"Windows 9" "Threshold" and "Windows" Rumors thread

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I knew vista was in big trouble when it was reported that microsoft was having fierce internal debates over whether users should be allowed to silence the startup sound.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That was the least of it.

I'm sorry, but if they had all tose major problems and that was how they chose to spend their time, that was not the least of it.

My point was that they fiddled while vista burned.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Part of the problem was timing. Vista required fairly powerful hardware to run as desired. But the hardware required was essentially that which the next generation of PCs would have. The current generation in many cases wasn't really up to it. Among other things, some machines Vista was offered on would not pass MS's own Windows certification tests.

But MS wanted to End-of-Life WinXP and get a new revenue stream from a new version of Windows. So they created a new level below the old Windows Certified which OEMs bundling Vista could slap on the packaging of such systems. Former MS SVP Steve Allchin, who ran the Windows development efforts, was very unhappy with this. He felt the customer would have a poor experience, and MS would get yet another black eye in the marketplace, and was dead right on both counts. Steve Ballmer's response was that he had nothing to do with the decision.

And as it was, MS couldn't end-of-life XP because of a generation of things like netbooks that couldn't run Vista. (I have one running XP Home and dual-booting Lubuntu. No way it would run Vista...)

Had MS been willing to delay Vista's release till the general run of machines being sold was powerful enough, a fair number of issues could have been avoided.
______
Dennis

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sorry, but Windows 98 was better then Windows 95.

Those were msdos with a GUI on top, and 98 and 95 were names, not version numbers, and 98 vas not a full version bump over 95, it is like from 8 to 8.1

Anyway,

w8 -> 8 (even)
w7 -> 7 (odd)
vista -> 6 (even)
xp -> 5 (odd)
millenium -> (even)

I think that is far enough for umpty-ump.

[crich70]

From what I understand there is no Win 9 planned. Win 10

[Anthem]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Among other things, some machines Vista was offered on would not pass MS's own Windows certification tests.

But MS wanted to End-of-Life WinXP and get a new revenue stream from a new version of Windows. So they created a new level below the old Windows Certified which OEMs bundling Vista could slap on the packaging of such systems.

I believe they called it "Vista Capable" and "Vista Ready". I remember going to the store to purchase a new laptop and paying extreme attention to the little stickers on the machines! Good times.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sorry, but Windows 98 was better then Windows 95.

Windows 98SE is one of the all time great Windows releases... IMO. I loved the crap out of Win98SE.

Originally Posted by crich70

From what I understand there is no Win 9 planned. Win 10

In their infinite Wisdom, they have decided to skip a number. Rampant speculation has ensued.

My favorite theory thus far: "Windows 7 8 9". Get it? Get it? (Just say it out loud)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sorry, but Windows 98 was better then Windows 95.

Yep. Win95 was the first step in an uncomfortable transition phase to move Windows from 16 bit to 32 bit architecture. Win95 was still similar to Win 3.1 - a multi-tasking shell sitting on top of a single-tasking OS. Win98 still had DOS under the hood, but it was essentially a real-mode loader for a protected mode OS. Once Win98 was loaded and active, it took over and DOS was out of the loop. Win98SE polished rough spots in Win98. WinME was essentially Win98 Third Edition instead of a whole new Windows, but MS chose not to play it that way.

I ran Win98SE for some time after Win2K came out, largely because of driver issues. In particular, Win2K had no drivers for my scanner, and Win98 did. When beta drivers for the scanner appeared that worked in Win2K, I mopped my brow in relief and migrated.

The difference was night and day. Win98 had reached the point where I was rebooting four or five times a day to get things done. Win2K just ran. I rebooted only when I was fiddling with hardware, or when a software install or Windows update required it. It was otherwise up 24/7.

There was an open source package that added enough 32 bit support to allow some applications written for Win2K or better to run under Win98, but mostly, people just migrated when they could.
______
Dennis

[eschwartz]

My favorite theory even fits in with the official explanation.

They were trying to run away from Windows 8 as fast as possible.
The first bad-to-good iteration using the new version numbers and they skipped a number obviously Win10 is so good (in comparison) that it deserves two major version bumps.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I'm sorry, but if they had all tose major problems and that was how they chose to spend their time, that was not the least of it.

My point was that they fiddled while vista burned.

Save that Vista didn't burn.

Bear in mind that most folks don't upgrade Windows in place. They get Windows because it comes pre-installed on the PC. They upgrade to a new version of Windows when they get a whole new machine that has the new version pre-installed.

