Will the delay in Microsoft’s Windows Vista have a domino effect on other planned releases of Windows? Partner sources close to the company said that Microsoft has sketched out plans for Windows ‘Fiji’ (also referred to by some Microsoft watchers as Vista R2) – the version of Windows set to follow Vista – as for Windows ‘Vienna’, the successor to Fiji, partner sources close to the company said.
That sounds like an interview question.
WTF happened to Blackcomb? They’ve been talking about it for 10 years now.
‘WTF happened to Blackcomb? They’ve been talking about it for 10 years now.’
Read the article. Blackcomb is now code named Vienna
This reminds me of the “Police Squad” gags on the boxer names.
Microsoft will simply release Fiji when it’s supposed to be released, even if that’s the day AFTER they start shipping Vista!
Of course, you realize that, under that policy, if Vista is delayed too much longer, they’ll simply ship Fiji and forget Vista altogether!
BWA-HA-HA-HA!!! That would be hilarious!
Noo… they’ll just rename Fiji to Vista, and claim that Vista has been delayed due to inclusion of more sophisticated software solutions than in the originally planned Vista :p
…such as WinFS, the Monad shell, EFI support, the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base(?)…
Coming in Windows Codename Fiji: grep(TM)!1
Coming in Windows Vista: egrep(TM)!!eleventyone!
I think you got it
Maybe they’ll start moving some of the obvious management stuff to their ‘Bet the Company’ platform. What was it called again? Oh, yeah: .Net.
One problem with planning too far ahead is that you can get blown off-course by what the man described as “events, dear boy, events”. It’s hard to think that many doctors will have patients complaining of weight loss and lack of sleep over the sheer worry of when Fiji and Vienna may appear. And 1001 things could happen between now and then that might force a rethink about what Fiji and Vienna are going to be quite apart from when they are ready for prime time.
Competition is hotting up a little with Apple and Linux, Google is prowling around, there’s a bit of a bubble around web2 and streaming everything, China is proving very hard to read and outfits like the EU are applying the screws. Who knows what might influence the market in the next five or so years? Microsoft would be muttleys if they didn’t do their best to stay flexible in the face of changing market conditions.
explain to me what the relationship of Fiji is to Vista and what an R2 would represent? I mean is it a kind of Service Pack? If they already have plans for that then wouldnt it be wise to wait for the R2 instead of Vista coming out in the beginning of 2k7? I just fail to see what is going on in Microsoft these days. It seems to me as if they are panicking with their own grand ideas…it seems that they have all these visions and products to launch but they dont know how to achieve it..
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No. Windows Server 2003 had SP1 then R2, which had actual features instead of bug fixes and such.
Basically, a R2 is a feature update.
Thanks for the explanation, then would this R2 be a free deal or would that be something a user will have to shell out cash for?
why we are even talking about this! You know Fiji will be delayed (or even dropped). Features that would have been in Vista will go into that one perhaps, and features that Fiji would have had won’t make it, so will be pushed into Vienna (which will cause that to be pushed back) and so on and so forth…
Haven’t we seen this enough now to know the way this will pan out?
Don’t worry, MS will have lots of good excuses… I’d love to know their hit/miss deadline ratio, 1:10 perhaps?.
I think MS need to concentrate on what they do best (I understand how much sense that statement makes ;-), and give up trying to rule every single market, it is starting to bite them very hard…
I believe that it is possible to be a little too obsessed with future release schedules. For crap’s sake, debating about a release schedule two versions after the product that’s not even been released yet? When’s the next American election coming? Who’s debating who’s gonna get elected 8 years after that?
From the article:
Will pushing back Vista’s release-to-manufacturing date by a few weeks or months play havoc with these already tentative schedules?
Sounds like the author is praying for Microsoft to fail and believes that if she wishes it hard enough, it might come true :roll;
We know in American elections that someone will be elected in 4 or 8 years. No one is debating it because there have not been any potential candidates named for office 8 years in the future.
We know that MS will put out a product sometime in the future, but the difference is the MS has already named the candidates and the proposed time line for those candidates to give us something to debate.
All that comes from MS trying to get their resellers, developers, system builders etc to believe they have a focused and well thought out plan for the future. Even though we all know that they wait for the next hot thing to happen then jump on it. (Like they did with IE, Windows media player, .Net etc) That has been all they have done in the last 10 years after the release of Windows 95 (Which was their biggest triumph)
Game systems get hot, MS is there, Ipods get hot, MS is there, Web TV gets hot for a minute, MS is there, Google gets hot, MS is there, Ajax gets hot, MS is there, DVR’s get hot, MS is there. Everything someone else does in the tech space that looks like a trend MS tries to get on the band wagon. They now do 100 different things and none of them great! No focus at all.
only way they’d get this out on time an fast an thats if MS$$ doesnt release Service packs for Vista
Partner sources close to the company said that Microsoft has sketched out plans for Windows ‘Fiji’ (also referred to by some Microsoft watchers as Vista R2) – the version of Windows set to follow Vista – as for Windows ‘Vienna’, the successor to Fiji, partner sources close to the company said
My god. Could someone please fix that sentence?
I doubt it’d matter much, really unless they already knwo what bugs are in Vista they probably don’t have much planned for R2. Maybe some unimplemented features like WinFS and some enhancements. Probably just a clever marketing scheme.
Apple gets flack for not releasing a comprehensive road map for enterprise customers (why the hell the need to know about it, god only knows, it isn’t as though enterprise customers are writing and selling software themselves), and when you have a company that does have, well, a ‘comprehensive road map’, the reality is, the road map, and the reality never quite fit.
The feeling I get with Microsoft is that the roadmaps and ‘grand vision’ seem to get designed by people who have little or no clue about the designing and writing of programmes, and hasn’t even spent a microsecond actually reading the Windows NT source code.
A road map gets release, and I can just imagine the groan by programmers in Microsoft over the stupidly optimistic time lines which these people give in their assessment of development lead times.
What Microsoft need to do is write down exactly what they want in their product at release date; and once that is established, what they want in Service Pack 1, with in 6-8months of the release of the RTM.
The problem with Microsoft is they had ‘wish list’ with little or not thought as to all the possible things that could crop up – they seem to be extremely optimistic with their projections; atleast if they do what I do; go for the worst possible case scenario and use THAT as the release date, if all things are completed before then, then you can atleast either spend more time testing OR come out to the market place and announce that you’ve completed the product before the expected release date, and will release it early.
If there wasn’t Apple or Linux desktops, windows would probably be on the drastically different schedule.
However it was necessary to adopt to what competition is doing: composited & accelerated desktop, development framework, etc. And with all that you still need to have good backwards comaptibility.
OS development is highly non-linear process, it can’t be predicted how and when features will be ready for mass market nor how the final product will look. Therefore planning future OS versions is merely having a testbed for new technology.
If there wasn’t Apple or Linux desktops, windows would probably be on the drastically different schedule.
As in, we’d all be using Win95 and Service Packs wouldn’t be free. If there had never been an Apple, of course, we’d all be using DOS.
However it was necessary to adopt to what competition is doing: composited & accelerated desktop, development framework, etc.
So much for “innovative” and “market leading”.
As in, we’d all be using Win95 and Service Packs wouldn’t be free. If there had never been an Apple, of course, we’d all be using DOS.
Those hypothetical bastards!