Vista Followup Already in the Works

DesertBlade passed us an InfoWorld article, which has the news that Microsoft is already hard at work on the next version of Windows ... and we may see it as early as 2009. Possibly codenamed Vienna, the next Windows iteration will be coming a brief two and a half years after Vista's launch. This is the same timeframe Microsoft claims it would have utilized for Vista, had they not put Longhorn 'on the back burner' to deal with security issues in XP. Corporate Vice President of Development Ben Fathi is already discussing features for the next OS: "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Why announce now?

[GBC]

I have used Windows as my main OS for around 13 or 14 years, ever since boxing up my old Amiga (*sniff*). I am now pretty happy with XP, like I imagine most Windows customers are. I really like the look of Office 2007 and will probably end up buying it, but I don't need to upgrade to Vista to use it.

I just don't understand why they are announcing this new version so soon after the release of Vista. The reviews I have been reading about Vista already make me think twice about wanting to upgrade; now that I know they are bringing in another OS in a few years' time what is the incentive for a typical MS customer like me to upgrade? Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.

For those that do want to upgrade there is already a built-in lag before doing so anyway (at least for the sensible ones), either because they need to buy new hardware or because they will not install a new OS without some of the early bugs being ironed out and a service pack being released.

If we assume that MS actually delivers this new OS on time (which is a big if) there is not that long a wait between the time after lag for people to upgrade to Vista and the time this is released. Won't this reduce uptake on Vista? After all, if we are already happy with XP, why not wait?

Anyone already using Vista care to comment?

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Re:already hard at work eh?

[Stevecrox]

I'm not so sure of that, vista adoption has been faster than Windows 2000 adoption in american business ( http://news.com.com/Report+Vistas+business+sales+s tronger+than+expected/2100-1016_3-6149468.html [com.com] ) to be honest thats going to drive sales. Most people I know like things to be the same, My pa uses outlook 2002 in work and refuses to upgrade to 2003, I can name several other family/friends who use a set OS/Office apps in work and so use the exact same ones at home (sometimes newer if the UI isn't much different.)

Vista's adoption rate has surprised me, only two other tech savy people I know have got it and yet the store in which I work is filled with new upgraders, a online group I'm part of has formed a vista discussion group and even a few of my university mates have also made the plunge. To be honest its worrying, I upgraded because I found one or two features useful and got too used to ribbons (from running the beta of Office) many people have upgraded because the people on the news have been going on about how wonderfuull Vista is.

I was doubtful that Microsoft would get 100 million copies of Vista out the door by the end of the year, but am not so sure now. BTW does anyone have and idea of the number of activations of Vista so far?

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Something that sells.

The store I work in is a fairly large one, and has only one competitor within the town and its outlying neighbours. Since Vista launched on the 30th, we've sold all of two copies. A lot of the people that are coming in to look at new PC's or Laptops are deliberately avoiding the ones pre-loaded with vista because of all the horror stories they've heard, and of the two copies of Vista that we've sold, one has come back as unusable (it was the upgrade version of home premium. The owners laptop was running XP Pro. The Home premium upgrade refuses to install over an XP pro installation, and the user doesn't want to upgrade to the business version, and ultimate was delayed, therefore not an immediate option. Why the hell are microsoft turning away sales like that?), and the other user is considering returning it as he can't even get on the net with it, despite have drivers for all of his hardware.

As far as launches go, this one has been pretty pathetic. So far, it seems to have cost us more than it's actually earned.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

That would be nice... One that doesn't require manual defragmenting the hard drive (everybody else can do it...) But they've been working on a new file system for a few years now and keep pushing it back, so it's kind of going the way of Duke Nukem' Forever...

The new interface/interaction paradigm might be cool, but that should come out of Microsoft Research so they can do proper user experience testing (and not just test like 13 MS employees like they did with the ribbon (this was mentioned on the Office development blog)... The ribbon looks cool, but I find myself digging around for items that I used to just have a small toolbox pop up for or were just on the main toolbar--plus there doesn't appear to be a way to reorganize the ribbon...) The regular MS people just don't have the training/expertise to do much user experience work--I've talked to employees about it at career fairs and such (I'm an HCI major) and most of them don't even know what user experience/usability work really is... And for a company that large and ubiquitous, that's just sad...

