Not exactly sure how you arrive at XP as "MS-DOS"-like. Your analogy holds through Millennium (ME). But XP hath no gory, icky DOS underbelly. Ironically, Mac OS X (or Linux with your favorite WM) more closely aligns to the classic DOS "tacked on GUI" model. The Mac just hides it better than anyone else. The average user doesn't need to see the crap that flies by when Linux (or even XP before the kernel) loads. Windows (and Linux) could improve quite a bit by smoothing the rough edges between the software and hardware. But of course few organizations in this world can do that better than Apple (since it's their entire platform to do with as they wish).
Potholes are exactly that. Holes. How would you cover something in them? Or you mean fill them with dough. Like doughnut holes? Then cover Jupiter? Mmmm... Deep fried Jupiter...
Taylor had nothing to do with Longhorn/Vista. If there were a series of executives who were asked to spend more time with their families WRT Vista's (ahem) delay, he honestly would not have been among them. There was another cause, unrelated to Vista, that led to this.
1: Steve has actually lost weight and gotten in better health - not what you said.
2: When I worked at Microsoft, the company was all about building kickass software. Not about beating the snot out of competition. Spolsky says it best... software isn't about beating the competition, it's about building better software.
3: Stalk. Not stock.
4: I never heard any such thing from Steve. In fact, there are quite a few people at Microsoft today who should be fired. But never will. The Peter Principle is in full effect at Microsoft.
5: Vista is a cluster. It's a top-down unmanaged product that displays what is completely wrong with Microsoft.
6: Bad day to sell. Should have sold years ago. It has nowhere to go but down.
7: Why J? He runs a division that loses massive amounts of money.
Don't miss it. WinFS was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, its death (or at least it's omission from Vista for the time being) is a good thing for consumers (the implementation was confusing and useless to the average Windows user) and lack of it is one bit of good news WRT the (abyssmal) performance of Vista.
Performant isn't a word. Even though many of my former co-workers liked to use it as one.
Virtualizing the device - unless REALLY poorly written - should not have a deleterious effect on performance. Unless it is read from an entirely different spindle, it's still competing for I/O with the MacOS. The ideal would be VMWare running on the MacOS with Windows from a second spindle. Or simply running WINE on the Macintel, subverting the Windows install on the other partition to gain Windows app compatibility.
Vista today is a shadow of what Longhorn was supposed to be. Longhorn's vision made sense and had something for every customer segment. Longhorn is dead. Vista is all about the consumer. Just as Windows ME before it.
Oh, and even if they knew the slip was coming... which they had to... It's very much in the mindset of Microsoft when playing chicken to not turn the car until you've already done some front-end damage.
"...who is actualy quite ineffective because he is marketing driven and not product and engineering driven."
Have you ever actually worked with Steve? Or are you making that claim based on the in-depth research you have read here at/.? Either way, you're incorrect. Either way he's not really the one who should go for Longhorn fermenting on the vine.
There is NO way 60% of Vista will be "rewritten". Not by November. Not by January. Not by 2009. It won't be rewritten. Possibly modified - but not rewritten. Having 60% of the world's largest OS codebase "rewritten" in under a year is, well, beyond the laws of physics. If they haven't been able to ship 100% of it in 5 years - and they are "feature complete" as they say they are for the latest CTP (BS, IMHO) then it cannot happen. Article headline was grabbing for readers. That is all.
At that point it is running with a VESA mode VGA driver. Which may look good, or like crap. Depending on the VESA implementation of the chipset. Given that it is a relatively recent chipset on the iMac, it looks about right.
They provide drivers only if vendors author them (and push for their inclusion). There isn't a team of driver faeries at Microsoft that determines the most popular devices and spontaneously author them and put them into Windows.
Microsoft doesn't make third party storage drivers. Your third party storage vendor does.
So when you say "pissed off to find out that they STILL arent supporting my SATA controller..." your anger should be directed at your storage device vendor (they).
Actually, the MS team who handled that as of when I left did, (and still does!) get that there's a problem with needing a fucking FLOPPY disk to install the storage drivers. I had the (mis?)fortune of trying to get it changed.
