“Face it, Windows Vista is just so played these days. With that preliminary biz release under its belt, we’re ready for bigger and better things, and luckily a certain “jameskyton” drive-by-blogger has the low-down for us on Vista’s successors, Fiji and Vienna”. Read more at Engadget.
Never Mind Vista, Here’s Fiji and Vienna
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
<personal opinion>
With major Windows releases every 2 years (apparently!) Microsoft have maintained a steady income stream over the last 15ish years. Without new, more demanding, OS-es, the Hardware vendors face reduced sales and thus less Microsoft OS sales in the future.
Now, it seems, that they’ve got Windows about as good as it gets. The WIMP setup is pretty much finalised, the application-set fulfills the consumers needs, and you can only sell the ‘improved security’ argument so many times before people get suspicious.
So where next? any slowdown in the Windows release-cycle will give the Linux/Apple markets a chance to gain a foothold so they’ve got to find something to sell to the execs, therefore all the talk of ‘complete overhaul’s.
I’m wary of all the ‘rebuilt-from-the-ground-up’ talk, because if MS develop a new, secure, performant, easy to use OS then there will be nowhere new for them to go after that. Much more likely is that any new OSs will take another 10/15 years to get correct and get to the level of Windows XP.
</opinion>
There will always be significant room for new features in modern operating systems. We’ve only begun to tap their true potential.
If you replace ‘operating systems’ with ‘computers’, then I agree with you.
Tell me something: When those computers evolve, what’s going to run them? Hot air? No, of course not: Operating system software. Hence, operating systems will continue to evolve with the computers they service.
It’s not that OSs don’t have a future, it’s that the current Windows line doesn’t have much obvious development left.
Singularity however…
It’s not that OSs don’t have a future, it’s that the current Windows line doesn’t have much obvious development left.
No offense but, if you believe that, you’re delusional.
Did you catch the “thrilled capitalists at NASDAQ” picture? I so much TRUST these people
Don’t worry….. they’re not alone…. Red Hat sits on the NASDAQ too……….
The way RH does business and grows, serves it’s customers needs, their business model, they’re more capitalist than MS is.
I agree. And that’s a good thing.
Time for update. Red Hat has moved to New York Stock Exchange.
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/earnings_2007q3.htm…
Holy crap. The article linked to here ( http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/30/never-mind-vista-heres-fiji-and-… ) says at the bottom “via slashdot.”
The Slashdot blurb ( http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/12/30/1524255.shtml ) summarizes a blog entry.
The blog entry ( http://www.pclaunches.com/industry_buzz/looking_beyond_microsoft_vi… ) has a link to its source.
The source is here: http://jameskyton.wordpress.com/2006/12/29/beyond-windows-vista-fij…
As things get linked over and over they tend to pick up more credibility. Of course OSAlert is going to link to Endgadget instead of a blog with a single (at the time) entry written by someone whose name appears nowhere else on the internet.
Now all we need is for someone to link to this cool OSAlert entry for info on Fiji and Vienna. Why not track things down to their source? It’d make it a lot easier to decide how credible the whole thing is (at this point, not very credible). People on Slashdot were complaining about that, and we are now two layers further removed.
Sorry, but don’t people learn from experience?
Years over years, tons of articles were written about what will come up in Windows Vista.
80 %, at least, were wrong!
Now, as even Microsoft doesn’t do any silly promises yet, that they can’t fulfill, again the first crowd of people show up with new assumption about all the great things coming up next … or not.
Edited 2006-12-31 13:56
Is WinFS a filesystem or not?
No, it’s not: the filesystem is and presumably will remain NTFS for some time (maybe with further refinations).
WinFS is just a SQLServer instance hidden in the OS, that will hold the metadata harvested from the filesystem itself.
It will then be used to perform live queries that abstract from the folder structure.
…all this is guesswork, obviously, since WinFS is still vapor.
Oh, and in case you noticed, yes it’s the same thing BeOS did some 10 years ago, but with a hell of an overhead
Also quite similar to Beagle in existing Linux, and the Mac OS-X search engine. The difference to WinFS is, that Beagle is not using a relational database. However, inotify, the kernel level thing that makes Beagle possible, could easily be made to use other types of storage engines.
