Microsoft COO: Big client OS not dead yet
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(InfoWorld) - To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the mega OS release has been greatly exaggerated, Microsoft's COO said this week. In a part-speech, part-presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, COO Kevin Turner echoed comments made earlier this year by CEO Steve Ballmer that Windows Vista is not the last major update of the company's client operating system. Tuesday, as Turner dubbed Vista and the simultaneously-unveiled Office 2007 "huge, big-dog releases," he also promised more would come. "Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch," Turner said. "And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office." Turner's assertions parroted those made by Ballmer Jan. 29, just before Vista and Office 2007 went to retail. In New York on the launch eve, Ballmer said Microsoft had "plenty more where that came from," referring to Vista and its follow-on. At the time, speculation had mounted over whether Microsoft would, or even could, again mount a Vista-sized effort, in part because Ballmer himself had sworn that the company would never again take five years to craft a new OS. Analysts and pundits, meanwhile, were predicting the decline of the desktop operating system's importance as Web 2.0 applications made inroads and companies like Google offered apps and other tools that ran on any browser. Microsoft, their thinking went, would be forced to update its platforms, whether operating system or application, much more frequently and with smaller-scale upgrades to mimic the always-updated Web. Microsoft did concede some points there. For post-Vista development, Microsoft said it would return to a goal of releasing major OS upgrades every four years with at least one minor release between each major. There's reason -- more than one, actually -- for Turner taking the time to repeat the message, said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "You don't want this audience to abandon Windows, so it's important to remind them that Windows is still the most interesting operating system to develop for," Cherry said. Such reminders are especially important now, added Cherry, because of a July survey that said the percentage of developers targeting Windows had declined 12 percent in the past year. But Microsoft has other reasons for belaboring the point. "It's obvious that there will be future major operating system releases," Turner said. "There will be thinner OSes, certainly, and some may choose to use them. But there will be changes to hardware that will require changes in the OS, and fundamentally, as the number of changes add up or the significance of what you're changing does, the more important it is to do a major update." Incremental updates, in other words, only take you so far. "We always talk about the operating system as the pipes and the rest as the fixtures, right? Well, this is like when you're remodeling a house. There is a certain amount of things you can do in the bathroom. You can change the shower head, say. But you can't move the shower to another room without changing the pipes." On other topics Tuesday, Turner urged Microsoft partners to cash in on the 2007 releases of Vista and Office. "You know what I see? I see one thing in FY [fiscal year] '08, I see money," Turner said. "I see monetization. I can smell it and hear it, see it, okay, because this is the year that we're going to monetize that innovation."
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MICROSOFT will not broadly release its long-awaited update to the flagship Windows operating system, dubbed &quot;Longhorn,&quot; until 2006.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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Details are scarce at this point, but the next client OS will have a "fundamental piece of enabling technology," a Microsoft executive said this week, such as a hypervisor or new type of interface.
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Release makes tweaks in performance and stability, but there's still another beta to come before launch of server OS.
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In June, I wrote a short series on Microsoft&#39;s next major operating system release, codenamed Longhorn. I raved about the much-anticipated WinFS file system that was supposed to replace the existing file system with a more robust SQL-based version.
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At long last, Microsoft has put a date on when it will release the next generation of its Windows operating system.  But the 2006 delivery of "Longhorn" will ship without the highly touted Windows File System feature, raising all sorts of questions about the future of the world's biggest software company.
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(InfoWorld) - When Microsoft unveiled the long-awaited details of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on Wednesday, the company also quietly pushed back the release date for another highly anticipated product, Windows Server 2008. The update to Microsoft's server OS, formerly code-named "Longhorn," had been due for release by the end of the year, but the company said Wednesday that the new target for release is the first quarter of 2008. The e-mail was sent in conjunction with the timeline for and details of the release of Vista SP1, a service pack for the client OS that many customers have been waiting for before they upgrade to Vista. Microsoft also detailed the delay in a blog entry posted Wednesday on its Windows Server Division Weblog. The entry, attributed to Helene Love Snell, a group product manager in the Windows Server team, cited quality issues with the current build of the product as the reason for the delay. "Microsoft's first priority is to deliver a great product to our customers and partners, and while we're very happy with the feedback we're getting and the overall quality of the latest product builds, we would rather spend a little more time to meet the high quality bar that our customers and partners deserve and expect," Snell wrote in the post. Although product delays are par for the course with Microsoft, the company is planning a launch event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008 for Windows Server 2008 and two other products -- SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 -- that it's touting as its next major wave of product releases. In fact, when Microsoft COO Kevin Turner unveiled the February launch at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in July, he called the products the "big dogs" of Microsoft's enterprise software products and the most significant product release the company will have in 2008. The trouble is, not all the products are guaranteed to be available on their official launch date, making it more of a marketing event than anything else. Visual Studio 2008 still is on track to be released by the end of 2008, though a delay of that product is not out of the question given Microsoft's track record. And while there's a chance that Windows Server 2008 will make it to business customers by Feb. 27 (Microsoft has not specified when in the first quarter it will be available), SQL Server 2008 is not due until at least June 30, Microsoft has said.