But the reality was that when Windows XP originally shipped, 5 years ago, this wasn't a problem on the immediate horizon. And when the service packs for XP and Server 2003 shipped, it was WAY to risky of a change for us to implement. And Longhorn was "right around the corner", where F6 from other media would be (and is, in current betas) supported.
BTW - your second paragraph amused me. Made me feel like I was Ferris Bueller.
Don't know where you've worked - but in my experience (working with Fortune 500 enterprise customers around Windows) but they don't do your work for you.
In an ideal world you get feedback from customers. In a really ideal world, it reflects what OTHER customers want, not just that customer.
In a perfect world, they're smart enough to tell you what they, AND your other customers REALLY need - not swag some BS wishlist, you're smart enough to understand what they REALLY are asking for (not deliver poo), and it all works.
But rarely (never?) have I met a customer who would sit down and to any depth write scenarios/use cases/user stories, etc for me. But they WILL look at yours, and if well written enough (if not, they won't read them to any significant level) they'll call bullshit, or tell you they love you.
User stories - done in a vacuum (as they often are, and were in a division of my former employer (ahem) are more than worthless. They are dangerous.
Developer: "We're writing what the customer wants. See? It's right here in the User Story!"
Product Manager/Program Manager: "That's great, has a customer actually seen the User Story?"
Developer: "No, but we're pretty sure it reflects what they want."
Product Manager/Program Manager: (sigh)
The critical aspect is showing a use case to a customer. If it doesn't stand on it's own, reasses the need overall.
Not juggle. Design. Customers give you poo (vague wishes of what they wish the product could do). It's up to developers, working with technically competent product managers/program managers (what's with this "artist" crap in the article's diagram?) to figure out how to actually find gold in that poo. Sounds more gross than it actually is. Done right it can be phenomenal for everyone involved.
Yup. I think the original poster actually defined the answer themselves, yet may not have noticed it (or likely can't do anything about it). There is a critical technical gap in their team. Either they need to let developers get out and breathe the same air as customers once in a while, or hire more technically agile product design resources.
It may be - but it's not notchy enough that most customers will replace commercial software which was developed by a team of individuals dedicated to designing the software that they (the paying customers) actually wanted... See the Novell survey for proof.
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Not exactly sure how you arrive at XP as "MS-DOS"-like. Your analogy holds through Millennium (ME). But XP hath no gory, icky DOS underbelly. Ironically, Mac OS X (or Linux with your favorite WM) more closely aligns to the classic DOS "tacked on GUI" model. The Mac just hides it better than anyone else. The average user doesn't need to see the crap that flies by when Linux (or even XP before the kernel) loads. Windows (and Linux) could improve quite a bit by smoothing the rough edges between the software and hardware. But of course few organizations in this world can do that better than Apple (since it's their entire platform to do with as they wish).
Potholes are exactly that. Holes. How would you cover something in them? Or you mean fill them with dough. Like doughnut holes? Then cover Jupiter? Mmmm... Deep fried Jupiter...
Taylor had nothing to do with Longhorn/Vista. If there were a series of executives who were asked to spend more time with their families WRT Vista's (ahem) delay, he honestly would not have been among them. There was another cause, unrelated to Vista, that led to this.
1: Steve has actually lost weight and gotten in better health - not what you said.
2: When I worked at Microsoft, the company was all about building kickass software. Not about beating the snot out of competition. Spolsky says it best... software isn't about beating the competition, it's about building better software.
3: Stalk. Not stock.
4: I never heard any such thing from Steve. In fact, there are quite a few people at Microsoft today who should be fired. But never will. The Peter Principle is in full effect at Microsoft.
5: Vista is a cluster. It's a top-down unmanaged product that displays what is completely wrong with Microsoft.
6: Bad day to sell. Should have sold years ago. It has nowhere to go but down.
7: Why J? He runs a division that loses massive amounts of money.
Cringeley may as well have written that. Not gonna happen.
For the average Windows user, no. That won't ring any alarm bells. And no, I didn't mean that as an insult. Really.
The number is significantly lower than that.
ME 2
Don't miss it. WinFS was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, its death (or at least it's omission from Vista for the time being) is a good thing for consumers (the implementation was confusing and useless to the average Windows user) and lack of it is one bit of good news WRT the (abyssmal) performance of Vista.
exmsft... Unless something has happened to Steve that I don't know about, it's not me.
