On Thu, November 30, 2006 1:19 am, Paul M Foster wrote:
>
> Another major problem MS has is that when they deliver a broken product,
> a billion people use it. Many of those people write software which
> works around the bugs. When MS comes out with the new version, in many
> cases they can't fix the bugs because everyone now relies on software
> that programs around the bugs. Vista, as originally designed, would have
> been a radical departure. But notice how many new innovations have been
> stripped out of it. My guess is not that they couldn't technically
> deliver those things, even if late. I think they couldn't deliver those
> things without breaking every piece of software that runs over Windows.
<snip>
That's a very valid point, IMHO. What Microsoft was trying to do with
Vista was extremely ambitious - new relational database filesystem, new
GUI, new kernel, etc... The development is actually an interesting
read[1]. First, they started with the XP codebase and after a few years
of just a mess of various code and no real direction, the whole project
was scrapped and started again with the Win 2003 codebase. Even with an
army of programmers, it's going to be hard to recover from that. Many of
those ambitious features were dropped and what you see is a more moderated
product.
I've been saying for years now that I could definitely see Microsoft
scrapping all of their old Windows code for a BSD-based operating system
with their own GUI slapped on it, a la Mac OS. That would immediately
silence a host of critics, solve a lot of security problems and allow them
to focus on their Office cash cow. Can you imagine how Office would
dominate the business world if it were truly cross-platform?
The average end-user doesn't care about the operating system. They care
about their applications, being secure and as virus-free as possible. Oh
yeah, and games.
v/r,
Rich Morgan
OpenAddict.com
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