Microsoft Clips Longhorn 657
Gr8Apes writes "Microsoft is clipping Longhorn to get the already-delayed follow-up to Windows XP out the door by 2006. MS has decided to remove some of the most ambitious features. Blackcomb is the version to follow Longhorn, and is expected at the end of the decade. The full new file system feature has been moved to Blackcomb. Other notable parts of the story, in MS's efforts to get its DRM into play, a new version, Windows XP Premium will start shipping with new PCs, which will include a new version of the infamous Windows Media Player. This version will have the ability to shop at on-line stores like the one MS plans to launch later this year. It's their move to 'outflank Apple'."
Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:3, Insightful)
A platform that will let you browse, email, and generally enjoy the Internet without risk of viruses, trojans, worms or spam.
Patch installation (Score:2, Insightful)
Outflank Apple? (Score:0, Insightful)
In case you hadn't noticed, there ain't no flank. The war is over, and Apple's not even struggling to move their market share, and it's not moving. G5 sales are disaapointing, but the iPod is red hot. Oh yeah, MS's portable mini-tablet/video/music player is an "iPod clone/killer attempt."
Apple is not the yardstick by which companies like Microsoft measure themselves. Not even close.
Office politics (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the growing popularity of Linux in the server market, and over the next 2 years or so in the desktop market too, is a big part of that decision...
Simon.
Smart Move (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many 'features' of their Longwait that literally scare the you know what out of people. Features that have been around spooking before.
Now MS are hard put and have to remove (or delay) these features - and ironically, and sadly, this might actually help their acceptance.
The EU Will have a field day.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Outflank == Copy (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess they gotta keep innovating the old fashioned Microsoft way.
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:5, Insightful)
.....If only such a platform existed. I would buy it. Unfortunately, not even Linux, BSD, or even OS X is capable of this. There is always risk. The point is to minimize the risk, but you can never eliminate it.
less features, more security and stability = GOOD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:1, Insightful)
What remains? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, can anybody point out which features would be really worth an upgrade, because I can't see any. I don't care about Eyecandy, also there should be something else than eyecandy...
More Obvious Product Tying (Score:5, Insightful)
MS Office - Now with Riboflavin (Score:2, Insightful)
The realist in me says that this was because the new Office made extensive use of WinFS and that making it backwards compatible would just contrubite to (more) code bloat. The cynic in me says that they wanted to use some spiffy new feature in Office MMX as a lever to force users to upgrade their OS. Still, it does a heart good to think about the heads rolling at M$ over the leaking of these e-mails.
WinFS quite ambitious (Score:5, Insightful)
Paul Thurrott's supersite for Windows has this information about what Longhorn is all about [winsupersite.com] from May 2003. I highly recommend that readers check out what MSDN [microsoft.com] has to say about it.
It is a document and content management system with synchronization capabilities built right into the desktop. And it is going to hit yet another software segment right in the pocketbook: document management and storage.
With the advances in disk drive capacity and network speed, imagine being able to sync your company's entire set of PDF files/engineering drawings/(pr0n? ;-) ) to a laptop for use on site.
Re: Future of Samba (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:1, Insightful)
Doesnt Apple do the same thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesnt itunes come with every computer purchased with MacOSX? And doesnt itunes, by default, have ITMS (iTunes music store) capability?
So how is MS now including WMP any different than apple always including Itunes+ITMS? It seems like its just the
Re: Future of Samba (Score:3, Insightful)
nice, really nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't biased opinions and criticism only be present in readers comments ?
Re:Doesnt Apple do the same thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More Obvious Product Tying (Score:1, Insightful)
I use the Mac platform because it is the best fit for my needs. However, it would be hypocritical not to admit that Apple is in many ways much, much more anticompetitive than MS. They only get away with it because they can't be considered a monopoly in any sense.
Also, you must admit that the US and European governments have done things to try and alleviate MS's stranglehold on computing, but there is only so much governments can do to a company with that much power. The wheels of US justice move very slow by design, and MS can shrug off fines of hundreds of millions of dollars with a smile. MS is, in a way, a serious competitor to any world government. Hello Bladerunner and Warzone (this is
I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
Re:Can an MS expert answer some questions please? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the Registry has an access-control/authorization subsystem very similar to the file system.
