After pushing the launch of Windows Vista to late 2006 for corporate customers and early 2007 for consumers, Microsoft insisted that quality, not timing, would dictate the product’s release schedule. The company’s loyalty to that guiding principle is soon going to be put to the test.
The Vista Domino Effect On Tech
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Earlier when Eugenia “owned” this site she used to write a lot. Nowadays she seems to be back after a hiatus, but limits herself to linking other articles. How come?
Eugenia, I am a daily visitor to this site since it used to be benews.com (never commented till today). I miss your editorials / write-ups / opinions / whatever. Stop being just another linker and start writing please! You were never always right, but you had an opinion and were not afraid to express it and encourage debate. I would like to see that again here.
Thom just links to a lot of stuff that I can google for myself and whenever he does write, it never (at least for me) makes interesting reading.
Cheers
Edited 2006-08-19 04:11
I am not back, it’s just that Thom was busy moving houses recently so I helped out. I don’t have plans to post more than 1-2 original articles per month.
You should have emailed us though instead of posting off topic.
From what I understand she stepped down as Editor in Chief and just occassionally contributes now. I’m happy to see her linking articles as they seem to be more varied and just plain better articles than… from others. It would be nice to see some “stuff” written by her as it was typically a good read.
As for the actual article, I’d like to see Microsoft get a “solid” product. Vista Beta 2 was pretty buggy when I used it. I had Explorer.exe crash a lot. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft decides to go for the money, or have a better product. From the past, we all know what will probably happen though.
I know we’re dealing with Microsoft here and so can’t take anything for granted, but it seems to me to be a no-brainer in terms of the decision whether to stick to the current release schedule or let it slide some more. Of course you wait till you’ve got it right.
SUSE 10.1 was a classic example. They (rightly) pushed back the release date a couple of months after realising that 10.1 wasn’t ready, but they unfathomably set a hard date for the reschedule which they stuck to despite the big problems with YaST & updating. So they ended up getting (in many ways) the worst of both worlds – a delayed and flawed release.
Like the article says, if Microsoft stick to the current schedule and Vista isn’t ready, they’ll simply have to issue lots of patches for weeks or months afterwards and endure a ton of bad press.
Depending on how things go, this may happen anyway, but there’s no need for them to make things even worse just so they can stick to an arbitrary release date (which is in the worst month of the year for sales anyway).
I’ve been putting off buying a new monitor for years because LCD resolutions are still stuck in the 100dpi Stone Age.
Admittedly, I don’t know much about LCD tech. But I have long suspected that the LCD makers haven’t spent big dollars working on higher resolutions because the end result is all too predictable: “The letters on my expensive new computer screen are too tiny to read!”
I don’t know if I’ll ever run Vista on my computers, but I will be very happy when it comes out. Only then, with all its fancy scalable vector graphics and text, will device manufacturers begin to compete for consumer dollars based on “true” resolution again.
From what I’ve seen, resolution independence isn’t quite as solid as it should be… We’ll probably have to wait until programs start catching up with the OS to become resolution independent.
Apple are very likely going to lead the way on this. After Leopard is out, a hardware revision or two down the line could end up using high-dpi screens.
Sorry, but that is nonsense. The problem is, the higher you push dpi the more flawed displays are getting produced which you can’t sell and have to throw away.
The same goes for bigger displays.
So the current situation just is what is feasible with current technology at decend product/fallout ratio.
That is also the reason why prices don’t raise linear proportional with size of the displays, because that isn’t a matter of more material but a matter of more fallout.
> Sorry, but that is nonsense.
Oh yeah? Well, you’re … nonsense.
> The problem is, the higher you push dpi the more flawed displays
> are getting produced which you can’t sell and have to throw away.
…
> The same goes for bigger displays.
Yep, no disagreements here.
> So the current situation just is what is feasible with current
> technology at decend product/fallout ratio.
The industry reached an acceptable product/fallout ratio to sell LCD monitors to the general public /years ago/. And they have continued to improve their processes since then, as made apparent by the ever-dropping prices. However, usually when old technology (lo-res) drops in price, there is a better technology (hi-res) that takes its place at the expensive end of the spectrum. But we haven’t seen this — why?
It’s possible that a 200dpi display is so much more difficult to manufacture than a 100dpi display that manufacturers aren’t even close yet. But I suspect it’s more because of the underlying demand problem — that the lack of ubiquitous vector scaling (read: available in Windows) means there is little demand for such monitors. If there’s no demand for hi-res displays, then manufacturers are going to put their effort into reducing the price and improving other aspects of the successful lo-res displays.
The way you stated it above, it sounds like you think that product/fallout ratio just magically improves over time and manufacturers are simply waiting for it to cross the threshhold of profitability. In reality, low defect rates are the result of significant effort and investment, which companies won’t make unless they think their will be a profit at the end of the day.
Vista released
= Increased demand from the masses
= $$ Incentive to improve yields
= Improved yields realized
= Prices reach consumer-level
= Hi-res displays for everyone
= Profit
But then there would be highres displays around even though at very high prices. You know, the Windows market might be the most important one but it is not the only market.
