Microsoft: Windows 7 not a lock for '09
LAS VEGAS--It's not clear whether Microsoft is just trying to be overly cautious, but top Windows executive Bill Veghte said the company is telling PC makers that Windows 7 might or might not be ready in time for this year's holiday season.
"I'm telling them that it could go either way," Veghte told CNET News in an interview Wednesday. "We will ship it when the quality is right, and earlier is always better, but not at the cost of ecosystem support and not at the cost of quality.
Veghte also said that the economy is factoring into his marketing plans for Windows, which is in the middle of an advertising push initially estimated at several hundred million dollars over several years.
"Given the economic situation, as shareholders would expect us to tighten our belt, but with the things that are most important, and customers would expect us to do that while continuing to innovate," he said. "The expectation is that the dollar we spend on advertising today will go further than it did in July...and the Windows business is pretty core to Microsoft, it's core to the Microsoft brand, so we will continue to invest in support of Windows."
Asked whether he thought the same applied to the unit's staffing level, he said Windows is core to the success of the company," but added that he's "certainly looking at how we can be more efficient, and given the mission in our advertising spending that we just talked about, efficient in where we apply our headcount and efficient, but not at the risk of jeopardizing the opportunity that we have."
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina.
however, the push to beta was wasted then.
#1 Fix legacy software and driver issues. People want to run old software and old hardware on the new systems. This is because a lot of important software has yet to be converted to Vista and only works with XP. Also they need special hardware that lacks Vista drivers as well.
#2 Fix the security model of Windows 7.0 to be more like Unix and make it hard for a virus to infect it.
#3 Get rid of the blue screen of death, not by changing its color but by making it go away. Error trap your OS code and do error recovery functions to put the user right back before the BSOD happened so they can save their data and then reboot the system.
#4 Offer Windows XP as a downgrade until #1 to #3 gets fixed. People don't really need any more than XP offers and some people want a system that works, not one that works sometimes and other times does not work.
#5 Hire Linux Torvalds and other Linux programmers to tweak Windows 7.0 kernel to be more Linux-like and load things via modules so that it saves memory and only loads what the system needs at the time.
#1 legacy software issues. .. I have had a nightmare experience trying to get Vista to work with legacy software. Not ancient dos stuff... programs like Autocad lite 2007. This is a very expensive program, more than the laptop it was installed on making Vista backwards compatible has to be job #1. At least get XP programs to run.
#2 Security model. Unix security model is very mature, thats why the Mac went that route. There is alot of free code out there that they could use as examples.
#3 BSOD. I rarely get a BSOD anymore on my XP machine but error trapping seems like a no brainer. Unfortunately most BSOD is related to faulty hardware.
#4 Keep offering WinXP. If they did that they wouldn't sell a copy of Vista and they know it. almost everyone I know who has bought Vista is upset with it... I even talked to a lady who left doing tech support for Vista because she was getting Death threats over it.
#5 Loadable Modules. Loadable modules on Linux works great and is rock solid. Even when things crash on my linux system it just keeps on ticking. Loadable modules also make Linux fly compared to windows...
I plan to completely skip Vista, Ive had better luck with WinME. I have a wait and see attitude with Win7. If it isn't released soon I plan to buy a Mac for my next laptop. Way to go Microsoft, you are driving away you customers to the competition... I just wish I could buy a WinXP laptop :/
Fix legacy software and driver issues.
The reason there are these issues with compatibility are because bad ways of doing things were changed in Windows Vista. Just like bad things were changed in Windows 2000 and XP and made Windows 98 apps and drivers incompatible. These legacy apps and drivers rely on the bad way of doing things. If they're not updated to be compliant with new technology themselves then they are discontinuing themselves as viable. Also, there is such a thing as virtualization.
Change Windows 7's security to a Unix model.
It is not harder for viruses to infect a unix system versus a Vista or 7 system. Most of the focus for infection and getting some kind of return on the infection is Windows because almost 90% of computers run Windows. If Unix were running on over a billion systems instead of 0.85% then it's security would be highly scrutinized. There will always be viruses because there will always be holes. Some people who write viruses and search for exploitations are very smart and one will always find the way through any type of security. Also, what you're talking about is inconceivable. It would take a re-write of 60% of Windows code and years with no greater benefit. It would be like taking a new Toyota into the shop, refitting it, and having a new Honda engine installed, except you're talking about several million lines of code.
Get rid of the bsod.
It would be nice if Linux, OS X, or Windows could do that. So far within the last month I've seen the equivalent on all three. The good news is that it is very rare on XP or Vista or the few good Linux Distros, OS X is a different story.