E.g. it would only take a few hundred lines of code to connect it to e.g. Postgresql and tsearch2 to get one of the fastest full text search enabled system in the market. The advantage over Beagle, apart from speed, would be that data could be stored and accessed from a central server.
Creating things like WinFS isn’t the rocket science thing that Microsoft want us to believe. Once Microsoft finally decides to make use WinFS, the competitive advantage will already be gone.
I in fact am believing that MS already has lost the advantages (if there were any). Look at beryl for instance. AERO, what ?
Security always has been a problem compared to other engineered OSes.
Performance wise, same story. Stability wise, same story…
Edited 2006-12-31 17:40
What about Aero? It’s perfectly capable of doing anything Beryl can do and probably faster.
They ditched all the smoke and mirrors for usability, is that a crime?
Have you even seen the technical videos showing off the power of Aero?
What about Aero? It’s perfectly capable of doing anything Beryl can do and probably faster.
It may be capable of doing it, but it’s not actually doing it.
All that I know is that my laptop is not Vista-ready, but it has no problem using Beryl…
They ditched all the smoke and mirrors for usability, is that a crime?
Some of the Beryl effects, like the expose clone, are very usable. The Cube Desktop is a great way to visualize multiple desktops. Windows becoming dark when the program is not responding is also very useful.
Have you even seen the technical videos showing off the power of Aero?
Aero’s only advantage is the capability to use pixel shaders, but the fact is that they are not using that capability at all.
So, yeah, for its customization, its open nature (which allows anyone to add plugins) and its low hardware requirements, I do believe that Beryl is in fact better than Aero, even if it lacks a single functionality that is barely used by the latter.
Windows becoming dark when the program is not responding is also very useful.
Vista has this as well, for a year or so now.
and its low hardware requirements,
Beryl is slow as molasses on my Radeon 9000 with 128MB RAM, with a ton of bugs everywhere (with the most annoying one being The Scroll Problem, confirmed by many other people), while Aero runs just fine on this card, and I have yet to see it crash.
Aero’s requirements are dictated by Microsoft to prevent Aero from slowing down your system too much. It only takes some small registry hacks to remove this barrier, and when that is done, my old Radeon 9000 runs Aero a lot faster and more stable than Beryl.
Is a Radeon 9000 slower or faster than X200 Mobility (also with 128 MB RAM)? Because that’s what I have and it’s far from being slow. That said, I didn’t know about the registry hack.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as the scroll problem, I don’t think I’m seeing it here. I think “tons of bugs” is an exaggeration, personally, even though it may not be as stable as Aero right now (which is expected, Aero being released commercially by one of the largest software companies in the world).
So I guess that only leaves the high customizability and openness of the Beryl as advantages over Aero – fortunately these are the ones that count, which is why you’re now seeing much more effects available for Beryl than Aero.
You’re welcome to express your opinion about this, but I have yet to see anything from Aero to make me believe that it’s better than Beryl (on supported hardware).
Maybe that has to do with ATI’s less than stelar OpenGL support? I’ve never used Beryl so I can’t comment on it directly but I did try out that Korora LiveCD which uses the original compiz and it was plenty fast on my system which is so old Vista probably wouldn’t even boot on it.
Aero needs a 64MB card to run with DWM on, probably more to use the Per Pixel translucencies.
IMHO, Flip3D is more useable than Expose. It doesn’t become tedious looking with a lot of windows and it’s easy to use your mouse and click any window in the list it creates.
Windows become a semi transparent white in Vista when they stop responding.
On the point of the technical videos, I wasn’t saying Aero was more powerful than Beryl I was implying that it isn’t as weak as you make it out to be.
They are using Pixel shaders on the Shadows under windows and on the translucencies of the Windows themselves.
In the end, the only argument for Beryl is it’s open source nature?
I’m fine with that.
IMHO, Flip3D is more useable than Expose. It doesn’t become tedious looking with a lot of windows and it’s easy to use your mouse and click any window in the list it creates.
That’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it, but I find that the Expose effect is fast, intuitive, and very user-friendly.
