"All promised features were cut from Vista." This is a commonly heard complaint about Windows Vista on the internet. While there certainly is a lot to complain about when it comes to Windows Vista, the mythical 'cancelled features' certainly is not one of them. Let me explain why.
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Member since:2005-11-21
It was a concept video peeriod. Just an advertisment for the PDC in 2003. At that PDC they showed you, with amazing accuracy (considering it was 3 years out) what the interface would look like and how it would work. They showed you where the animations were going to be, where they weren't, and they showed you the final interface was going to be Aero Glass. That's they were trying to stress a cleaner more professional look.
They talked about the new interface guidelines (you can see them on Archive.org or pictures on Thurrotts site).
All the metadata based file searching and organization is still there. They even integrated natural language search so you can type "powerpoint presentations by donald from 2002 or 2003" and it'll find them.
All those folder views in Explorer canme to fruition either in Vista or Windows Search.
that's just it... they weren't showing you an "actual running product" they were showing you a concept video whipped up in Macromedia Director by a third-party design firm. AND THEY TOLD YOU SO. The PDC 2003 showed you the actual running product.
INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, THAT WAS THE FIRST PUBLIC SHOWING OF LONGHORN.
Member since:
2006-06-03
I'm not saying I expect 100% faithful reproduction. But when they show a video that says, this is what WE produced in the past.. this is what WE will produce in the future, and then show videos of file-operations and fundamental things like windows-mail with a funky GUI, then yes, I do expect these things to show up in a final product. It's not like it was all pictures of Silverlight-enabled Websites, or funky 3rd party apps.
What was shown was:
Windows Logon,
simple file operations using explorer
File Searching (based on metadata)
Viewing folders, in explorer, in exciting new ways, with animations etc.
A decent sidebar with animations
and other things CLEARLY designed as part of the core OS, not as 3rd party addons
They are all presented with a consistent, unified interface. NOT '50 different Ui's in the box', there was only one type of UI shown in the video WE are talking about.
It's like going to an Auto show and seeing a Porche racing round a track, then when you go to buy your $50,000 car, you end up with a VW Beetle, not a bad car in itself, but not what you were shown as an actually running product.
The concept PCs that MS talks about are clearly labelled as CONCEPT ideas, to stimulate the PC design market. This video was billed as a preview of things to come from Microsoft.