the PDF ....
If I remember right, the speed required for water to be "solid" isn't even close to terminal velocity. It's around 40 MPH or so. This comes from lots of water skiing....
But the 'Water is soft, Dirt is hard' quote is when they're describing how to manage the final touchdown (at around 18 MPH). So at that point, the water would be pretty soft.
I'd love to hear the internal perspective of how the 'reset' decision finally came about inside Microsoft. Who took responsibility for it? Did Microsoft's upper management shoot the messenger, or did they reward them for making what must've been a very contentious decision for solid business reasons. I'm sure that'll make for an interesting book if someone ever cares to write it.
Do you really think Microsoft has been delaying the Vista release in order to make it the best Windows release to date? That seems ignorant of the history of the project to say the least. Here's what I remember:
The Longhorn project was officially started in 2001 (or possibly earlier). Longhorn initially had a number of OS-level features that would've made it on par with some other OS's in the same time peroid, had it been released in its original time window (late 2002, I believe). By my recollection of events, they originally started with the Windows 2000 Server codebase, and attempted to bolt the new fancy features onto the side of it. The effort failed miserably.
By 2003, Microsoft had realized that doing "add-on" development to Windows 2000 was a lost cause, so they literally called a do-over: this time they started with the WinXP Update 2 codebase. By the start of 2005, they were still having serious trouble getting all the new features to play well together, so they started removing them one by one. By 2006 all of the exciting new OS features had been removed, except for the new display API. This became the new feature set of the Vista release: eye candy.
Feel free to correct my from-memory summary of the history of the project. But my point is that they weren't polishing the silverware until it shone brightly; they were just trying to get the dinner table set before it was time for breakfast.