Offer XP...
Vista is very, very solid, and a great OS. If you believe the bad hype without really trying it out you're a sheep. SUSe is a great Linux OS also, not a fan of Macs though. Windows is not the only great OS or only way to go, but you can't say it's not any good when it clearly is.
Your last suggestion sums it all up as truly ignorant. Even if they wanted to mimic the Linux kernel exactly they wouldn't need or want to hire Torvalds. The source is open, remember? There are a slew of articles on two MS projects, MinWin and Midori designed to do something like that in a more complex way. Also, the Linux kernel may use less memory than the Windows kernel, but other than Distros like DSL, system requirements for SUSe and other Distros aren't too light. It's not so much about the kernel, but what you put on top of it.
While people like you were using Windows ME, the technologically savvy were running Windows 2000. Windows Vista is a lot more like Windows 2000 than Windows ME. ME was just a minor upgrade of the already horrible Windows 98. Windows 2000 was a major rewrite of over 50% of the code and an upgrade of the OS away from DOS to the fully 32bit NT kernel. It broke a lot of compatibility too, but that had been fixed long before the time Windows XP came out. XP wasn't met with much good to say about it either. It's funny to see everyone clinging to it now because 'it still works for me'.
Indeed. That said, if a customer's favorite apps (no matter how poorly coded) do not run on Windows any longer, then what reason does said customer have for continuing to use Windows, instead of (insert another OS here)? The biggest reason folks have for sticking with Windows (if they don't buy a Mac or installed Ubuntu Linux) is the app collections they have - destroy that, and you remove the last thing holding folks in. Even MSFT has to recognize that.
"It is not harder for viruses to infect a unix system versus a Vista or 7 system. "
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. The *nix environment is specifically untrusting - the worst a user can do is wipe out their home directory. Look at it this way: The majority of web servers use Apache on Linux... yet the last Linux virus that affected more than a small number of machines (literally, with the line at ~100 or so) came out in 2001. There has never been a virus for OSX that has made it into the wild (at least nothing that didn't require a user to seek out a specific URL, download a package, and install it with explicit admin/root permissions...which no OS can save you from).
"Vista is very, very solid, and a great OS."
...if you double the hardware (esp. RAM), be very specific about what hardware you have/use, and strip half of Vista's features out? Sure. OTOH, it still has bugs (e.g. copying files tends to be a LOT slower...)
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Now - loadable modules? That's pretty much what drivers are and do. OTOH, what would be nice (and I mean damned nice) would be the ability to strip unused features out of the Windows environment entirely. In Linux (and in OSX to some extent via transplanting Darwin kernels), I can strip out all the features I have no need or use for - to the extent that I can turn a generic install into one very fast and efficient one. I can also switch out the GUI entirely in Linux - removing bigger ones for smaller, faster, and lighter ones. In Windows, you get the whole package whether you want it or not.
The issue with windows is that many developers are lazy and code undocumented drivers and routes for THEIR variant of the system only then are amazed when real-world causes problems - even HP printers have huge problems with this! this is evident even with webmasters who refuse to let sites run unless you are using IE7 and expose your whole registry open to their meddling due to unnecessary reliance on ActiveX (the devil of the internet)
the issue with Vista is that it is very good at what it does its just its not efficient in doing it taking huge processor and memory resources for a simple task and many machines simply cant run vista despite what Microsoft told us. in fact winows has been designed by comittee since its original launch never once has someone really sat down to define a unified, stable and secure and efficient structure for tis development - unlike almost every other OS!!
part of the reason UNIX based systems are more secure is the overall design of the operating system following the OSI model of layers of operability protecting those below while windows is still more a hotch potch of code bolted together to do a job more like a sponge to the tight onion of Unix and as you are all aware its a lot easier to get water (or illicit hooks or viruses) into a sponge (windows) than it is an onion (unix).
And if you really are interested in my OS of choice it has to be SPARC or VMS....
Windows is the only OS I've seen that happily dies all by itself during regular use.
Windows cannot enjoy the benefits which Apple has achieved. While it would be nice to dream of Windows as revitalizing itself under re-written code, I don't see this happening. First of all, the uproar over completely re-writing Windows from developers and corporations (of course, ignoring the home users) would be deafening in and of itself. There would be massive revolts and migrations to other OS's -- if you have to rewrite your programs, why not switch to an OS that has proven itself. If this occurred, Microsoft would go down as leading the largest corporate blunder in history.
