Windows 7: Preventing Another Vista-esque Development Process
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jul 2007 12:54 UTC
Windows Six months ago, after a long gestation period, Microsoft finally released Windows Vista. Vista is a huge release; not only because of the long list of new features, but also because of its sheer size, and number of bugs and other oddities and downsides. The development process that lead to Vista has left many with a very bitter aftertaste; features were cut, codebases were scrapped, release dates postponed. A few days ago, Microsoft released some sparse details on Vista's successor, internally dubbed 'Windows 7', and in order to prevent another Vista-like development cycle, here is what I would advise Microsoft to do. Update: APCMag reports that Julie Larson-Green, who was the driving force behind Office 2007's new Ribbon user interface, has been transferred to the Windows 7 GUI team.
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Arakon
Member since:
2005-07-06

I stated there was a place for meta data in media files in my post, but not everything needs meta data and adding it to a file system seems backwards. It would be better to have Media files with a wrapper or add-on like an ID3 tag on mp3s. If the meta data was stored in an addendum to the media files themselves then the files could be moved from file-system to file-system while preserving the information.

By making the meta-data file-system specific wouldn't that create that dreaded "Microsoft Lock-in" that everyone always bitches about? Then we'd have all kinds of wasted effort and time spent trying to convert this data so that other file-systems could use it and not restrict the files to a Microsoft only file system.

No thanks.

Reply Parent Score: 2

google_ninja Member since:
2006-02-05

stuff like id3 only came about because of the lack of the feature on the filesystem.

When you take the feature to the file system, then you can start to drastically change the way file managers work, and thats the prime advantage.

As for vendor lock-in, this is always a problem, and it will take a huge amount of work to get something this complex to work from another platform. however, we are already more or less in this position, linux filesystems store different data then hfs+, which stores different data then ntfs.

Reply Parent Score: 2