Of course it's in the works!

[phillymjs]

They've probably been fleshing out the feature list for Vista's successor since the first day a developer copy of OS X 10.5 reached the grubby mitts of a Microsoft employee. Don't expect the real work to start until spring, though, when it's released with its 'top secret' features.

Go ahead and mod me down, bitches, but after this tasty tidbit [itnews.com.au] you know I'm probably right. And they did the same thing to Go Corp, BTW.

~Philly

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I don't think so. It's just an immensely bureaucratic, huge organization by now.

The *system* prevents all that manpower from delivering great results; being chained they just can't.

Pretty much like Socialism worked out for the Soviets.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[JohnFluxx]

I've never understood why basic apps like the calculator and the character selector etc apps don't receive any love.

They seem like great places were a couple of developers could just be given the job to fix them up. Yet they never seem to improve.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

So WinFS is finally being released? That was the one I was referring to that's been in development (and delayed) for years now. I've heard mixed thoughts about whether or not it will be better or worse, but we won't know until it's out...

The other thing that might be useful (eventually) is a file system designed to optimize the use of flash drives (not really all that useful with 30 GB flash drives costing a few hundred, but this will likely be very useful in about 2-5 years after the prices have dropped considerably/larger capacity flash drives are available).

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[tomhudson]

10 reasons

1. Don't forget that the vast majority of people working for Microsoft don't code.

2. Also, that their corporate culture has been known to be sucky for almost 2 decades (hint: nobody likes being shuted at).

3. And that you can make as much or more money elsewhere (Microsoft stock options are no longer a real incentive)

4. You can enjoy more autonomy at almost any other company

5. People want to have a life outside of work (follow-up to #2)

6. Its more fun being a larger part of a small project than a faceless cog in a large project (follow-up to #4)

7. A lot of the interesting stuff just isn't being done by Microsoft

8. Clueless VPs spouting bullshit:

   Corporate Vice President of Development Ben Fathi is already discussing features for the next OS: "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

   A perfect example of someone who should be kept locked away from the media until they have something concrete to say.

9. Windows and Microsoft aren't seen as being cool any more, and haven't been for a decade.

10. Who wants to be associated with crap products that are responsible for most of the zombies/worms/viruses?

I mean, really ... Ben Fathi [microsoft.com] is supposed to be the guy overseeing everything, and he says "I don't know what it is" about what's next, and this is news????

Ben Fathi serves as corporate vice president of development for the Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD) at Microsoft Corp. He oversees the development of core components of Microsoft Windows, including the kernel, and technologies associated with security, networking, virtualization, setup and deployment.

Fathi previously served as corporate vice president of the Security Technology Unit (STU), where he was responsible for delivery of all core security technologies, including the authentication, authorization and audit capabilities (AAA) of Microsoft products; Windows Rights Management Services (RMS); BitLocker drive encryption; and anti-virus, anti-spyware and network security protocols. Fathi also managed the Security Engineering and Communications team, the Security Response Center and the Security Outreach team, all of which focus on helping protect customers from online security threats.

So, he says he doesn't know what the next big thing in Windows is going to be ... here's a suggestion - new graphics and artwork to make it look more like OSX, a new startup sound that cost a billion instead of a few measly million to "enhance the user experience some more", a Duke Nukem Forever interactive screen-saver, and ribbons with dropdowns with flyouts with popups with menus, so that the user has at least 10 different ways to get to any particular option. And not one, not 2, but FOUR new programming languages - D minus (to replace C sharp), DOT NOT (a .net replacement that is ultra secure by refusing to do ANYTHING), J-Script/XML+J-Script/CSS for those who want to continue to build non-standard web sites, as well as Internet Explorer 9 - will only allow you to visit microsoft-signed sites, and a revamped cmd.exe and windows kernel that will only allow access to 640k of ram per process so that no application can ever be a resource hog. This last spec will be known as "Microsoft Dynacode Operating System 1", or MS-DOS 1.0. Plans call for an optional text interface sometime by 2012, and the removal of mouse support by 2015, because they can sell ms keyboards for more than mice.

