“Every time I hear another announcement on what Longhorn will implement or what new tricks it will learn to perform, I have the feeling that I’m watching a show where the magician pulls rabbits out of a hat.” Softpedia has a lengthy piece discussing what Longhorn means to Redmond.
Microsoft Plays Russian Roulette with Longhorn
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Adam Scheinberg
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Longhorn will do everything… revolutionize the desktop, make your coffee, babysit your children, etc. Well, except for all the features that keep getting pushed out.
I’m bailing; I haven’t used my XP desktop for anything but gaming in months. I’m going to replace it with an Apple x86 machine as soon as possible… the iBook I bought to work on a UNIX book has made me switch.
– chrish
new OS. And I mean the classic story, not the penguin.
Somethings cooking in this OS world. I don’t know what,but I just feel we’ll see veeery interesting stuffs in a short time. And probably it has something to do with Longhorn/OSX/Linux
Just you wait!
One “problem” Msft are faced with is simply that many/most current XP SP1 SP2 etc users are perfectly happy with their current OS – it does most of what they want reasonably well now – so, at what point will say 30-40 % of existing XP users have moved to Longhorn? – 2008-2009 ?? – it’s irrelevant if Longhorn comes out in late 2006….. what counts is when vast numbers of people have evently moved to it, and that could be in the 2008-2009 timeframe – this is a real problem for Msft – in the meantime over the next 3 years, desktop Linux, desktop Mac OS-X will increasingly seem adequate ans sufficient for many desktop computing tasks – this is a worry for Msft…..
What if this, what if that..if this doesn’t happen…I want to pretend i’m an insider at microsoft….it’s a monday morning at the end of june what can i write about…
Microsoft can take another 2 years to get it out because we know linux isn’t a threat on the desktop, OSX won’t be until at least 2007, and Microsoft’s server share keeps on going up. XP and 200x is doing fine for people.
The amount of resources required has always been Windows’s problem and the fact that Longhorn already requires 512 MB of RAM is a clear indication that one will probably need 1GB of RAM to be able to run Longhorn in proper conditions.
Insane hardware requirements.Switched to Linux long time ago anyway.If i would buy a Laptop it would be either the newest breed of Apples or most likely will install Linux on it.I hope though they will sell them with no OS included also.
Has the press always been this negative during the run up to a new Windows release?
This is out of curiosity, I’m wondering if this is how it has always been or if this is new.
And you should know if it’s clueless speculation, as you seem to be an expert in it.
Anyway, how about reading the article the next time around? The author even agrees with you in a large part and argues a different point, however, you wouldn’t know, as you very obviously didn’t bother to even read the article.
OS X requires 512mb Ram to be happy, running it with more is advised. I use 768mb’s and don’t notice any slow downs.
Of course OS X get’s more effiecent with every release. Though i expect leopard(10.5) to stop that, because of the x86 change over.
Of course There is nothing going into Longhorn that Apple isn’t doing in OS X 10.4 today. WinFS would of been major but that’s gone.
Longhorn is turning into Apple’s copland project, Lot’s of cool features but unable to deliver. Though MSFT is going to force it down consumer’s throats anyway. Hence the difference.
I once watched a breakdancer at the 3rd street promenade in Santa Monica, CA. He spent over a half hour talking about how he was going to do the headspin and how great it was going to be. He asked the assembled crowd to check his helmet, made a big show of putting it on… checking the music… etc. He had someone hold the helmet out and promised to do a backflip into it. In the end, neither the backflip or headspin resulted. For some reason, conditions weren’t right. He took his bucket of money and left. I feel the same way about longhorn.
I can’t wait for the vector interface. It’s going to be sweet.
To challenge the inertia of customers, Microsoft would have to come up with compelling reasons to upgrade. This situation has happened before, but now the users are mostly satisfied with the current feature set of Windows XP.
