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Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

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Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#41

Post by vizeroth »

unsignedqword wrote: post #8

Vista was not a very well-received release, but I remember using 64-bit Vista way back when. Maybe my memory is failing me a little, but I don't really recall Vista being that bad or unstable. UAC, of course, was a little annoying then, but 7 felt a little more unstable and crash-prone than Vista. My dad still uses a Vista desktop regularly (a 2007 install) and as far as I can tell it still works perfectly fine for h…

Vista was the first Windows release I really felt was unsuitable for installing on most systems which were purchased before the OS was released. OEMs made the problem worse by pre-installing it on low-to-mid-range systems which had no business running it. Additionally, if you were running 64-bit Vista at release, there were significantly more driver issues than with the 32-bit version, though running the 32-bit version meant you could barely support enough RAM to let the system start performing well.

UAC issues cleared up once all of the software developers got around to releasing the next versions of their applications, but MS took most of the blame. I can't really blame the developers for not wanting to make significant changes to their software before the final release of Vista, given the chain of events leading from XP to Vista. Many are already hard pressed to remember how rocky the XP release was, and that MS did much more in XP to make 3rd party applications work with the system. In Vista they essentially took the extra step to warn the user that the application was misbehaving, rather than silently letting it happen. Some people got into the habit of disabling UAC by default and I had to convince one person who should have known better that he wasn't going to suffer from a deluge of support calls if he stopped disabling it in Windows 7 (and the handful of Vista systems still around).

In the end, 7 put very little in terms of functionality or stability on top of Vista SP1, though Microsoft did put significant work into making it possible to run 7 on systems that didn't have the horsepower for Vista. The marketing push brought a lot of people around. I look at it as an essential part of the strategy they're currently using with Windows 10 (vs. 8), though they took the extra step of changing the underlying version number this time around (something they didn't do when going from Vista to 7).

The biggest problems with continuing to run Vista are that the support window is rapidly closing and 7 will usually perform better on the same hardware (because they toned down the UI and put real effort into getting 7 to work on hardware that was previously running XP).

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#42

Post by blowski »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #25
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista != Longhorn. Vista was a total do-over after it became clear that Longhorn was never going to ship.

In the first few paragraphs of the article it mentions > The project, however, failed completely and development had to reset. More than three years late Microsoft released Windows Code Name 'Longhorn' as Windows Vista. Is this incorrect, or not the full story? edit: less confrontational

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#43

Post by borski »

skaber wrote: post #4

Good memories. I remember leeching longhorn builds from some guy on an irc channel on efnet through xdcc transfers. Every two-three weeks there was a new longhorn build that I would burn on a cd and use to format the family pc. I would've been a great beta tester!

Dude, I have a strong feeling this was me.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#44

Post by aaronbrethorst »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #25
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista != Longhorn. Vista was a total do-over after it became clear that Longhorn was never going to ship.

In the first few paragraphs of the article it mentions > The project, however, failed completely and development had to reset. More than three years late Microsoft released Windows Code Name 'Longhorn' as Windows Vista. Is this incorrect, or not the full story? edit: less confrontational

> Did you even read the first few paragraphs of the page?

I did. I also worked at Microsoft during the years in question.

edit in response to your edit: The project was restarted. Longhorn and its three pillars were essentially thrown out. Windows Vista was rebuilt from scratch on top of Windows Server 2003. I assume they chose to keep the same codename so as to reduce confusion. But that doesn't mean it was the same OS.

Hopefully this Wikipedia article answers the rest of your questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista#M...

edit 2: here's another article:

    It was decided, at least for now, to drop or modify many of the
    original objectives; no more using C#, abandon WinFS, and revise Avalon.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lo...

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#45

Post by saganus »

How come they can distribute binaries of an OS that belongs to a company?

I mean, even though it is a failed project, it still may have valuable stuff, patents, etc.

So how come they are able to distribute without issues? are they going to potentially get a C&D? should we start archiving these just in case?

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#46

Post by reDunDantReDund »

Who are these people, and why are they desperately clinging to the history of what essentially amounted to a company killing project?

