Linked by John O'Sullivan on Fri 17th Oct 2003 17:48 UTC
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981. "64 bit is coming to desktops,there is no doubt about that, But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology." It seems to me that by the time it ships, Longhorn will need 4 gigs of RAM.
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If you think BillG is technically out of the loop, talk to someone who has been through one of the (regular) "Bill Reviews" people at MS suffer/benefit from. His role is more-or-less entirely 'technical' since day-to-day business became steveb's pigeon.
As to the wider point the article is making - I disagree with his premise. Most of those 'OS releases' are really minor iterations, and once you take those out and look at the revenue generators, the picture becomes much more uniform.
The first Windows OS that contributed significantly to MS was 3.1 in 1992. Then the Win95 / NT 3.5 wave in 1994/1995. 98/ME were very minor revs of 95 (the OEM95 versions don't seem to have made this list, and were no more or less significant to customers than 98/ME), so the next wave to look at is the 2000/XP wave in 2000/2001, along with the short delay before we got 2k3 server (2003).
My product timeline, then goes:
1992 - [3] - 1995 - [5] - 2000 - [3] - 2003 - [4] - 2006
So we wait until 2006 / 7, for the next major release.
Seems pretty average, if we pull out all the 'point releases elevated to product' stuff.
And, for fear that you argue that you can't just pull that out, well - we'll be getting such a product later this year / early next year (2004 give or take a few weeks): XP SP2. A host of bug fixes, but new features too. At least as significant as Win95 - Win98, and way more so than WinME. And I wouldn't be surprised to see another before Longhorn.
Plus - the OS is more modular these days. You can get new DirectX, Media Player, hardware support etc. etc. without an OS rev. At the developer end, .NET framework, GDI+, P2P etc. all arrived without an OS release.
An ancialliary question might be: Why no big marketing splash and an "XP Second Edition" moniker?
I think the answer is that we're living in a more mature market place now, and many customers value stability over 'the latest thing'. New products take even longer to adopt than a service pack!