I have used “highres” crts on sun maschines when most people thought 800*600 was better than sex. If it was feasible at even barely aceptable costs to produce high res LCD then at least some companys would do that.
Start by dumping those old bitmaps and switching to something that scales like truetype.
uhm, you have recognized that windows doen’t use Bitmap fonts since Windows 95, probably since 3.11? Can’t remember that far back.
And surprise: if you choose a fontsize eg for the titlebar, that would be too big to fit in, then that element gets resized to fit the font.
TrueType came out far later. If you want to zealot around, better make sure to know what you are talking about.
Screw windows, get to know your X server, I use only truetype, misc. cursor and a type 1 for xterm default. Looks fabulous at high resolution, thank you bitstream.
This article is bullcrap. Beta 2 was a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago. In september we should get the RC1. There will be a RC2 and then the launch.
A ton of things have been fixed. They should not base the issues off of a five month release, but instead base jugements off of RC1.
Beta testers on Neowin say that the versions right before RC1 are really stable and fast and a ton of bugs have been fixed. Even those found by Semantic have been fixed.
I think Forbes should just keep on posting business news instead of computer news and not listen to their Linux zealot Server Admins.
I tend to agree with you about the article from a technology point of view, but from an investors POV it is on the mark. Looking at the state of MS and Vista from a business and investment position there is a lot of speculation and little substance coming out of MS concerning the final release. MS appears to be tripping over its own feet, Ballmer looking more like the idiot that he is, Bill Gates speaking about future MS vaporware, and a general lack of excitement over the MS Live projects. Lots of speculation over whether there will be a Beta 3 or RC1. PC manufacturers and software developers are not happy, while for the mmost part the PC gaming sector appear to be the only ones making any real advancments at being poised for the final Vista release.
If you read the article in the context that it is written you will see that Forbes is right on the mark, and they are doing more for Vista than MS apparently is doing for itself. This article is an excellent summary.
Well, the YaSt problems were introduced by the hostile takeover from the technology pushists from Ximian. No user was in need for RedCarpet. They broke SuSe and Nuremberg had to fix it.
—
Vista – We will see possible scenarios.
a) Vista gets released in April 2007, some adapt to Vista as a replacement of Win XP others wait till SP5
b) Vista gets released in April 2007, it is buggy and users will complain a lot, hardware mess, etc.
when Vista gets released in April 2007, that will trigger discussions in the public sector. Linux has to a surpass Vista by end 2008 when most deployment decisions will be taken. A Vista release is good because it will trigger the Windows vs. Linux discussions again.
I’m trying to figure out what sort of business would want to upgrade to Windows Vista? Honestly, with the hardware requirements on them, and a lot of businesses using dual-head displays with really cheap graphics cards, in a lot of cases on-board ones, then how does Microsoft really intend to sell it?
No company that I know of will bother upgrading when they already have trained staff for Windows XP on computer hardware that will run it sufficiently.
On the other hand, any new businesses would still rather just buy bottom line computers, and would still have the choice of running a different operating system than Windows in the first place (which with all the malware that floats around for Windows XP it’d be wise to go with either Macs or Linux based solutions.)
Better security will be a good enough reason for a lot of companies.
I’m trying to figure out what sort of business would want to upgrade to Windows Vista?
New PCs will come with Vista preinstalled, and XP will stop being supported. As always …
just as they dropped Win 2000 support after the XP release… oh, wait, Win 2000 is still supported.
It will be a couple of years until XP support is dropped. Security and distance maintanance might be a reason for companys to migrate, but honestly, i don’t think they will rush to Vista as they didn’t rush to XP.
So what?
this other site says that vista is on track and build 5520 is going to be the Release Candidate 1 and should be out on september.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/08/16/Vista_may_not_be_delayed_ag…
Edited 2006-08-19 16:04
I notice a lot of people are modding down if they disagree with someones opinion.
I also disagree with these peoples opinion but don’t want to mod-up
I do like this nice bit of spin.
After over 5 years development still contains an unacceptable level of bugs.
Of course it is only five years if you count in the develope time of the palladium kernel, that proofed to be not feasible.
That wouldn’t be very fair, since they started from scratch after that, would it?
Let’s punish every delay that was caused by the attempt to do something realy innovative and let’s send the right message out to companys.
Technically I suspect the should be punished, for stifling innovation across the industry with an already out of date OS.
That aside *if* they have only put five years of development into Vista that would be a disgrace. I suspect that already they are planning the successor to Vista *now*.
I get tired of this wrote from scratch rubbish, evolution rather than revolution, is often the better approach. There is nothing impressive about getting it *wrong*, overdue, and as hard as a project of this magnitude is to do badly. Microsoft *should* not get it wrong, and everyone if aware they should have had a back-up plan.
Oddly enough my main problem with Vista is the lack of innovation. Everything I wanted has been taken out.