Complexity kills
by Volker Weber
You read that Vista, the artist formerly known as Longhorn, won't ship on time. Big deal. Or has anyone expected them to actually ship on time? The bad news is that they now have committed on a date which is more than eight to ten months out. If it is so far away, then it would be very hard to actually commit to it. What will happen until then? What if you cannot get the known bugs down to an acceptable level? And why ship to corporate first? They won't deploy before SP1 anyway.
This smells of Copland, the operating system Apple never shipped. Yes, MS will ship something called Vista. But it might as well be XP SP4. It certainly isn't Longhorn. And honestly, who is waiting for a new MS operating system to spend their money on? Yes, you will get it force fed with stickers on new PC gear. But do you really want it, need it, crave for it?
I am not going to go out on a limb and predict that Microsoft crumbles. But they certainly lost it. What we need is elegant, simple things, that solve user problems. Not even more bells and whistles.
If you are so lucky that you don't need a certain application which only runs on Windows, you can get better stuff today.
But one thing is for sure. You would not want to work for Microsoft in the very organization responsible for shipping Vista. If you think otherwise, take a few hours off your schedule and read this thread. And ignore the idiot Mac users sounding off further down.
Update: Why ship to corporate in November? This was an easy one, but I still failed to see it immediately. There are a lot of Software Assurance contracts expiring at the end of the year. If MS does not ship by then, customers who signed up for SA at the beginning of 2004 would have received precisely nothing in return for their money.
Comments
Thank you, Volker, that was a really good comment!
I couldn't agree more with you that Vista won't be more than XP SP3 (or 4). And I think that's really a pity. I kind of like the Windows XP by now and adapted to all the strange little things. But I thought it was time for a really new generation of operating system. Vista may be a cousin of XP but no son, no next generation. For that it may take another 6 years. But then perhaps I use MacOS at home and another operating system at work.
As Microsoft revenues are still growing although they have not been shipping anything of interest for years I think it does not matter what they develop (or copy).
Vista sucks? Tthe OEM business and Dell will sell it anyway. The competition gets the press, Microsoft gets the money. As long as something gets preinstalled on every PC it does not matter much what the Windows division does (or does not).
Every heard of Software Assurance?
Observations:
1) Does anyone know how much of those responses on minimsft are real? That thread really reads like an elaborate hoax of several trolls posing as disgruntled MS-employees.
2) I really didn't care for XP when it was new and still used Win9x for years before I switched. I switched when the hardware needed by XP was reasonably cheap and well-supported by its drivers. Same will happen this time - XP will be around for a long time.
3) From a technology standpoint, there is nothing in Vista that makes me excited about it, except eye candy. (The eye candy looks really nice, though.) There is a small hope that MS will make it more secure this time, but with their track record, I think they won't succeed on that issue, again.
4) I've been using Ubuntu Linux as my main desktop OS at home and at my office for several months now and was surprised how rarely I needed to boot the Windows partition. So yeah, it's ready for the desktop and it works well enough for me as a full-time alternative to XP. And its upcoming features are way more interesting to me than those of Vista. If you are tired of XP and don't want to wait for Vista, this is a good time to check the alternatives out there.
The only reason why I wait for Vista is that it is rumored to support symbolic links (something which other OSs I know of have always done. It has always escaped me why windows shortcuts only work with absolute paths.)
So I might save substantial HDD space when I can use links in my MP3 collection (right now, when I have the same song on a sampler and on the original album, I have to store the file twice - as a shortcut would no longer work as intended if I moved the whole MP3 structure somewhere else.)
Apart from that... XP is quite OK, I got used to it. It actually does what I want it to do most of the time - an uncanny trend that started with W2K back then. Who needs translucent windows?
BUT. Ask me again in two years time. Better still: Ask us all... ;-)
Interesting to see that there is no occurrence of the words 'Groove' or 'Ozzie' in that lengthy thread (yet).
Twelve months ago the acquisition of Groove.net was completed by Microsoft, to the sound of a few fanfares; part of the deal was that the Groove security model would be built into the new version of Windows, recognising that this would mean a very fundamental re-working of Longhorn as it existed at that time.
I can't help wondering just how much of the delay can be attributed to that major re-work. Any means of locking down Windows is an entirely good idea, and Groove's security model is recognised as being second to absolutely none - but at what price is Microsoft achieving that integration?
Nick, I am pretty sure that this rework is not being done.
Wow, good title: "Complexity kills"! I'm going to put that in my signature.
I already liked "KISS", but "Complexity kills" is even beter: it's less complex ;-)
The gaming community will really benefit from Vista ... between XNA, XboX Live Services for the PC, and the new XNA Game Developer Studio, we will see lots of Vista only games in late 07. The gaming world will update.
I agree with you about the businesss world. I am on the fence with the general consumer world ... the majority of people buy their home computers/laptops from dell or at a store like best buy. They walk in/order it online and it is configured already. Anyone getting a new home consumer pc will get Vista. The real question is what will the people in positiion to upgrade do.
John,
for the moment, you may be right. However, any serious gamer sooner or later will leave the PC world and join sides with either the X-box or the PlayStation fraction. The same will be true for the developers. Many if not most of them are fed up with having to support the variety of systems the PC world's ecosystem offers. Not only that, but supporting all that home-brewn power machines and their endless config differences is costing the development studios real money. I, as a user and frequent gamer of some other time, am still fed up with all the quirks and bugs related to sound cards, graphics adapters or even the use of multiple CD-ROM drives. If I'd ever enter gaming again I'd use a console. Period. Developing an operating system with the gamers in mind may be a viable business for the next three to five years but not much longer, imho.
"What's the difference between OS X and Vista?
Microsoft employees are excited about OS X..."
Shocker...