2. If so, does this strike anyone else as a really bad idea from the view of modularity, scalability, and security?
It would be a bad idea, if it was the case (which it is not).
3. Will Longhorn keep the Windows Registry?
Absolutely. There are way too many third-party applications that leverage the registry to eliminate it. If MS were to eliminate the registry, they would have the same outcry that took place when they locked down the file system. See, prior to Windows 2000, users and applications could write anywhere in the file system. Lots of (badly-written) application would sprinkle their configuration files all over the place. This was clearly a problem with ISVs, so MS took action and enforced that (by default) users could only write into their user profile directory. Well, everyone complained that MS "broke" all their apps... but the real culprit was all these poorly-written apps that were dumping user configuration information into files like C:\WINDOWS\config.ini
Re:WinFS WILL be in the next version, just no netw (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see a compelling reason for the existance of this "upgrade" other than to feed the M$ coffers and lock in a steady revenue stream for them. The main features seem to be:
Actually maybe there is one new, useful feature. Or did Microsoft stop trying to catch up to the 15-20 year old idea of having multiple shared-library/DLL versions on the same system?
Re:Doesnt Apple do the same thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:XP SP2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not here (Score:3, Insightful)
James
Re:Outflank Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
B) No matter how paltry the Apple market share, it's still several times larger than the one Linux currently 'enjoys'.
C) MS are scared shitless of Linux. Apple are a contour of the same threat.
D) Apple - and NeXT - have often set design standards. MS are watching developments here all the time.
E) The weather is currently bad in the Seattle area. MS are being sued all over the place, and more and more companies and institutions and governments are fleeing the MS camp. MS have to play it careful or lose everything.
F) The iPod might sell, but Xserve has received a lot of R&D attention. MS don't have anything like this.
Conclusion? There is a flank. There is enough of a flank for MS to be worried, just as the Halloween Docs show they were worried six years ago, long before Herr Torvalds got to Mars.
MONOPOLY Re:Doesnt Apple do the same thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple does not have a monopoly status!
Microsoft has a monopoly status!
When you have a monopoly the rules change! You cannot use your monopoly status to "sell"/push your other products!
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you honestly think that if Linux wasn't the dominating system you wouldn't see as many problems as you do with MS? Come on...
You're last statement is correct though. Average Joe User isn't very tech savvy and propigates the problem. But like I said before, if Linux was easy enough to use and all that, the same problem would exist.
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So what you're saying is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Remember the old adage, "wait for Service Pack 1", when it comes to deploying Microsoft products. Given their horrible track record as of late it has now become "wait for Service Pack 2".
I recently had to do a fresh installation of Windows XP from a CD. This version of XP included Service Pack 1. I was absolutely stunned at the amount of time I had to spend patching the thing. There were literally 20+ patches, security roll-ups and service packs to applications (Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, etc.) that had to be downloaded from Windows Update. If I wouldn't have had a broadband connection I would have been online forever downloading it all.
That is just simply unacceptable. I won't be recommending that anyone who is stuck using Microsoft products upgrade to a new release until Service Pack 2 from this point forward. Microsoft needs to just chill out on the operating system releases and get everything patched and tightened down in the current OS. Once they've gotten their bases covered, then use that secure code base as the basis for the next operating system. The problem is that as soon as Microsoft releases an OS they are already working on the next one. Security holes propagate from one OS to the next generation OS which can cause even more unforeseen problems in features being worked on in the next generation OS.
Microsoft really needs to cease all work on Longhorn, tighten down XP, merge the security fixes back into the Longhorn code base, and then work from there. The problem is their stupid new licensesing scheme. Forcing users to buy into "Software Assurance" in order to get future upgrade at a discounted rate has really forced Microsoft's hand. If thy were to stop and shore up their current code base before releasing their next OS (thus delaying it further), all of the customers who have bought into their new licensing scheme are going to be very unhappy. If they continue their current way of doing things, they are going to continue alienating their customers with security problem after security problem. They are really damned if they do and damned if they don't hear, but it is their own fault They got themselves into this mess with sloppy software engineering practices and a stupid licensing scheme that forces their them into delivering upgrades within a certain timetable.
Linux is looking better and better by the minute.
Re:Doesnt Apple do the same thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seeing how they are both in the OS business makes this comment pretty hilarious. How can it be a monopoly if they have competition ? Apple probbaly has more of a monopoly position regarding running an OS on Apple hardware.