Vista got a lot of (justified) complaints, but machines running it sold. It wasn't so bad it prevented people from upgrading so they wouldn't have to deal with it.

I avoided Vista, but I'm someone who did upgrade Windows in place. I avoided Vista largely because I wasn't ready to to do the significant upgrade on my hardware that Vista would have required. I was still using a 32 bit architecture, and XP still fit my needs.

I recently moved to a 64 bit machine that has Win 7 Pro installed, but avoided Win 8.1, and the fact it had Win 7 Pro instead of Win 8 was a purchase factor.

It will be curious to see how this will affect Win 10. How many people will be in the market to get a new machine that will come with Win 10 when it hits general release? MS may hope for a lot more upgrades-in-place than Windows has historically gotten.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Anthem

I believe they called it "Vista Capable" and "Vista Ready". I remember going to the store to purchase a new laptop and paying extreme attention to the little stickers on the machines! Good times.

Yes, that sounds about right. Vista Capable was the in between certification level created for all the machines that could technically run Vista, but couldn't do it very well.

Windows 98SE is one of the all time great Windows releases... IMO. I loved the crap out of Win98SE.

I ran it for a long time, but like its predecessors, it reached the point where multiple reboots per day were required, and the only cure was reformat and reinstall from scratch. (I had a complex setup, but I saw the same issues on machines with only vanilla Win98 and MS applications.)

Win2K was a dramatic difference, and those problems went away.

In their infinite Wisdom, they have decided to skip a number. Rampant speculation has ensued.

My favorite theory thus far: "Windows 7 8 9". Get it? Get it? (Just say it out loud)

I won't pretend to guess what MS was thinking. I will be curious to see what all Win 10 has. What has been reported thus far, like a Start menu and virtual desktops, is all stuff you can get in Win 8.1 now through third-party offerings.
______
Dennis

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I will be curious to see what all Win 10 has. What has been reported thus far, like a Start menu and virtual desktops, is all stuff you can get in Win 8.1 now through third-party offerings.
______
Dennis

You had but to ask.

Here is Wired's take:

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/windows-10-attack/

But while Windows 10 is a step back for the interface, its underlying strategy is an ambitious leap forward. Under the hood, it’s a far bolder attempt to meet the needs of both desktop and mobile users than Windows 8′s hybrid weirdness. With Windows 10, Microsoft is trying to achieve several big goals at once: Make 75 percent of its desktop users finally consider an upgrade, attract more developers, and elevate its mobile OS beyond also-ran status.

Those last two are where Microsoft can gain the most ground. At its core, Windows 10 is an attempt to realize the dream of “write once, run anywhere” for Windows development. It promises the ability to write software that will magically morph to fit any phone, tablet, desktop, or other device. You won’t have to pick a way to interact with software, which was one of Windows 8’s fatal flaws. Instead, Windows 10 will pick the best software experience for your device.

That holds a lot of promise for a platform that has always been left wanting for mobile developers, as Windows 10 presents a way to attract them through the side door. With a 90-plus-percent market share, the Windows desktop is a hotbed for development. And now that Windows applications will purportedly adapt to any device, that 3-percent Windows Phone market share isn’t a massive obstacle for building up its app market.

Microsoft's spiel:
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwin...ng-windows-10/


ZDNet, with details on how to get into the preview program:
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-wind...ts-7000034210/


And, of course, WinSuperSite:
http://winsupersite.com/windows/micr...ces-windows-10

Schedule. The enterprise-focused Technical Preview starts tomorrow. In early 2015, Microsoft will ship a consumer-oriented milestone and detail new user experiences. In April 2015 at BUILD, the firm will reveal the Windows 10 developer story. And then Windows 10 will ship later in the 2015. How much later? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Note the return of Tiled Windows.
Win 2.0 was really ahead of its time. Three decades!
(Which means Bob might make a com back next decade, with Cortana AI behind him.)

The recent announcement was focused on the corporate users.
Consumer (and XBOX) goodies will be discussed later.

The one platform/one store mantra suggests at least some XBOX ONE games will come to tablets and smartphones. I wouldn't mind seeing Windows ebook apps running on XBOX.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

You had but to ask.

Here is Wired's take:

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/windows-10-attack/

Rather than creating distinct mobile and desktop environments that work more seamlessly together—the Continuity features in OS X Yosemite, for example—Microsoft is building a multi-device platform. A single OS that can run flawlessly on the various devices we use.