That being said, Microsoft will need to probably rewrite chunks of code. If it does not, you will see hardware requirements skyrocket away from the typical user's price range, which defeats a large portion of the Windows market. I do believe that Microsoft will need to make concessions, but not have to rewrite Windows completely. They should be able to sustain a large portion of the OS market for quite some time if they complete this -- even if Apple continues to gain market share, there is more than enough market out there for both companies to continue to make gobs of cash.
The trick is - can they actually pull it off without a complete re-write?
(funny trivia - Windows has its heritage in DOS, which in turn has its heritage as a CP/M rewrite. CP/M in turn is an offshoot of the 1970's era UNIX System 4, I believe).
C/PM is not an offshoot Unix. It is a firmware BIOS based OS for the Zilog Z80. C/PM80 was a port of C/PM from the Zilog Z80 to the then new Intel 8085. MSDOS was originally based on the C/PM80 BIOS, with its own BDOS. Later, they rewrote the BIOS to be native 8086/8088. That was the first real MSDOS.
There was also a four user version of C/PM called M/PM that used banked switched RAM to support four terminals.
The whole thing was written in assembly language, and I wrote several console utilities for M/PM back in the day.
Also, I have seen Mac OS X crash. I have in my hands a great test tool. Low level format a compact FLASH card on NetBSD. Then plug that compact FLASH card into a Mac. Make sure you don't have any important files open, because it immediately bricks the machine. It can only be recovered by cycling the power. It turns out that Apple slightly modified the BSD file system. It is close enough that it thinks it can do something with the drive, but different enough that it then goes insane. Note, no files are installed on the FS. It is just low level formatted. Disklabel followed by newfs.
My XP machine has not frozen in ages. Not since I removed an old SCSI based Canon flat bed scanner and stopped using the 'lite' version of Photoshop that came with it.
I was recently helping a friend with her Linksys wireless G router and spent a day on Vista and found it to be responsive and very usable on a mid grade Compaq. (the old Linksys G gave me fits. She needs a new router...)
My OpenSUSE 11.1 install on my T40 laptop works great. It has not bricked yet, even when used for lots of FLASH based games by my kids.
I use a combination of XP/RH/SUSE/NetBSD at work, so my experience is well rounded. I also used SysV.2/SysV.4/HPUX/SunOS/Solaris/NT4 in prior work, as well as developing embedded apps for QNX vxWorks uC/OS eCOS pSOS ROS and AMOS.
No OS is perfect. Remember the Morris Worm? I do.
Use what you like. I like Linux. I am forced to use Windows because some of the tools I use reside there and only there. No, not just office apps. Embedded uP tools. But I fall back to Linux whenever possible.
This last december (2008) Windows was hit with a IE Zero day bug, and when it came down to it, only one version had a copy of IE which prevented the code from actually entering the machine VISTA! Yes ladies and gentlemen while vista broke the camel's back on a lot of old ass software it was needed, seriously windows vista still has apps from the Windows 3.1 days! come on its time to start cleaning up the collective garage that windows has become and get rid of all this old crap.
In case you guys forgot XP before sp2 arrived had more holes than swiss cheese, anyone remember IE 6? So while Vista needs more ram... who cares RAM is now dirt cheap!
PS: Windows Vista runs fine on my single core laptop
Pentium M 1.7GHZ
2GB Of RAM
40GB Drive
ATI Mobility radeon x300
Only features i turned off:
Windows sidebar.
...too bad it didn't even slow down a whole plethora of other 0-day exploits... ;)
Businesses hate Vista because it costs them money for basically nothing. When Vista systems are added, it can cost a bundle to get all the applications and drivers working right while an XP machine can be put into ser vice for a minimal cost. Now why the heck would Microsoft force users to use a product they don't want? That kind of sums up the current state of affairs. I doubt anything will change with Windows 7... call me a pessimist if you like.
I'm still using XP because certain applications still are not supported under Vista. I'm not complaining though. My XP install works fine and does everything I need it to do. Why stress myself by adding a more bloated system while wondering if my current hardware will be able to run it decently?
I got off the train up upgrading the OS simply for the sake of upgrading. XP has been perfectly fine for me. I don't get BSOD's, my corporate apps work fine, and performance is snappy.
And to add insult to injury, I'm doing all this on my MacBook Air running XP using VMware Fusion. So when XP does take a dump (very, very rare), it does not take my machine with it.
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by D3vildog699
January 11, 2009 6:04 AM PST
- Either way, from the reviews im anxious to try it. Haven't had a chance to get to the beta yet, but i plan to. If the end product is pretty horrid i'll stick with my vista machine and not worry bout it.
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