Windows become a semi transparent white in Vista when they stop responding.
With Beryl, you can customize it to reproduce this effect if you want. Or you can have them dark. Or remove the color saturation.
This is what I mean by customization.
On the point of the technical videos, I wasn’t saying Aero was more powerful than Beryl I was implying that it isn’t as weak as you make it out to be.
I wasn’t implying that it’s weak, just that saying that it has great capabilities when it doesn’t use these capabilities to its fullest is rather irrelevant.
They are using Pixel shaders on the Shadows under windows and on the translucencies of the Windows themselves.
To me, that’s overkill as 99% of people wouldn’t notice the difference with Beryl translucencies and shadows.
In the end, the only argument for Beryl is it’s open source nature?
…which means its development is faster, that it’s more customizable and that more plugins are available for it.
It also runs very well on my Athlon 900MHz with 512Mb of RAM and an old GeForce4. I’m not sure how well Vista would run on this system. Fortunately, Beryl doesn’t require me to buy a new OS just to have the eye candy.
Can I install only Aero on my Windows XP system, without the rest of Vista?
yes I have and you probably haven’t seen beryl, looking glass etc yet. and yes, the performance on the current hardware for AERO is next to none. Di you really think you can run it on this laptop ? It doesn’t, too slow. Beryl runs and then it’s on an ATI card (which isn’t exactly the best card you can think of under linux).
Now, if we add all the DRM bits and pices, you know you have a monster at your place.
On the other hand, if you are happy with it, keep it.
Performance wise, same story. Stability wise, same story…
You must not have used Windows in a while. It’s very stable now, at least my Win2k system is. Maybe XP took a step down in stability but I somehow doubt it.
You make the desktop search functionality seem like a toy project level issue.
Unfortunately it’s not. Even if you were indexing only regular files on the disk, you’d need to extract information from them. More specifically learning ~/docs/thesis.pdf has changed is not enough. You’ll also need to extract the text and metadata from that document. You’ll need those kinds of filters for all file types (multimedia, office, source code, etc)
And you’ll not only scan simple files, but you’ll have to understand several program configurations. For example you’ll also need to read (i.e. parse) Thunderbird profiles, or read Blam! RSS feed storage intelligently.
Furthermore, people are already working on more exciting things, like extracting “semantic relations” and automatically generating queries for you:
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/
What WinFS tried to achieve was removing directories all together (at least logically), but defining a good metaphor is not easy, thus they failed. Otherwise Beagle level functionality already exists in Vista as desktop search.
Creating things like WinFS isn’t the rocket science thing that Microsoft want us to believe. Once Microsoft finally decides to make use WinFS, the competitive advantage will already be gone.
True, and that is the case; the problem they face is this; they *could* have released WinFs, but the problem is; it would be just yet another ‘me too’ searching technology with no real edge over what is offered in Linux via Beagle or MacOS X via spotlight.
What Microsoft was hoping is they could do ‘natural language searching’ that is, you can plow in an every day sentence like, “find me all documents older than 24 of december written to Santa Claus’ and it will spit out all documents that fit that description.
What they failed to grasp is just how complex something like that can be, as it brings in a level of fuzziness and randomness; unlike Beagle and Spotlight which have fixed statements that people must use, Microsoft wanted any old statement being used by the user, and still bring back the same results.
I think its a matter of Microsoft dreaming too much rather than simply, ‘lets get the basic foundation on the operating system *THEN* work on refining it further and offer updates later’
BeOS had nothing like WinFS 10 years ago.
It was, however, very similar to what we already have now in Vista and OSX.
It was, however, very similar to what we already have now in Vista and OSX.
No it’s not. Where Beagle/Vista/Spotlight allows you to search inside files’ contents (besides metadata and filename), BeFS only allows you to search in metadata and filename. This is a severe limitation on BeFS’s end, meaning you can only find a specific file if you know its name or metadata contents.
Edited 2006-12-31 20:18
If Vienna really entails what this blog post says it will entail, I’ll be more than happy- no, I’ll be satisfied more than anything. Ditching backwards compatibility is the only way for Microsoft to go; they should’ve done it with Vista, but sadly they did not have the balls.
