Windows 7 in the Next Year? 385
Microsoft's efforts to get businesses to adopt Vista may come to a screeching halt now that Bill Gates has announced "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version", referring to Windows 7, the next expected version of the company's flagship desktop operating system.With a new version available soon, many organizations may decide to wait and see if they can avoid the pain of a Vista rollout altogether.
But what is the alternative until then? (Score:2, Interesting)
At my last customer job, XP was still the set OS, with no Vista supported or even allowed. For the notebooks they buyed in Germany, the supplier still offered XP, but we had inquiries from South America, where the only OS available was Vista. I wonder what they will do, if the only notebooks available will no longer work with XP due to new hardware and no XP-drivers.
Re:Ground up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ground up (Score:3, Interesting)
Should we stay or should we go now (to Vista)? (Score:5, Interesting)
The short story - we certainly don't want 1/3rd XP, 1/3rd Vista, and 1/3rd Win7, and that's what it is looking like when we don our future-hats.
So we decided this week that we'll stay with XP for as long as we can, using the principle that it is less expensive to support XP today, and we have no idea where Vista and Win7 will be. And we'll still have plenty of time to upgrade across the board if MS sticks with their current XP sunset plan.
We'll only start deploying Vista when Microsoft gives us clarity on the Win7 timeline, or when we conclude that Vista support will be less expensive than XP to support, or when we feel that we need to start converting to meet Microsoft's XP retirement plans.
Re:Nah, not really (Score:5, Interesting)
If there was a company that made a "professional, commercial" Linux-type OS that could run all Windows programs natively, I'd not only buy 5 copies, but stock in the company.
Hell, I'd tattoo their logo on my neck.
Re:I find that hard to believe (Score:4, Interesting)
Too little, too late (Score:2, Interesting)
Our company (50 Mill turnover a year) used to be completely Microsoft all the way, including eOpen Office licenses etc and no Linux servers. Now we have rolled out a lot of linux backroom machines. Not because of cost, just because MS is becoming harder and harder to work with. Add to that the fact that i've become a very big supporter of OSS and the ethics of OSS.
Our next decision is not "do we upgrade to Vista +1" but "Which business linux distro best suits our requirements.
Windows Vista, the new ME (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully they had a lot of reusable concepts and code that they can leverage. Otherwise, that's an awful waste of code and effort.
Microsoft: "The whole world is our beta tester." (Score:4, Interesting)
Quoting the parent comment: "Next year? they haven't even started beta yet have they?"
You are forgetting what appears to be a core Microsoft philosophy: "The whole world is our beta tester."
The problem with Vista is that buyers are becoming technically knowledgeable enough that they don't want to be beta testers of a very unfinished product that requires them to buy more powerful hardware. Remember that Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released only 3 years ago. Before that was 3 years during which every Windows XP customer was a beta tester of a very unfinished product that didn't even handle USB very well.
Sometimes it seems to me that Microsoft is not primarily a software company that is abusive, but an abuse company that sells software as a method of delivering abuse.
Remember that a "new version" can be as little as moving the menus around and causing everyone a lot of annoyance, as Microsoft did with IE 7. There should be a song, "50 ways to abuse the customer."
The end comes soon, and Microsoft is trying to delay the end. With XP, most users have all the operating system they want. Except for the built-in susceptibility to malware, Windows XP is acceptable. Customers just want to do their work. They don't sit around all day dreaming about new features of an OS.
For most of Microsoft's customers, there is no need for change, especially when they realize that the Chief of Grief, software's Dr. Death, will quickly declare the death of that version, too, as it tried to do with Windows XP.
Another problem at Microsoft is apparently that the good people have left, and the people who remain are not knowledgeable enough to do the work. Microsoft's employees know the end is near, and the creative programmers have already left. Only those who just want a job remain.
Re:Nah, not really (Score:3, Interesting)
Or, it'll be some basic HAL that runs a functional .NET CLR, and version 4.0 of the .NET framework will be the new Windows API. The old binaries will break, but can run hypervisor-style in an older version of the OS, XP-like but with DirectX 10.2. Or something.
I know they love the CLR. And for good reason, with the framework and some of the newer goodies in there, it's pretty darned swell.
Then they will just keep adding functionality and features there, and stay one step ahead of the Mono folks and continue to extract ca$h fromt he marketplace. For "speed-sensitive apps" they'll ask people to port their c++ apps to c++ managed, gotta tie them in to the platform somehow.
Re:Mods on crack again (Score:3, Interesting)