Vista Devolves Further Still

[Mikuro]

Source: http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/06/29.13.shtml

Microsoft has announced that Vista will not include the much-ballyhooed (and legitimately interesting and forward-thinking) WinFS file system.

I shouldn't be surprised, since Microsoft's favorite hobby for the past year or two has been ripping features out of Vista. All that remains is a shriveled husk of a next-gen OS. Can someone remind me what Vista has that XP doesn't? It has a nice new facelift, and an equivalent of CoreImage (which the facelift is built around). Is that all?

If I were a Windows user, I would be soooo annoyed. Three years ago, Longhorn (now Vista) sounded like a really good, maybe even revolutionary product. It promised to take a technological leap forward similar to Apple's leap from OS 9 to X. But over the years, it's just become more and more like XP.

So...yeah. Vista's been crippled again. I urge you now to point, laugh, and generally be smug.

[Qion]

I can't be smug with this one. That's just humiliating for them. OS X Tiger already does everything -if not more- than Vista... it's like Microsoft is saying, "Let's see just how far we can bury our image of boring repetitiveness into people's faces while still maintaining a sub-par excuse of a competitor to the Mac side of things and manage to sustain a 90% market share!"

[HateEternal]

I tried out the public beta. Without having a beefy video card there isn't much that I have found to be interesting. I prayed that even without a video card to support aero they would have _at least_ reworked the way windows were drawn in 'classic ui' mode so you wouldn't have the 'moving window acts as a giant eraser until it stops feature' but no... The new start menu is worse than the XP menu, who wants to use a scroll bar when you are going for an App? Once again they moved everything around... kind of annoying but not terrible. The windows explorer bread-crumbs are kinda neat... thats about it. They added more built in apps so you have a better out of the box experience. I've spent maybe 2 hours with it, so I didn't get into it too far.

Oh, and after like 10 years MS paint got new icons... and I think they updated the color palatte to be more 2006ish... nice work guys.

[symphonix]

It seems that with every new evolution of Windows, they seem to get further and further from the ideals of usability and good design. The Aero interface is an eyesore. All my PC-loving friends adore it for its eye-candy, but all it does is make things harder to read, more clutterred and awkward to use.

I'm not surprised WinFS got canned. From what I've heard it works fine for about 50% of the beta testers, the rest described it as a painfully unreliable system to use. And when a Windows *fanatic* tells you something in the OS is so bad its unusable, you'd better believe it.

[ora]

I'd love top see a list of the original longhorn features that showed what had been dropped over time, would be very telling.

For me the killer is still they couldn't make it in .NET, given the fuss over .NET i hear from my PC using coder friends this made me most amused.

[fryke]

WinFS was taken out longer ago already. They were merely talking about betas of it in the final Vista version. Now they're simply calling WinFS off completely (well, putting it to SQL and software development projects).

[powermac]

I remember when Microsoft announced the features they wanted to put into Longhorn(vista). It was an ambitious idea, that many of the experts felt was not possible in one release of the OS. Further, that the underlying technology in Windows will not be able to support all those ideas MS had at the time. I believe those experts to be right. As Vista has been developed, as we have seen, features are being taken out.

Lets face it. Apple made an ambitious move to OSX, and for good reason. MS will have to do the same thing, that is write a new OS with new technology to be flexible for future changes.

Although I have not personally seen Vista in action, a few people I know have reported, at the present time, with this preview release, all Vista has accomplished is eye-candy features over XP.

[symphonix]

Originally Posted by powermac

I remember when Microsoft announced the features they wanted to put into Longhorn(vista). It was an ambitious idea, that many of the experts felt was not possible in one release of the OS. Further, that the underlying technology in Windows will not be able to support all those ideas MS had at the time. I believe those experts to be right. As Vista has been developed, as we have seen, features are being taken out.

Lets face it. Apple made an ambitious move to OSX, and for good reason. MS will have to do the same thing, that is write a new OS with new technology to be flexible for future changes.

Although I have not personally seen Vista in action, a few people I know have reported, at the present time, with this preview release, all Vista has accomplished is eye-candy features over XP.

Its interesting when you think of it like that. In essence Microsoft are trying to achieve in one 7-year step what Apple have achieved in 5 operating system releases over five years. With each major release, Apple averaged about 200 bugs that were corrected on the first 10.x.1 update. These were all small, obscure bugs that simply weren't picked up in testing, such as incorrect date or address formats for a particular country, or an inability to connect to a particular version of a server.

In essence, I think Microsoft have a very similar task in front of them with Vista. I wouldn't be surprised is Service Pack 1 corrects over a thousand minor bugs that weren't picked up in testing.

The attempt to move the OS over to .Net was similar to Apple needing to move Carbon applications over to Cocoa - a process that took years and was only finished completely when QuickTime 7 was released. Microsoft found the task too hard and scrapped that migration. It was also claimed that applications re-written in .Net were much slower and more resource hungry than their original versions.

Apple certainly did make the task of a fully searchable file system with metadata look easy, but it was something that had to be setup years in advance. 10.0 was all about treating the files in a way that *could* work with a metadata system, in 10.1 metadata support was added to the resource forks, 10.2 prepared support for XML and multiple-inheritance in the file-system itself, by 10.3 they had created the APIs for metadata including unix commands for handling metadata on files (look up some of the unix commands beginning with "md" and check their history if you want), just prior to 10.4's release they updated all their other apps to write metadata when saving files, and in 10.4 it finally emerged into the operating system as "Spotlight", an actual feature that could be used.

Microsoft has tried to achieve the same task in one step, and that is why both of these plans (.Net and WinFS) have proven to be too hard for them. In the same time, the management team in charge of Windows Vista has been replaced several times.

Well, they got the eye candy done. And in the end, thats all it'll take to sell millions of units of Windows Vista.