Use NT as the base, and rework everything on top of that, and you’ve got yourself a major winner.
True, but if they ditched backwards compatibility, businesses will start to look at alternatives like OSS/WINE for compatibility and improved features until a port could be made. Then there’s competing platforms like OSX, Unix, Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc. that would get considered for future developement to prevent a company like MS from disrupting their business by not providing compatibility.
It’s a tough spot to be in. Compatibility is a major reason why MS has been successful, or more like perceived compatibility. Nothing is ever perfect but MS’s selling points have always seemed to be based on this is an improvement over what we offered before, whether it was evolutionary like the different versions of DOS, 9x, NT, or revolutionary like the transition between those different archs. But the point was you could still mostly use what you have always been running.
In fact, at my local branch of my bank, they still use 486’s running DOS for most of their backend stuff and the desktops are all running Win95. A company I contract for upgraded from NT3.51 to Win2k about a year ago. Most companies I do work for are running ancient backends with mixed clients. Only the new computers ever have a new OS.
If it’s not broke, why fix it. Software doesn’t erode. I know I don’t have to tell you this but it’s why MS is afraid to break compatibility, or at least the perception of compatibility. MS knows if they say to their customers you have to upgrade because we are, those very customers are going to look elsewhere and see MS isn’t the only choice and there maybe more cost effective solutions for the future than scrapping everything from the past and restarting. It begs the question, if I have to redo everything anyways, why do I have to do it with Microsoft? Heck, thru virtualization I might be able to benefit from improved security while still able to use what has already been acomplished.
I agree tho, MS should do this, rather, should have done it a long time ago. Vista was evolutionary, not revolutionary. MS needs to stop dragging their feet and get busy, but as I have already said in my opinion, MS is afraid to kill one of their most successful selling points.
Although I don’t agree with everything you said, you’re 100% correct about backwards compatibility though – and Microsoft executives have public said how important it is; the Windows development leader was quoted to say, “legacy code is our greatest asset” – but what this fellow needs to also take into account that sometimes an old decrepit building can become a liability in the long run, and might require being demolished and replaced, or just simply removed all together from the asset portfolio.
Regarding ‘that would get considered for future development to prevent a company like MS from disrupting their business by not providing compatibility’ – I’d love to be that optimistic.
If I was running Adobe right now, I’d be porting all these applications to Linux (both of the enterprise desktops) and hedging my bets so then at least if all goes wrong on the Windows desktop, or Microsoft starts encroaching onto my territory, I would have build up a new customer base elsewhere.
What I find funny is when I see third parties get destroyed by Microsoft, knowing that Microsoft were entering their market, and yet, either doing nothing, or waiting till the last minute hoping that jumping to linux or opensourcing will fix all their products ills.
What is holding Linux back isn’t so-called ‘lack of userfriendliness’ or hardware support, because in all honesty, its equal to that of Windows and in some cases superior; what is killing Linux on the desktop is the dearth of desktop applications from big name vendors;once they come, then end users will wonder why they should pay $399 for a copy of Windows Vista when they could obtain, for example, a copy of Novell Linux Enterprise Desktop for $50 per year – which would work out to be $250 for 5 years, which is, going by NZ retail prices, $150 cheaper than purchasing the retail version of Windows XP Professional.
You’re absolutely right.
Even a Microsoft employee told me that it’s the lack of popular commercial apps that keeps Linux back.
The reason there are so few popular commercial apps is because there is almost no client market exposure; which comes with major OEM support.
Writing software for Linux is not more difficult when targeting standards like LSB.
Well said. As always, the weakest link in the chain is OEM support. This is what Linux companies should strive to get.
The reason there are so few popular commercial apps is because there is almost no client market exposure; which comes with major OEM support.
But OEM support will only come with demand for Linux on the desktop – it is the chicken and egg scenario and there is only so much the ‘open source volunteers’ can do.
The ball is squarely sitting in the court of Novell, Red Hat, IBM and other so-called “Linux desktop backers” – they need to start putting their money where their mouth is, approach these big companies an invest money into getting these software titles ported to Linux.