Sure, MS has market dominance, but you are always free to choose Linux.
Re:Doesnt Apple do the same thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mm, no, MS was found guilty by the US courts of illegally abusing its monopoly position to destroy its competition. It's also just been found guilty by the EU of exactly the same anti-competitive practices, and had its offices raided in Japan as part of an investigation into, yup, you guessed it, monopolistic practices.
Apple can bundle whatever software it likes with a Mac - at 3% market share, it's not going to have a monopoly on the desktop any time soon. Hell, you can even delete iTunes if you want, and it's gone forever. But if MS puts its own music portal in as part of WMP and it can't be removed, just like they claim IE is a vital part of the system (*coughhorseshitcough* - why make a frickin' internet browser a key part of your OS unless it was a sneaky way to lock in users and destroy the competition?), then they're abusing their monopoly position yet again, breaking the law and the terms of the DoJ settlement - and apparently not caring in the least, since the current administration couldn't give a rat's ass about monopolies as long as they get their cut.
Be nice if Nader won, if only to see the look on Bill's face!
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:4, Insightful)
WE ALL KNOW THAT NOTHING IS 100% SECURE.
it's not that linux etc. are 100% secure, it's that they are orders of magnitude more secure than a product that costs orders of magnitude more money.
do you guys have day jobs as lobbyists for anti-safety legislature or something? "well congressman, no car will be 100% safe so what's the point of wanting us to provide seatbelts/air bags/crumple zones/non-exploding gas tanks?
Vapourware (Score:1, Insightful)
This is vapourware in action, people. They promised all these features, businesses all over the world held off on switching to other platforms because "Windows will have these cool features soon", and now the next version still won't have the features.
Remember when Microsoft said that Windows 95 would be ultra-stable because it was 32-bit and had memory protection? Actually, come to think of it, wasn't the last three versions of Windows supposed to have something similar to WinFS?
Re:Don't worry...as usual, Slashdot misinforms (Score:2, Insightful)
The vitriol is due to the fact that Microsoft did their level best to bend every customer they could find over a barrel to sign them up for a maintenance plan that was going to cost said customers more money than buying Windows and Office over the counter if the upgrade cycle lasts more than 3 years. And, when this was pointed out to Microsoft, they promised (hand on heart!) that there'd be some sort of ROI for this maintenance plan.
The technology may be amazing. It may be able to make demons fly out of my nose. But they conned a LOT of CIO/CTO folks into paying them for delivering nothing while they spent 5 years building the thing.
How they did this without keeping a straight face is beyond me.
What a shame (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft's filesystem work sounded like it was going to finally be the first really good thing to come out of the company in decades. I know, I know, some other OSes have actually already been there, and there was no reason to believe Microsoft would get the idea "right" anyway, and that it wasn't just a strategy to block interoperability.
Those things don't matter, though. Longhorn's filesystem was going to popularize filesystem innovation, which means the Linux dudes would have to copy them in order to keep from feeling inadequate. Then desktop UIs would start to appear that take advantage of new filesystem capabilities. The upshot was that there was a hope, that I might finally get a computer that is fundamentally better than what was around in the 1980s.
Now the revolution has been postponed. Oh well.
Re:WTF?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
It is, and as you've noted, it's a glaringly obvious one at that. Aside from this, we see an article above where the text mentions "increased competition" to OpenGL from D3D. Another abuse of monopoly power. The OGL implementations I've seen so far way out-perform D3D. The problem is that D3D ships with 90+ per cent of the new desktop machines out there, so it can still be a piece of trash and still dominate the market.
Perhaps some folks just don't get it. Requiring Microsoft to sell Media Player separately isn't the same as preventing them from offering the feature to the public. The DOJ can take action without actually hurting Microsoft's shareholders. Hey, if Media Player could actually stand on its own legs against the competition, MS would actually stand to make more by selling it as a separate component.
Re:What remains? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably I'm "obviously" not getting it, so maybe you can explain what features exactly will be different from KDE today and why they will make life easier.
MS Products NOT secure. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you simply open a mail right now - a maliciously created one - you can have code run as your user. (http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA04-099A.
No AV signature.
No patch available.
No need to click on an attachment.
