Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 18th Apr 2008 11:38 UTC
When Vista was released, and the first reviews started to trickle in, it became apparent that Vista was a massive release - not only in terms of money spent on it by Microsoft and the amount of promotion, but also the operating system itself. It was huge, and it felt as such too. Despite what many have been saying the past year, Vista is, in fact, much more than just XP with a new theme. Basically every framework and feature has been rewritten, lots of new ones have been added, and, according to some, the process of modularisation has started with Vista (and Server 2008). It may come as no surprise that all these changes resulted in a whole boatload of bugs and breakage, which led many people to conclude that Vista was simply not as "done" as it should have been when released. Steve Ballmer confirmed these sentiments in a speech at Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle.
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Member since:2007-02-17
What's the big deal, he is just saying what we know and wanted to hear...
Well ... he said it was big (and it is ... on disk the bare Vista OS is ~ three times the size of a full Linux distribution including applications) ... but even he apparently doesn't know what is in it that is taking up all that room ... or at least, if he does know, he isn't telling us.
It is sure hard to figure out what features it actually has that takes up all that size on disk.
Member since:2005-08-06
Okey, repeat after me
"Vista is not linux, vista is not linux, vista is not linux".
95% of the computer market are aware of Linux existence, we know it is said to be every users wet dream.
Now I'm not dreaming about it despite knowing of it's existence... so can we stay on the topic of what Ballmer is talking about instead? Especially as Linux is just like Vista "work in progress"....
Big question is rather, isn't consumer marketing laws saying something about false marketing?
Member since:2005-07-06
"What's the big deal, he is just saying what we know and wanted to hear...
Well ... he said it was big (and it is ... on disk the bare Vista OS is ~ three times the size of a full Linux distribution including applications) ... but even he apparently doesn't know what is in it that is taking up all that room ... or at least, if he does know, he isn't telling us.
It is sure hard to figure out what features it actually has that takes up all that size on disk. "
100% agree; and for the same amount of space Vista uses up, you can have a full blown development installation with all the bells and whistles.
Now, some would claim its due to 'less drivers' - I call bull to those; Linux (like MacOS X, Solaris and *BSD's) include large number of generic drivers which developers build their own drivers on, without need to replicate large sections of code over and over and over again. It seems that in my experience, in the Windows world, a 40mb (or larger) driver download is considered 'acceptable'.
Member since:2005-07-06
What's the big deal, he is just saying what we know and wanted to hear...
I think the better question to ask is this; why was it sold as being 'finished' when its actually still 'work in progress'. Are they going to formally announce once they get 'there' where ever 'there' actually is. Do customers now have to the right to demand copies of Windows XP (and supposedly finished product) until Windows Vista has formally reached its destination?
I'm sorry, but Windows really needs to be addressed from top to bottom; when I see the sort of inconsistencies in the UI Window's GUI, it reminds me of the types of inconsistencies I used to see in Linux 10 year ago - I really have to ask myself, when are we going to see Microsoft invest some billions into delivering a consistent experience? I also want to know why they (Microsoft) haven't moved all their operating system components over to the new WinFX/.NET - you would think if that were the future, all the bundled applications with Windows Vista would include all these new API's - but they don't.
I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.2 right now, and sure, it has received its amount of flack (Most of it due to lazy third parties not updating their applications and end users running hackware), but at least these issues get addressed - at least we know there is a clear roadmap for the future - at least we actually SEE Apple launch new API's and USE them themselves in their own products
Edited 2008-04-18 13:26 UTC
Member since:2007-05-22
I think the better question to ask is this; why was it sold as being 'finished' when its actually still 'work in progress'.
I'm surprised that people are just now asking this question; Microsoft has done this with their last few iterations of Windows. It's as if the customers are being used as beta testers and don't even know it.
Edited 2008-04-18 15:03 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
I also want to know why they (Microsoft) haven't moved all their operating system components over to the new WinFX/.NET - you would think if that were the future, all the bundled applications with Windows Vista would include all these new API's - but they don't.
Well, that is a good question. Originally, more of the apps did use.NET, but then they had to back away from them. I remember reading about writing Windows shell extensions and there were Microsoft published articles about the right way to do it in .NET. Later on, they recanted and said not to write shell extensions in .NET--because of .NET's own version of "DLL Hell" that could be called "Runtime Hell". Only one version of the .NET runtime can be loaded into a process space and if you have different requirements of what is the required runtime is--well, let's just say that bad things happen. That's why they had to back away from writing shell extensions in .NET.
Member since:
2006-07-04
What's the big deal, he is just saying what we know and wanted to hear...