Sun has the same syndrome that Red Hat and Novell – thinking that if they make the worlds best desktop and development tools, they, the third parties, will instantly come – there is a road of dead companies who have done just that, made great desktops, great products, but died because they failed to get partners on board with sweeteners and enticements.
Once you get the applications, people will start choosing to install it on their computers by their own free will; once that picks up, OEM’s will see that there is a viable market, they’ll start installing it on their hardware; and as they install it, they’ll start demanding that their hardware suppliers either support Linux or lose their hardware supply contract.
So ultimately, everything, and I do mean this without exaggeration, everything relies solely on getting those applications onto the Linux desktop – that’ll set the ball rolling.
Oh, and something I’d love to see, IBM open source lotus smart suite – if they did that, believe me, it would be an awesome office suite on Linux, and wouldn’t have the bloatage that OpenOffice.org has and being feature rich when compared to Koffice which lacks some enterprise features.
The other problem with OEM take up with Linux is that the kernel developers are now insisting that all drivers are now open source.
Althought im not gonna get into the whole opensource vs closed sourced driver issue as it’s already been done to death, i do however think it could be a problem for some OEM suppliers.
99% of OEM’s that provide hardware work on volume and price; the so-called ‘intellectual property issues’ which Nvidia and Ati throw around are nothing more than red herrings to justify their stance of having the end users by their balls – they could open source the whole damn thing, or at least the drivers, which keeping the OpenGL library closed, but hey, that might actually make end users happy – can’t possibly let that happen!
I mean, in all honesty, I certainly don’t see Realtek, for example, going bankrupt, and all their drivers for their hardware are open source and they work closely with all those who wish to create drivers for their hardware.
“In fact, at my local branch of my bank, they still use 486’s running DOS for most of their backend stuff and the desktops are all running Win95.”
Similar to see at the local branch of my bank here: A bunch of x86 machines is running “Windows NT 4.0” with only one application: A TN3270 terminal emulation client (to communicate with an IBM AS/400 eSeries mainframe in the cellar); would be cheaper to use real IBM 3270 terminals.
First of all Vienna is the capital city of Austria (europe). The Microsoft Windows Team apparently choose the after Bill Gates visited the city 1-2 years ago.
IMHO, the blog author mixed many things together …
He speaks about Vienna what is called “Singularity”.
He speaks about vamporware WinFS which has been known to be death for months. And WinFS had been not a filesystem but a user mode layer “built” upon NTFS, written in C#.
Such prognoses are most times completely wrong, especially in technology world.
Linking such blog entries on slashdot yesterday and now even on osnews (I always though it has a lot better editor quality), speaks volumes. That’s sad.
I really doubt Microsoft intends to overhaul Windows again like they did with Vista. A whole new interface and sandbox approach to unmanaged apps in Vienna will take another five years to develop.
More likely, Microsoft will pursue better factoring of its existing OS components. I heard that Microsoft spent considerable time in Vista trying to untangle the Gordian Knot of dependencies in the OS (ie. cyclical DLL dependencies), which make it much more difficult to streamline code. From what I’ve heard, they made a lot of progress but were forced to make certain exceptions in critical scenarios that would have been broken otherwise. This convinces me that they’ll continue to try to unravel dependencies to whatever extent possible — and then cover backward compatibility via virtualization with their VirtualPC technology that they purchased.
I fondly recall a tiny indexing app from ON Technology by Mitch Kapor no less that indexed my olde 20MB HD MacOS back in the late 80s. It made Mac app development a real breeze, but one OS version later Apple killed it. After that, pretty much waited eons for content indexing till Copernic, google search.
Although BeFS doesn’t have content indexing, most of my quick search needs are fine by Find and there is also a nice little BeGrep tool, doesn’t take too long to search specified doc folders, not much use if stuff is all over the drive though. Also the Be Find search really bogs down for larger drives and becomes useless, might as well preorganize the drive by objects types anyway.
As for the article, what alot of linking with very little real meat anywhere, just speculation. I finally end up at some vista fan site of Gerald.. It would be worth OSAlert keeping better track of Singularity though if thats what Vienna really is.