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Company says more than 5 million people will test a near-final version of the oft-delayed operating system.
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p2pnet.net News:- By the time Microsoft finally un-corrals Longhorn, a significant portion of its potential customer base will be long gone.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that a long-standing and influential member of the Windows OS team has left, one of several recent and imminent executive departures that together represent a changing of the guard at the company.Rob Short, former corporate vice president of the Windows Core Technology group, left the company last month, according to a spokeswoman from Microsoft&#39;s public relations firm.Short had helped develop the Windows OS at Microsoft since joining the company in 1988. He was on the original Windows NT development team, which did some of the early work to optimize Windows for the PC architecture. Most recently, Short and his team were responsible for the design, development and testing of the core components of Windows.News of Short&#39;s departure follows the announcement last week that&#160;Jeff Raikes, head of Microsoft&#39;s Business Division, will leave the company in September. Raikes is one of the company&#39;s top executives, overseeing Office and all of Microsoft&#39;s business products. Microsoft has appointed Stephen Elop, a former executive at Juniper Networks, Macromedia and Adobe, to succeed him.At the same time Microsoft unveiled Raikes&#39; departure, it also said that&#160;Bruce Jaffe, corporate vice president of corporate development, will leave at the end of next month. Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft&#8217;s general manager of platform strategy, also plans to leave the company in the next month or so, Microsoft has confirmed.When Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates leaves his day-to-day activities at Microsoft midyear, he will leave behind an executive staff that looks vastly different from how it did a few years ago -- which may not be such a bad thing, considering the 33-year-old company aims to generate more revenue from newer business models and technologies.&quot;It is interesting that the company so far seems to have had some successful outside hires [when it&#39;s] had a reputation in the past of chewing them up and spitting them out,&quot; said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.However, he noted that the departing Raikes was instrumental in transitioning Office beyond a mere set of desktop applications to become a bona fide business collaboration suite. So it hasn&#39;t necessarily been the Microsoft long-timers that have prevented the company from evolving beyond its core businesses, Helm said.&quot;If Microsoft is moving too slowly in the Web-based world it&#39;s not necessarily because the old guard is holding it back,&quot; he said. &quot;It may be more a matter of the sheer size of the company and the inherent difficulty of turning a ship that big.&quot;Apart from CEO Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft&#39;s entertainment and devices division, many of the company&#39;s other top executives have joined the company in the past three years. They include the man widely seen as Gates&#39; successor, Chief Architect Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005. Kevin Turner, Microsoft&#39;s chief operating officer, and Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Online Services Group, also joined the company that year. And Raikes&#39; replacement, Elop, won&#39;t start at Microsoft until the end of the month.
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New dual-core processors will make conventional software licensing models obsolete. What's next?
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InfoWorld - With Vista just out the door, Microsoft&#160;is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product&#39;s core components.
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SilentChris writes &quot;According to CNet, Microsoft is revising their plan for Longhorn. In addition to scaling back WinFS, they will also have separate releases of Avalon (the new graphical system) and Indigo
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(InfoWorld) - While it's taken Microsoft Corp. half a decade to bring out a new version of its client operating system, the real development work on Windows Vista only took around two years, according to the head of the company. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, reflected on what Microsoft had learned from the process and delays inÂ bringing Vista to marketÂ during a question-and-answer session followingÂ the business launch of the OSÂ Thursday in New York. "Time is sort of a funny thing," Ballmer said. "You need to give new technologies time to incubate before you try to bring them together," he added. "Let each [technology] come to market individually and then do the integration." Microsoft spent the first two years of its Vista development process building a variety of new technologies and then struggled to integrate them, according to Ballmer. The third year went smoothly as Microsoft's developers focused their efforts on the Windows XP Service Pack 2, with some of that technology ultimately winding up in Vista, not XP. The bulk of what has now been released as Vista Microsoft developed in the last two to two and half years, Ballmer said. With his habitual flair for superlatives, Ballmer described Vista as."the highest quality, most secure Windows operating system ever." However, he was quick to add that Microsoft won't rest on its laurels. In its next Windows client OS release, the vendor will look to do more to support the major changes already under way in computer hardware, notably the shift from single-core to multicore processors and improvements in network infrastructure, he said. Microsoft also wants to offer more functionality in its OS for IT administrators so that the software is simpler to manage and for software developers in relation to storage management and other features that didn't make it into Vista, according to Ballmer. A future operating system also needs to take into account the move from software to software-as-a-service or as Ballmer said, "software plus service." Users can expect to see "a lot more service enablement" in the Windows OS, he said. Ballmer estimated that by the time Microsoft launches the consumer versions of Vista and Office 2007 scheduled for Jan. 30, 2007 worldwide, the company will have spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" on marketing the new software. Â
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Service Oriented Architecture isn't getting any easier despite the raft of acquisitions.