Two paths are open for Microsoft:
1. Longhorn has fundamental improvements: but they have been dropping features? They look more and more like a huge sprawling monopoly, with crippled products because of the need for non-competition between divisions. This is why the database filesystem was dropped, not to compete with SQL server.
2. Longhorn will bring forced incompatibility with many user-level applications: users will be forced to switch to the new Office, the new Exchange, etc, because it has become incompatible with the old versions.
It is time for Microsoft to reorganize.
it’s going to kill MS, but Longhorn’s failings are going to let other players into the market. I’ve played around with the alpha releases and I have to say there is NOTHING compelling to make me want to sidegrade to Longhorn. It’s nothing but a Windows 2000 skin. Regardless, MS is going to loose it’s monopoly and their plans for controlling content pumped into the home died as well. Windows and Office was their bread and butter, but soon they will be commoditized leaving MS without a product with good return. MS will lash out with litigation but their profits as well as their coffers will bleed like stuck pigs.
They won’t go out of business, but they sure will make life hell for everyone else.
I sold my notebook on the weekend, I’m tired of computers. Linux has served me well for the last few years, but technology in general is not worth a lot.
“I don’t think it’s going to kill MS, but Longhorn’s failings are going to let other players into the market. I’ve played around with the alpha releases and I have to say there is NOTHING compelling to make me want to sidegrade to Longhorn. It’s nothing but a Windows 2000 skin. Regardless, MS is going to loose it’s monopoly and their plans for controlling content pumped into the home died as well. Windows and Office was their bread and butter, but soon they will be commoditized leaving MS without a product with good return. MS will lash out with litigation but their profits as well as their coffers will bleed like stuck pigs.
They won’t go out of business, but they sure will make life hell for everyone else.”
I completely agree, maybe they will be big enough of a burden to society and economy to make everyone see HOW stupid software patents can be. And hopefully politicians are not corrupt enough to change things once the first patent world war is started.
If longhorn will use a new vector engine, then imagine how incredibly bad old apps will look.
Microsoft doesn’t even have decent layout managers in Windows XP, and now they’re going vector?
Vector based and fixed positioning of controls just doesn’t make sense!
I don’t think the desktop is ready for complete vector based graphics. It’s too heavyweight.
each time i read stuff about longhorn they talk only about the eye-candy, webservices or some new acronym they invented. the things which really need to be addressed are not there, like proper file locking, system wide spelling checker (like in osx), symlinks (it’s already implemented in ntfs internally) and some proper file manager (konqueror is way better).
also fix the fragmentation of the config/user files, i have no idea where to look for a file. so ditch the registry and make some unix like homedir system. the “documents and settings” directory was a nice idea, but put every user file there!
oh man, if they made me the adviser they would have a killer os
I’ve been a Windows user for years. However, I’ve started playing around with Linux a few months ago and have really enjoyed it. It disapoints me to find out that Microsoft is unable to come up with anything new and exciting in their latest OS. If IntelMac releases a version that will run on my existing hardware, I’ll probably skip longhorn and give OS X a try.
All this deliberation over Longhorn, and all the while people will be able to buy a Mac OS computer and have Windows on it for legacy apps.
Windows had its heyday, but UNIX is back in full force between Mac OS X, Solaris 10/OpenSolaris, the BSDs, and Linux.
Microsoft is the odd man out. Funny, that.
“it’s going to kill MS, but Longhorn’s failings are going to let other players into the market. I’ve played around with the alpha releases and I have to say there is NOTHING compelling to make me want to sidegrade to Longhorn. It’s nothing but a Windows 2000 skin. Regardless, MS is going to loose it’s monopoly and their plans for controlling content pumped into the home died as well. Windows and Office was their bread and butter, but soon they will be commoditized leaving MS without a product with good return. MS will lash out with litigation but their profits as well as their coffers will bleed like stuck pigs.
They won’t go out of business, but they sure will make life hell for everyone else.”