Vista today is a shadow of what Longhorn was supposed to be. Longhorn's vision made sense and had something for every customer segment. Longhorn is dead. Vista is all about the consumer. Just as Windows ME before it.
Oh, and even if they knew the slip was coming... which they had to... It's very much in the mindset of Microsoft when playing chicken to not turn the car until you've already done some front-end damage.
"...who is actualy quite ineffective because he is marketing driven and not product and engineering driven."
/.? Either way, you're incorrect. Either way he's not really the one who should go for Longhorn fermenting on the vine.
Have you ever actually worked with Steve? Or are you making that claim based on the in-depth research you have read here at
There is NO way 60% of Vista will be "rewritten". Not by November. Not by January. Not by 2009. It won't be rewritten. Possibly modified - but not rewritten. Having 60% of the world's largest OS codebase "rewritten" in under a year is, well, beyond the laws of physics. If they haven't been able to ship 100% of it in 5 years - and they are "feature complete" as they say they are for the latest CTP (BS, IMHO) then it cannot happen. Article headline was grabbing for readers. That is all.
Even my oldest hard drives weighed more than that.
He may be an old timer - but I would think even the oldest old timer knows that MB = Megabyte...
At that point it is running with a VESA mode VGA driver. Which may look good, or like crap. Depending on the VESA implementation of the chipset. Given that it is a relatively recent chipset on the iMac, it looks about right.
Because the DVD program you installed on Windows is using a licensed copy of the MPEG codec - not a hacked codec based on DeCSS.
They provide drivers only if vendors author them (and push for their inclusion). There isn't a team of driver faeries at Microsoft that determines the most popular devices and spontaneously author them and put them into Windows.
Microsoft doesn't make third party storage drivers. Your third party storage vendor does.
So when you say "pissed off to find out that they STILL arent supporting my SATA controller..." your anger should be directed at your storage device vendor (they).
Actually, the MS team who handled that as of when I left did, (and still does!) get that there's a problem with needing a fucking FLOPPY disk to install the storage drivers. I had the (mis?)fortune of trying to get it changed.
But the reality was that when Windows XP originally shipped, 5 years ago, this wasn't a problem on the immediate horizon. And when the service packs for XP and Server 2003 shipped, it was WAY to risky of a change for us to implement. And Longhorn was "right around the corner", where F6 from other media would be (and is, in current betas) supported.
BTW - your second paragraph amused me. Made me feel like I was Ferris Bueller.
Don't know where you've worked - but in my experience (working with Fortune 500 enterprise customers around Windows) but they don't do your work for you.
In an ideal world you get feedback from customers. In a really ideal world, it reflects what OTHER customers want, not just that customer.
In a perfect world, they're smart enough to tell you what they, AND your other customers REALLY need - not swag some BS wishlist, you're smart enough to understand what they REALLY are asking for (not deliver poo), and it all works.
But rarely (never?) have I met a customer who would sit down and to any depth write scenarios/use cases/user stories, etc for me. But they WILL look at yours, and if well written enough (if not, they won't read them to any significant level) they'll call bullshit, or tell you they love you.
User stories - done in a vacuum (as they often are, and were in a division of my former employer (ahem) are more than worthless. They are dangerous. Developer: "We're writing what the customer wants. See? It's right here in the User Story!" Product Manager/Program Manager: "That's great, has a customer actually seen the User Story?" Developer: "No, but we're pretty sure it reflects what they want." Product Manager/Program Manager: (sigh) The critical aspect is showing a use case to a customer. If it doesn't stand on it's own, reasses the need overall.
Not juggle. Design. Customers give you poo (vague wishes of what they wish the product could do). It's up to developers, working with technically competent product managers/program managers (what's with this "artist" crap in the article's diagram?) to figure out how to actually find gold in that poo. Sounds more gross than it actually is. Done right it can be phenomenal for everyone involved.
Yup. I think the original poster actually defined the answer themselves, yet may not have noticed it (or likely can't do anything about it). There is a critical technical gap in their team. Either they need to let developers get out and breathe the same air as customers once in a while, or hire more technically agile product design resources.
It may be - but it's not notchy enough that most customers will replace commercial software which was developed by a team of individuals dedicated to designing the software that they (the paying customers) actually wanted... See the Novell survey for proof.