Windows Vista release slips to Q4 2006

IDG News Service ^ | July 28, 2005 | Elizabeth Montalbano

[CheneyChick]

Windows Vista won’t be available for shipment until the last quarter of 2006, a Microsoft Corp. executive let slip in a presentation on Microsoft’s campus Thursday.

Microsoft had previously slated the release of the next client version of it Windows operating system (OS) for the second half of 2006. But at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Conference in Redmond, Washington, Thursday, Will Poole, senior vice president of the client division of Microsoft, said the OS would not be available until the 2006 “holiday” time frame in the U.S.

This presumably would mean that the OS will not be available until sometime around the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, which is the last Thursday in November, or Christmas, which is Dec. 25.

Poole quickly corrected his faux pas, and reiterated Microsoft’s party line that Windows Vista will be ready sometime in the second half of 2006 during the remainder of his presentation to analysts.

Microsoft released the first beta of Windows Vista Wednesday, and Thursday at the analyst conference showed a demo of some of Vista’s new features, including virtual folders and enhanced support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

The company unveiled the official name of the client OS, formerly code-named Longhorn, last Friday at its annual sales meeting. The next version of Windows Server, however, still retains the Longhorn code name, and is expected to be available in 2007.

[sigSEGV]

And I love the "What's that dirty stuff on my title bar? -- Oh, that's just the translucency effects. Oooh, Ahhh"

[dr_who_2]

Windows NT. One of the original designer/developers for NT had something to do with Digital's VMS. Anyhoo, the Windows NT kernel was originally supposed to be a microkernel, quite unlike traditional Unix kernels. I doubt the Windows kernel can be called a "microkernel" anymore, though. Naturally, Windows NT, VMS, and Unix kernels are all multitasking by design, but the way that NT/VMS start new programs is also different from the fork() and exec() approach that Unix uses. People who insist that the spawn approach is better are probably full of it. As far as most users are concerned, though, Windows NT is designed to look a lot like MS-DOS, a really crumby OS that lives on even after death. Windows ain't Unix. There are plenty of free "Unices" to choose from, plus OS X, which will cost you. Windows is proprietary in the same way that the pope lives in the vatican and bears poop in the woods.

[dr_who_2]

Translucency/transparency is exactly one of those things that desktop Linux geeks want but no one who wants to get something useful done with their computer wants or cares about. GUI's are great when they know their place. Get rid of stupid animation, sound effects, excessive dialog boxes, icons, and clutter. Give me an easy to read display with lots of room and scalable graphics/text so that I can always read the fine print. You'd think they'd figure that out by now.

[6SJ7]

Thanks for the info. I see lots of articles critiquing the external look of Longhorn, but nothing about internals.

[dr_who_2]

As for the changes since XP SP2, who can say. Lots of big changes (except to graphics rendering code, etc) have been delayed until yet another release.