I agree. Especially if x86 Macs cut fairly deep into Microsoft market share. It would be nice if it started a trend where new OS’s and Computer Architectures rolled out from this, like in the good old days (80s-90s) when you had 10-20 different computer companies.
From the article:
“Windows XP is already complex enough, but considering what is known about Longhorn so far, Microsoft is planning an operating system that will be exponentially more complex than XP. And as we know, the more complex a machinery is, the higher the likelihood of one component to break down and cause the whole equipment to malfunction.”
That’s more or less the start and the end of it.
I generally agree with this, but people were saying the same thing about Windows 2000 before its release.
To challenge the inertia of customers, Microsoft would have to come up with compelling reasons to upgrade. This situation has happened before, but now the users are mostly satisfied with the current feature set of Windows XP.
Exactly – as more and more people are becoming increasingly computer savy, and alternatives such as “desktop Linux”, “desktop Mac OSX” are becoming more and more user-friendly and viable, we’ll increasingly enter enter an era of sufficient computing, to coin a phrase
– increasing numbers of people might start to think “why pay for Windows, MS Office, Norton AV, Paint Shop Pro…. etc etc” every so often, when increasingly you can get free alternatives which are sufficient for your needs ?? – that’s not to imply that everyone will increasingly think like that – but clearly, more and more people are starting to think like that……
Hey everyone! Let’s all throw away our Windows computers! Let’s throw away years of knowledge and experience. Let’s all just dump our collective billions invested in software right into the trash. Let’s all provide employment for all those poor Apple and Linux programmers who are desperate to re-invent the wheel for us. Let’s all change everything because all of these Internet dorks have gotten bored with Windows and are desperate to find some other substitute for a social life.
Stay in an abusive relationship if you want to. I try and avoid the SOB! ;}
This is out of curiosity, I’m wondering if this is how it has always been or if this is new.
I don’t know the answer to that, but if it wasn’t like this before, it probably is now because every Windows release has been hyped to the point that it couldn’t possibly live up to people’s expectations; and it never has.
People want something better and they hope that each new version of Windows will be the OS they’ve always wanted. The media is probably still this way, but they are steeling themselves against the inevitable disappointment to come.
What if you can run windows binaries natively on OSX?
Will there even be a need to run windows for things like games, Office, etc?
I will laugh if you’re an EV1 astroturfer pissed about your little plan with SCO blowing up in your face.
If you’re not, then let if be known to you the hosting company you have your IP from tried a little plan to tanish Linux by giving MS FUD material in the way of a case study based on EV1 switching from Linux to Windows. Then the idiots went and bought (more like siphoned cash to) a license for non-existant SCO IP in Linux then yelled to the world they just gave a bunch of money to a company who is trying to steal a community’s work (a community based on sharing and being open, no less). Of course this was seen as very unpopular and EV1 got burned hard as well as the case study was dumped because EV1’s name was mud. MS didn’t want to get dirty when it came to prop EV1 up so thankfully that piece of garbage wasn’t too publizied.
So please, don’t astroturf if you’re an EV1 cronny, and if you’re not, then investigate who you do business with, it reflects poorly on you.
I will laugh if you’re not, then yelled to the way of money to a little plan with SCO blowing up in Linux by giving MS didn’t want to Windows. Then the world they just gave a company who is trying to steal a community’s work (a community based on sharing and EV1 got burned hard as well as the idiots went and being open, no less). Of course this was dumped because EV1’s name was mud. MS FUD material in the hosting company you have your face.
If you’re an EV1 cronny, and if be known to get dirty when it reflects poorly on you.
whats the story ? my last post got modded down, but there is loads of crap posted that stays up ?
sort it out please
osx is already a better desktop system than windows. currently it is the system windows and linux are playing catch-up with… however..
linux,( with xcompmger -c -f, on xorg), has stuff windows will not have until longhorn gets released… that is, if it is even included. even have a look at luminacity… thats what microsoft WISHES they could do with the windows desktop.
windows is now looking like the ugly sister of operating systems
Its more like pulling rats rather than rabbits out of a hat. If you tried any of the the Longhorn beta releases you see very quickly that it’ll take at least another 5 years of development efforts to make it useable. In the meantime everyone is going linux anyways so Longhorn is already pretty much obsolete.