Firewalls don't block it.
No need to download it with p2p.
Windows is NOT secure - the design choices they made remove the seperation between data and functional code, removes the seperation between priveldged user and non-priv, and as a result, its just a matter of WHEN the vulnerabilities are found.
You listed ways to mitigate the insecurity - doesnt change the fact that it IS insecure.
Office wasn't going to work on other versions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows leaders are meeting through the middle of April to make the hard decisions about which specific features to cut from the operating system."
Only Microsoft would call that a feature.
Re:Wait just a freakin' second. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WinFS WILL be in the next version, just no netw (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone with good sound cards and a second computer can use it to record what they play back on their first, which after a single analog step gives them a digital copy with better quality than most of the (128kbps) MP3s on the net. There is no technological way to prevent this: if it can be heard or seen, it can be recorded digitally, and once one person records it in an unencrypted digital format it's just as easy to spread around as if it had never been in an encumbered format at all.
If your business model really requires impenetrable DRM to be viable, you probably ought to find a new one before spending too much money on snake oil.
Over all bad news for microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I *do* honestly think that. Consider the case of the web server: Apache has a couple more servers than IIS, yet my access logs show about 30 attempts a day to propogate IIS worms. Not Apache worms: IIS worms. This despite Apache's popularity.
The problem is only partly MS-Windows' popularity. The heart of the problem is that, well, MS-Windows sucks, security-wise.
Microsoft's main problem is their insistence on making everything brain-dead easy, without really making things easy. Double-click on an attachment, and it will blindly run whatever code is attached! Yeah, that's just fuckin' brilliant. Even better: base file type on a three-letter extension, then *hide that extension from the user!* Yeah. Even *more* fuckin' brilliant.
Yes, Linux will eventually become easier to use, so users can install their own software packages without root privs, etc. But so far, the track record indicates that the Linux distribution producers will avoid the same stupid mistakes Microsoft enthusiastically embraces in the basic design.
Maybe not. But so far, it looks promising.
Uh (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovating the old-fashioned Linux way--ripping things off then criticizing the company that came up with the ideas.
Springboard vs. (ZoneLabs & Symantec & McA (Score:2, Insightful)
More AntiTrust suits around the corner.
This is a part of every product cycle (Score:4, Insightful)
The most important feature of every product is its shipping. You can have a perfect OS with all the features everyone wants, but if you haven't shipped it nobody gives a crap (and money either). You can cut back in two ways - on quality (which simply doesn't work for big projects because problems start stepping on each other's toes) and on features (which is what I believe is happening).
Re:Microsoft needs exactly ONE new product (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, Microsoft could take a look at other OSes to see how they regularly improve themselves. Linux and OS X have both had major releases in the last year that significantly improved overall performance on both new and (at least in OS X) older machines. Linux has improved its thread model and scheduler. OS X has decreased its memory footprint, used Open GL to offload UI processing, and improved the threading behind the Finder. Both OSes have improved their ability to interact with other OSes. Apple has also added innovations like Expose and Rendezvous.
Re:WinFS WILL be in the next version, just no netw (Score:3, Insightful)
One episode of South Park had the town trying to free a serial baby murderer. The judge asked "tell me one positive thing about killing babies." One of the kids answered "well, its easy."
Well yeah it probably is, physically, pretty easy. Babies are typically much smaller, weaker and more fragile than most adults. But that doesn't mean that everyone is going to go around killing babies. In fact almost no one does. Why not? Because its wrong. True its illegal, but even if it weren't people still wouldn't do it because its pretty cut-and-dry WRONG.
Likewise everyone has the capability to easily "steal" (as they like to say) music, whether or not there is DRM. Every DRM mechanism devised so far has been so trivially defeated that the industry looks foolish for trying. Yet the music industry thrives. Millions of people trade music on file sharing networks, but even no-talent hacks like Britney Spears and William Hung still sell massive quantities of CDs.
Its absurd. Go after the real "pirates" (whoever they are) using the existing and more than sufficient legal means. Price your products competitively so people can afford to buy them from you. But be realistic about it. Not everyone can afford to buy every CD at $15-a-pop. Friends share things. They always have, and they always will. Music and movies bring people together.
Build that into your business model and embrace it. Treat your customers right and your business will be viable way beyond the digital age.