The complete scheme change Vienna suggests with no backward compatibility, that would be fine with me too, just sandbox old apps with the VM stuff thats all over. The proposed speech driven envirement could work for some tasks where one commands the system to set course to … warp factor 10! or maybe just play a particular album or visit usual website.
Microsoft has grown to the point where it really has to be split in two (if not three) entities: operating system development (1) and applications (2) development {and eventualy (3)services}.
And that’s not just for breaking down MICROS~1 monopoly but for the sake of software quality and customer satisfaction.
An oversized monopolistic and overly complex company as Microsoft is today we all are seing sings of tiredness, lack of iniciatives and inertia. I’ve got feeling there are even growing antagonistic if not totally disparate tendecies under the same roof. Managmenet is spitting out promisses, developers are directed by marketing specialists and so on.
For now Microsoft is still a computing platform, applications and services/solutions company. That’s what I would call Hindenburg (disaster) project.
I know it’s hard do develop an one-size-fits-all operating system as well as reliable office solutions suitable for both enterprises and home users. Making MSWorks with home users and MSOffice with businesses in mind is waste of energy and consistency the same way critics are talking about OpenOffice-Koffice in Linux world.
The only difference is MSWorks will remain crippled MSOffice while OpenOffice and KOffice are improving everyday despite the lack of centralized and pretty much loose project managements.
Home computer users might want to have DX10 ,Aero and other eye-candy on their desktops but corporate numbercrunchers don’t. An average bookkeeper or researcher may want to use reliable file indexing service enabled by default but passionate gamers don’t.
It is not easy to please your teenager who don’t know of anything else besides AOL messenger and iTunes and roaming sales representatives who are syncing their laptops through VPN at the same time.
Microsoft answer to that are crippled and stripped Windows versions that meet user needs but I call it stealing not selling. What may seem to be a compromis for Microsoft it is a limitation on the use for users.
Here ,again, Microsoft is openly letting us know
they’re distinguishing premium customers from not so lucky ones who cann’t pay for full-featured bundles of crap code coming off the MS labs.
Nothing visionary can be marketed the way they’re doing today. Only half-done products and services designated for obsolescence the moment Redmont gurus have something new to sell.
Everything Microsoft does today is getting all things together and that’s not because Redmond gurus want everything integrated for better customer experience but for easier and cetralized market/profit management/manipulation. That’s what is behind Windows Live and Office Live. I don’t think I would ever leave my documents on remote servers least for Microsoft servers to index my data. Thank you very much!
That’s why Microsoft does not really mind overlaping iPod market with their Zune, or trying to steal search engine market from Google or getting in the way of antimalware developers with their own protection software.
Nothing revolutionary here just old shear greed from Redmond!
Being omnipresent the way it is now, as for me, Microsoft will remain name brand I should stay away from. There’s nothing for me to enjoy from Redmond only to be worrisome.
Edited 2006-12-31 23:10
Microsoft is already running three defecto subsidiaries (Windows, Office, Games). There would have been four, but each of the three above absorbed pieces of MSN. Each of these groups operates more or less independently; consequently, I don’t see much benefit to the company or the customer in actually breaking them into separate companies.
Regarding premium differentiation, that’s nothing new. Companies have been doing that for ages. Look at all of the PREMIUM upgrades that you can make in any car, home, vacation, etc that you purchase. Now, you may argue that, since the additional cost of packaging bytes on a disc is negligible and, therefore, Microsoft should simply include them without any additional cost. But I should probably point out that (a) You do have a choice, (b) Microsoft doesn’t have to offer some of the premium functionality, and (c) Not including them allows you to choose better alternatives from Microsoft competitors. Overall, I would rather have the choice about what I’m buying rather than have Microsoft offer a single version of Windows and have them split the pricing difference between the low-end version and the premium version.
Seems to me that Vista doesn’t even go GA until the end of the month, and they’re already trying to subdue the underwhelming reception with talk of future versions of Windows.
That’s what I think, anyway.
win-xp has 13 unpatched vulnerabilities
if they can’t even fix xp i won’t trust them