Oh, and their engineering slogan will be "Windows ain't done until Wine won't run."

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

I do like the ribbon interface to a degree, I just think it should have gone through MS Research where they could have done more extensive testing and perhaps delayed the ribbon until the next version--right now you not only have the learning curve for the ribbons but the inconsistency of interface throughout the Office suite (Publisher and Visio use the old interface) plus the fact that XP and Vista are both entrenched in the old interface. If you're going to push a new paradigm then you should do so consistently... Plus, most Office users are the already entrenched users...

Re:Subject

[nomadic]

OS X is NeXTSTEP 5, and has been in development since the mid-late-80s.

Well as an operating system as whole, a lot of Linux is GNU and XFree86, and has been in development just as long. And the scale of NeXTSTEP development is dwarfed by Linux development. If you were to compute the number of man-hours that went into developing NeXTSTEP and OS X and let's even throw in the Mach kernel, I'm sure it would be far, far less than that of Linux, and the end result is a comparable OS that surpasses Linux on several fronts.

I first used Linux in 1993; it's a much fuller experience now, but honestly after 14 years of development I would expect there to be a much more massive change. Windows 3.1-Windows XP is a much bigger jump. The fact that Linux still surpasses Windows is more of a result of a) how bad Windows started out, and b) Microsoft's poor management of the development process. But just because MS mismanages a closed, proprietary development process, doesn't mean that such a process is fundamentally worse than an open source process.

I think that one of the reasons a lot of Linux zealots come down so hard on OS X is it's a very obnoxiously obvious example of a mostly non-open source project being very successful.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[justthinkit]

When you have a totally mature product/market (in this case, operating systems) it is essential that you degrade parts of your product with every new release. Think of it as planned obsolescence for things that never break down.

The first time I saw Microsoft doing this clearly was the media player in Windows 9x. The previous MP was less capable but it worked with the frickin' keyboard. The new one _at first_ would not respond to the keyboard but once you clicked on a menu it would. This took away some automation potential in a nearly invisible way.

The second obviously crippled application is MS Paint. It is crippled in that it never improves. Today's MS Paint is so ridiculously incapable that it can't (1) Ctrl+F display the full image if it is larger than your desktop -- you can scroll it but nothing more, (2) select an image portion that is larger than the Paint window (or at least I haven't found the magic pixie keystrokes), (3) simply scale an image.

Windows ME, of course, had to be slower than Win2000. Even though it wasn't. So, just introduce some useless piece of crapola indexing thing that never stops and voila.

Vista (and the equally dreadful MP v11 for XP) is just the latest careful crippling of an already feature complete product so that, several versions down the road, they can fix these cripplings and introduce new ones at that time.

Taking The Wind Out Of Apple's Sails?

[GaryPatterson]

I suspect that Microsoft are announcing shiny new software for some future date is that they're worried about Leopard.

Reviewers are already pitting Vista against OS X 10.4 and finding them neck-and-neck, with Vista coming out ahead on some features and OS X coming out ahead on others.

A lot of people are expecting the upcoming OS X 10.5 to blow Vista's features out of the water. Microsoft don't want Vista to look like a lame (but profitable) duck for a few years, so they're going to pump up the next big thing. To paraphrase their past vapourware strategies - "don't buy from them, stay with us and you'll get all their features anyway, soon, soon..."

"We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release."

Is that just a complete lie, a total re-writing of history? I've never heard anything other than the story of years of painful work going nowhere, resetting to Win2K3, jettisoning features and finally making progress. I've never heard this bit about slacking off for a couple of years, not really trying and then picking things back up later on.

So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna?

According to Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers."

"It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

This comment reveals that Vienna is truly vapourware - they've not even reached the whiteboard to block out the big features.

How can Microsoft let executives like this go out and give an interview with no spiel? A quick elevator speech is all that's required. Just something about "new filesystem database to revolutionise files" or "rich media" or even "exceedingly wealthy media born with a silver spoon." Anything is better than this sort of "well, gee, I dunno, didn't think you'd ask me that, hmm... nope, nothing's come to mind."