I've been watching this process play out for some time, as the industry trend is toward convergence. In market terms, as a market matures, consolidation happens, and you wind up with a few big players and a bunch of folks in niches too small for the big boys to address.

In computers, this has played out in several areas. On the hardware level, we've seen a steady reduction in the number of architectures. While RISC chips like the SPARC and PowerPC are still in use, for the most part the choice has come down to Intel or ARM.

On the OS level, we are seeing a move to run the same OS on any device you have. Apple approaches it with their line - desktops/laptops run OS/X, and everything else runs iOS. In future iterations, I expect to see them converge more than they have, and iOS will be Apple's only OS.

Windows has been moving in that direction, with a flavor of NT on desktop and laptop and Windows Phone on phones. Windows 8 RT was a build of Win 8 that would run on ARM based tablets. It did not come as a surprise to me. Dave Cutler, the chief architect of NT, was insistent from the beginning that it be portable and able to be brought up on things that weren't X86 based.

Linux is moving in that direction, since Linux is designed to be portable, and you can get a Linux distro for just about any platform, but Linux has the issue of fragmentation, and so many distros, with the only thing in common on some of them being a Linux kernel. That might just coalesce around Android, which runs on phones and tablets, and has an alpha X86 port that could become a desktop offering.

The changes discussed so far are all the visible ones, and I'm curious to see what changes MS may make on the system level.

On that line, one of the most interesting possibilities was one MS was rumored to be working on for the development code named Longhorn, which became Vista. MS was reported to be thinking about a whole new file system, moving away from NTFS and using a model derived from SQL Server. It reminded me a bit of Pick OS, which included a relational database and programming language (Pick BASIC) as part of the core OS, not a layered product.

I'm just as happy MS didn't do it, but it would have been fascinating if they had. It illustrates one of the trends in overall development. IBM's mainframes used a variety of file systems, and it's mainframe OS had a built in level of application awareness as a result. Unix took the opposite direction, where everything was a file, and a file was an arbitrary stream of bites. It knew about standard files, "special" files (devices), and directories. A program was simply a file with the execute bit set in the permissions mask. Whether the file could actually be run as a program was the user's problem. Unix would let you try, and just fail with an error if it couldn't.

Windows is closer to the Unix model than the zOS model, since NTFS is now the default file system, and programs are still files, but more application and awareness and support on the OS level is still a possibility.

The bigger question as platforms converge is precisely applications. Not only do you want the OS to run on any platform, you want your applications to do so as well. This is possible to some extent now as hardware has grown steadily more powerful. The rise of cross-platform scripting languages like Java and Python has made it possible to create applications that will run on any platform that has a current version of the language runtime. The runtime hides the hardware and OS differences, and you can write and compile code on one platform and run the result on another. Current hardware is powerful enough that you can write in something like Java or Python and get acceptable performance, instead of having to use a language the compiles to native machine code. Kovid Goyal's Calibre, written in Python, and available for Windows, Linux, and OS/X is an exampel familiar to MR readers.

MS has made a start on this, and I expect to see that effort continued as time goes on.
______
Dennis

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The changes discussed so far are all the visible ones, and I'm curious to see what changes MS may make on the system level.

On that line, one of the most interesting possibilities was one MS was rumored to be working on for the development code named Longhorn, which became Vista. MS was reported to be thinking about a whole new file system, moving away from NTFS and using a model derived from SQL Server. It reminded me a bit of Pick OS, which included a relational database and programming language (Pick BASIC) as part of the core OS, not a layered product.

I'm just as happy MS didn't do it, but it would have been fascinating if they had.
______
Dennis

Microsoft has been interested in a relational file system since the Cairo Days.

http://www.zdnet.com/bill-gates-bigg...fs-7000011136/

They revisited the technology during Longhorn and more recently. The verdict, so far, is that the hardware (especially hard drives) is not there yet. (It didn't help that the project management was a tad...confused...)

But with SSDs evolving, the day is coming. It will be very useful as they roll out more of their natural language technologies into production. But the efforts they put into the work were not wasted: the Cairo era work fed into Exchange Server and the Longhorn effort fed into Sharepoint, two tidy little billion-dollar businesses in their own right.

Oh, and over at ZDNET they think the real revolution in Windows 10 is in how MS has evolved their workflow to produce and maintain it. There is a reason they are saying it will be the "last" version of Windows.

http://www.zdnet.com/why-microsofts-...ry-7000034147/

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Microsoft has been interested in a relational file system since the Cairo Days.

http://www.zdnet.com/bill-gates-bigg...fs-7000011136/

They revisited the technology during Longhorn and more recently. The verdict, so far, is that the hardware (especially hard drives) is not there yet. (It didn't help that the project management was a tad...confused...)

