Longhorn getting sliced and diced...
Seems M$'s revolutionary forthcoming OS is starting to look like just an WIN XP update. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08...ples_longhorn/
Tiger is going to bury this thing...
Quote:
Microsoft project managers have demanded that features be jettisoned in order for the next major version of Windows to ship as projected by 2006, and the major loser is the new GUI, codenamed Avalon, according to multiple sources who spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity. Features are being "decoupled", according to current Redmond jargon, meaning they may be introduced at a later date. Or not.
Microsoft project managers have demanded that features be jettisoned in order for the next major version of Windows to ship as projected by 2006, and the major loser is the new GUI, codenamed Avalon, according to multiple sources who spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity. Features are being "decoupled", according to current Redmond jargon, meaning they may be introduced at a later date. Or not.
Quote:
Another feature likely to be "decoupled" is WinFS, or Windows Future Storage.
Another feature likely to be "decoupled" is WinFS, or Windows Future Storage.
Tiger is going to bury this thing...
Quote:
But slip it has: in October 2001 Chairman Bill vowed that Longhorn would hit the CD pressing plants in 2003.
But slip it has: in October 2001 Chairman Bill vowed that Longhorn would hit the CD pressing plants in 2003.
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Also from the same article
Bill Gates described Longhorn as Microsoft's largest ever engineering project, but it has been bedeviled by slippages. Two years ago, Gates said that Longhorn was "the equivalent of many moon shots".
Guess they're settling for low-earth orbit.
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
It does seem strange. The article mentioned a high turnover rate as one of the deciding factors to jettison Avalon. I had always thought that once M$ assimilated you into the collective, you were there for the duration.
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
I have no f*cking idea.
Perhaps this truly is becoming Microsoft's Copeland. The ideals of Avalon are pretty cool but it is looking like they might not be able to pull it off. WinFS is important to their whole biz strategy as well according to the videos I've seen. Longhorn without these two key features isn't going to have the same impact.
Apple needs to make Tiger airtight and start the assault on Redmond. Looks like they'll be able to get 10.5 Lion out in mid to late 2007 and still catch a young Longhorn for slaughter.
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
As much as I love to hate microsoft, longhorn's progress is fairly typical for the industry.
The short answer is that OS development is extremely complex. Even well funded and well managed OS development projects fail on a regular basis. Merely being delayed is the norm. On schedule is unheard of.
Apple spent billions on copland and then scrapted nearly the entire project. IBM has done the same more than once. Apple had a UNIX OS prior to OSX. BeOS tried and failed. NeXT failed but was then bought at the last minute by apple. WinNT was delayed many many years, long enough that MS had to keep extending their win 95 codebase.
If you are reading a tech article where the author is suprised by longhorn's delays, then it is probably a good idea to disregard the whole article as somewhat uninformed. An elementery grasp of the complexity and history of OS development makes Longhorn's progress look par for the course.
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
Because software is notoriously resistant to being rushed along regardless of how much money or personnel you throw at it.
If a certain task is going to take 100,000 lines of code, it won't get done ten time faster than one guy can do it if you try to get 10 guys to write 10,000 lines each. The task might get done two or three times faster. Try to get 100 guys to do a 1000 lines each and you'll waste so much time in meetings trying to coordinate what everyone is doing that the job will probably take longer than if you'd given it all to one guy, and the end result will probably be buggier too.
When there are clearly defined individual tasks for individuals to work on, the inefficiencies aren't so bad. But it can take a lot of time -- in a process that can't be rushed very well either -- to get down to such clearly defined tasks. Then, of course, once-clearly-defined tasks mutate after the work has already begun based on the original specs, not only enough to waste a lot of the effort that has been expended, but enough to muck up the clarity of who is depending on what from whom.
My guess is that Longhorn is a product of middle managers and a few principle software engineers spending a couple of years making PowerPoint presentations and UML diagrams, not doing much prototyping or testing before making grand claims about what they can do, and thinking that once they'd polished up those slides and diagrams to perfection that it was "a mere matter of coding" to make it all come together.