Is this a manifestation of some sort of post-traumatic stress?

I despised Vista, and recounting it's origins and history of such a thing, to me, is like recounting the childhood of your daughter's murderer.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#47

Post by frik »

Numberwang wrote: post #2

I wonder if the project name for win10 was shoehorn.

Yes.

Vista was actually a fine release, just a bit resource intensive, had a stubborn file copying algorithms, and device driver support from third parties weren't that great at release time. Beside that Win7 is after all a Vista SP1"+", and a damn fine OS until 2020.

The worst Win OS was WinME, which was pretty unstable in comparison to older Win9x releases. I switched to Win2000 and then WinXP and never looked back.

The second worst is Win8x and Win10 though. Rough and unfinished on the UI side, and too many phone home "features" under the hood. The WinMin kernel would be great though, but Windows is heading in the wrong direction (Azure cloud, OS as a service, plans for monthly subscription). It would have been great if the plans for WinFS and Longhorn shell would have been restarted and based on Win7 shell. A C++ based Longhorn UI shell would be great for enterprise and consumer. The search experience would be what one has today with SharePoint but insanely fast and proper integrated in to the Windows environment. The cloud offerings are a joke in comparison, sadly a regression in all fronts and they have no vision as it seems. The dreams of an x64 based Phone that could run Win32 applications like Photoshop - all gone. There is so much legacy, but very uncertain future of the platform. Even in enterprise world, which applications are still native? Only Office 2010 or the remarkable unstable 2013 is what every enterprise user still uses daily, everything else in on SharePoint, SAP (Java based client) or other intranet web applications or even internet web applications. And copying files around is more of an hassle than ever before. A native WinFS and a Longhorn UI would have been so great. Sadly, it's all history.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#48

Post by forgettableuser »

untog wrote: post #5

This is really fascinating, though I have no idea why. That said, I'd love to read a series of articles about the development of Longhorn and why it failed rather than a tech dive into the components developed. Does anyone have any recommendations?

There was a in-depth article from Vanity Fair from 2012, "Microsoft’s Lost Decade" which tries to put together what happened.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lo...

Some excerpts:

    By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse as employees struggled to beat out their co-workers for promotions, bonuses, or just survival.
...

    Then, in June 2004, Steve Jobs announced that Apple was releasing its new operating system, called “Tiger.” And inside Microsoft, jaws dropped. Tiger did much of what was planned for Longhorn—except that it worked.

    E-mails flew around Microsoft, expressing dismay about the quality of Tiger. To executives’ disbelief, it contained functional equivalents of Avalon and WinFS.

    “It was fucking amazing,” wrote Lenn Pryor, part of the Longhorn team. “It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.”

    Vic Gundotra, another member of the group, tried out Tiger. “Their Avalon competitor (core video, core image) was hot,” he wrote. “I have the cool widgets (dashboard) running on my MAC right now with all the effects [Jobs] showed on stage. I’ve had no crashes in 5 hours.”
...

    Longhorn was doomed. A few months later, Allchin brought together the Longhorn team and made the announcement: Microsoft couldn’t complete Windows Vista in time to hit the latest planned release date. In fact, the company couldn’t foresee any launch date. So a decision had been made at the most senior reaches of Microsoft: after three years of work, throw everything out and start over. It was decided, at least for now, to drop or modify many of the original objectives; no more using C#, abandon WinFS, and revise Avalon.

    Apple was already in the market with those features; Microsoft was basically giving up in its effort to figure out how to make them work.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#50

Post by WalterGR »

orionblastar wrote: post #9
badminton1 wrote: post #6

I would like to know about what happened with the Windows Future Storage (WinFS)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS http://superuser.com/questions/11346/what-happened-to-winfs Apparently it was canceled and part of it was added to Microsoft SQL-Server 2008, and Windows 7 and other software. I think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud. It is why Microsoft bought out Skydrive renamed as Onedrive.

I think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud.

How so?

The point of WinFS was to store an object graph representing your data in a DB. It was more or less antithetical to files.

(Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team.)

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