And that the OS is what is important. He doesn’t seem to have realized that there has been a paradigm shift.
The OS is no long what is important. No cares if it is Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, just as long as they can use their APPLICATIONS (this is what is important now).
With Open Source, it doesn’t matter what OS you are using. When applications become OS agnostic, then you will see Billy’s world begin to shrink. Firefox has already started to chow down in IE. Many companies are starting to standardize on OpenOffice… The tide is turning…
Meanwhile Gates sits and mutters how “oh, it is a lovely OS”… who cares?
Its more like pulling rats rather than rabbits out of development efforts to make it useable. In the the meantime everyone is already pretty much obsolete.
Not long after NT came out I mentioned to a friend that this would be MS’s biggest mistake. Since then NT technology has grown in leaps and bounds, but I still stand by my comment back then.
I’d been using a lot of Unix back then (this was before I’d heard of Linux by the way), and loved it, it did everything I thought an OS should back then. I was a huge Mac head, still am, but wanted an OS like Unix but a GUI like the Mac.
The mistake I thought MS made was not adopting *nix as the foundation, and putting a GUI on that and making sure all their apps at the time ran with it.
If MS had done that, there would be no threat from OS X or Linux, there would have been less incentive to move to Linux. MS would have a stable platform and we’d all be happier.
It’s going to take a while, but MS will loose market share to everyone else, esp. OS X (haven’t used the free Solaris yet)…
By the way, I’m not a fan of MS going away, I am typing this on an XP laptop. However, I am no longer waiting for Longhorn anymore, I’m sure it will have lots of bells and whistles etc, but won’t be OS X. I used Tiger again on the weekend and all I can say is Apple is definately onto something there…
“But that trick *never* works!”
“This time for sure! Presto!”
By el_chato (IP: —.dsl.telepac.pt) – Posted on 2005-06-27 14:20:31
To challenge the inertia of customers, Microsoft would have to come up with compelling reasons to upgrade. […]
Guantanamo Bay! By then it’ll be rent-free, it’ll stink so bad. Why else would Microsoft be so eager to get details of every MS user and eagerly protray them as ratbags with no redeeming features? ;^) (I call this my worst-case scenario of business-consumer relations ;^)
<snip>
1. <snip> but they have been dropping features? <snip>, with crippled products because of the need for non-competition between divisions. This is why the database filesystem was dropped, not to compete with SQL server.
A la IBM and the IBM PC – management couldn’t have it competing with their mainframe moneyspinner – so they put it out to pasture and it almost ended by eating the mainframes for lunch.
2. Longhorn will bring forced incompatibility with many user-level applications: users will be forced to switch to the new Office, the new Exchange, etc, because it has become incompatible with the old versions.
Yes, I can just see the headlines in Computerworld or Infoworld – Microsoft proclaims update to Longhorn better TCO than to Linux with a smaller headline below it – Businesses report massive file and filesystem corruption with Longhorn Office. After all, we all faced that with the successive forced updates to MS Office we had to live through; and Longhorn is supposed to break the mold; the which meaning that there are no guarantees of anything. Some TCO savings that’ll be!
It is time for Microsoft to reorganize.
It’s time for Microsoft to pull finger. Time for Microsoft to wake up. Time for Microsoft to open up.
Either that or face an autopsy.
That is why microsoft has .NET
OS not important, you said? sure you can pick any OS you want , as long as they got .NET
why? because your employer run Office.NET, your artist run PhotoShop.NET your kid want to play WarCraft.NET etc etc
Gates is smarter than you lloyd