The links accorded with my memories of the period.

Especially the note from an MS staffer in the process that if you asked any three members of the WinFS effort, you would get three different answers as to just what it was. If you can't clearly define what problem you are addressing, it's no surprise if you don't get a solution out the door.

But with SSDs evolving, the day is coming. It will be very useful as they roll out more of their natural language technologies into production. But the efforts they put into the work were not wasted: the Cairo era work fed into Exchange Server and the Longhorn effort fed into Sharepoint, two tidy little billion-dollar businesses in their own right.

Well, SSDs certainly provide access an order of magnitude faster, though I don't expect to see the full effects till costs drop further, and we see new underlying storage media that aren't subject to the limits on writes that current NAND flash is.

But the underlying idea isn't exactly new. A database I used to deal with under Unix offered best performance if the data store was placed on a "raw" partition. It did its own low-level disk access and got performance gains by bypassing the OS file system. Of course, that was in the days of things like MFM drives, and drive performance has improved to the point where the impulse that drove the approach isn't as pressing.

(I just went to an SSD for OS and programs on the current desktop, and spent some effort setting stuff up to minimize writes, with the intent that the SSD hold programs an OS and be primarily read from, but most frequently updated data would be on a standard HD. But it's wonderfully fast. Being able to boot to a Win7 desktop in 30 seconds, or a Ubuntu Login screen in 20 is a refreshing experience.)

Oh, and over at ZDNET they think the real revolution in Windows 10 is in how MS has evolved their workflow to produce and maintain it. There is a reason they are saying it will be the "last" version of Windows.

They certainly needed to revamp their workflow. Everything I heard about the Windows code base and development process, and the number of different folks who got to pee in the design soup, reminded me a bit of Hollywood and movie production: it's a miracle anything got out the door at all, and a double miracle if it was good.

The focus on the Enterprise customer is also a requirement. I've been part of company-wide Windows upgrades. They are complex and expensive, and addressed because the company doesn't have a choice, and has to upgrade to continue.

This reluctance affects the rate at which Windows upgrades take place. A new Windows version might have things of value, but the perceived pain of making the change outweighs the gains to be achieved, and the enterprise stays put.

The model MS seems to be moving toward looks a bit like what I see with Ubuntu Linux: a continuing stream of updates pushed to the machine, with a reboot only when something like a new Linux kernel requires it.

MS also seems to be moving to a more modular design, where CIOs can pick just what parts they want to upgrade as defined by their business needs, and not have to get everything in a new release.

I expect future Windows versions to be identified in terms of milestones achieved and bundles of features offered, but not tied to version numbers, and not happening all at once for all concerned. That's the development model in an increasing number of areas. I run Firefox, and Firefox went to a rapid release model a while back where there is a new major version every three months. I use Nightly, which will be Firefox 35 down the road, but for some time I've had to look at Help: About to know just which version I am running.
______
Dennis

[fjtorres]

Heh. Here's a very logical reason why MS went with Windows 10 and not nine:
http://www.cnet.com/news/is-this-why...it-windows-10/

Yet no explanation seems to come close to matching that of a self-described Microsoft developer who goes by the name cranbourne on the social news site Reddit. The user points the finger at Microsoft's almost 20-year-old releases that helped make the software maker a household name during the rise of the PC:

Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form


if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) { /* 95 and 98 */ } else {

and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that.

"Having worked on the Windows compatibility team before, I have no difficulty believing this," wrote user richkzad in response. There are in fact examples of this on publicly available code repositories.

In other words, a lot of existing software, upon seeing "Windows 9" would switch to Win95/98 code and would misbehave and have to be rewritten.

Windows 10 won't have that problem because there is virtually no Windows 1.x software still in use. (There should be none but it is a near certainty that somewhere, somebody has some Win1 code running.)

[Glorfindel]

^That makes sense

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

In other words, a lot of existing software, upon seeing "Windows 9" would switch to Win95/98 code and would misbehave and have to be rewritten.

... except that you don't test for Windows versions like that. You do it by calling the "GetVersion" or "GetVersionEx" Windows APIs, and they return Windows versions as a "major" and "minor" version number, not a string. There's no possible way to confuse Windows 95 with Windows 9. Windows 95 returns a version of "4.0", Windows 98 is "4.1".