I know a number of people in MS, at various levels. Everybody wants their hand in the pie, to leave their mark, and boost their own career. It's highly cutthroat. So you end up with a pie, in the end, that's just mangled.
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
Simple: It has nothing to do with the number of developers, nor the skill or intelligence of those developers.
If the guys dictating strategy and doing architectural work suck, it doesn't matter how much talent they throw at a problem. An elegantly implemented piece of crap is still a piece of crap.
MS has fallen into a trap of their own making: On the one hand, they're so fat with cash and talent that every project becomes a big, complicated, do-everything megawidget (see: OneNote); on the other hand, their monopoly is sustained by the same old same old, so they can't revisit their basic interface or applications without opening the playing field up to competitors by enraging their user base.
[edit: what Kickaha said ++]
Originally posted by Kickaha
So you end up with a pie, in the end, that's just mangled.
How did we get from cattle mutilation to pastry mutilation? Is there no end to the food stuff and/or potential food sources which Microsoft is willing to mame and disfigure in its quest for World Domination?
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
CoreVideo has jack all to do with Quartz Extreme, really. So each gets to do its job well.
Apple has really adopted the Unix philosophy to heart, and it's paying off *immensely*... small technologies that work together in concert to do incredible things.
MS is so focussed on producing whole-package-for-everyone-anywhere items that they're cutting their own throats in the long run.
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
3) The people who go to microsoft and want to work on windows are the least creative people you will ever meet. I know several of them from Princeton.
2) They have to use MS dev tools. They're really not that bad, but interestingly enough, MS's collaboration software sucks.
1) They have to deal with a proprietary, monolithic kernel as well as proprietary components. The Mach kernel alone, code and concept, took 20 years to get to Mac OS X. If you read the story of Mac OS X, you get a saga that starts in the early 80's. OS X's Darwin core is aptly named, as it's the successful evolution and integration of the best ideas and the best products of the last 20 years, open source or not. No company, no matter how much money they have, will be able to surpass that in a proprietary, modern OS.
I'm not a software guy, and not even a "computer guy" for that matter, but I work amongst them, and know their kind well. MS does do a few things quite well. Windows isn't one of them.
MS is so focussed on producing whole-package-for-everyone-anywhere items that they're cutting their own throats in the long run.
I am excited by this "Unixy" ideology. I wonder how large apps like Photoshop will fair against specialized apps. I think of large apps as being frameworks. Photoshops masking tools are good but there is always that better plugin. And so on and so on and so on. Soon the plugin companies will realize that they can "glue" their apps together using some of the tech that Apple has created and they will be freed from being "just" a plugin. I still like to Opendoc principal of binding many smaller apps/processes into a flexible sum.
Longhorn is the extension of "wizards" it wants to grab your hand and lead you everywhere but of course only hitting the "MS approved" spots on the way to your destination. No thanks Bill.
I know absolutely nothing about software development, but didn't they wait too long before starting Longhorn? I mean, wasn't OSX in development for 10 years before the public beta?
Nope took almost 4. SJ came back to the fold in what 97 and Public Beta hit in 2000 after some Preview Releases. And look at OSX now. Apple just needs to maintain their course and let MS stumble. MS cannot afford to stumble because linux is steadily encroaching.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Nope took almost 4. SJ came back to the fold in what 97 and Public Beta hit in 2000 after some Preview Releases.
Yes, but wasn't OSX being developed at Next for the previous 5 years? And then Apple bought it and hired back Steve.
Originally posted by the cool gut
Yes, but wasn't OSX being developed at Next for the previous 5 years? And then Apple bought it and hired back Steve.
Yup if you include the NeXT days then OSX is indeed a decade old.
I see they're still pushing the whole .Net thing with Indigo, but (aside from developers) what does this bring to the end user? If they kill Avalon that would seem to do away with any new "oooh ahh" eye candy stuff. With WinFS out, doesn't that pretty much kill whatever new search features Longhorn would have ala SpotLight?
I'm sure Longhorn will be big and bloated enough to force hardware upgrades again, but what is it really going to bring to the table?
Originally posted by opuscroakus
but what is it really going to bring to the table?
What have any of their OS's brought to the table??