The moving train wreck that is Windows Vista finally began to approach its destination last week with the release of another major test version: beta 2. This should mean it is ”feature complete”, with only bug fixes, performance tuning and a final polish before it reaches businesses at the end of this year, and consumers at the start of next year.
Looked at objectively, from a suitable distance, through half-closed eyes, it looks good. In particular, the graphics are often stunning when running the new Aero Glass user interface.
The white unpainted areas and jaggedy lines often visible in Windows XP seem to be a thing of the past. In fact, you get something closer to the graphics performance of a good game, and for the same reason — the graphics card is doing most of the work, instead of leaving it to the main processor. As a result, Microsoft says going back to a ”lower” version of Windows can mean it slows down instead of speeding up, because the load is thrown back on to the CPU.
The new transparency — the Glass that has been added to the Aero interface — looks nice but may not last. At least it’s controlled from a sliding scale, so you can set how much transparency you want.
But there is still a lot to do, and beta 2 desperately needs the computer equivalent of a house doctor — a function Steve Jobs performs at Apple — to get the dozens of programming teams to throw out the crap, or at least get their corners, rules and spaces reasonably consistent.
Still, Microsoft hauled more than one hundred journalists and analysts from 15 countries to a Vista reviewers’ workshop in Seattle, so we could get our copies of the new beta from the fair hands of Jim Allchin, who has run Windows development for more than a decade. He duly appeared on stage with the first box of beta 2’s, so we got them before the PC makers at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Not that they were any use until an access code appeared in our mailboxes later.
Allchin then gave a memorable goodbye speech, using words such as ”naive”, ”hugely painful” and ”humbled” because once Vista ships, he’s being replaced by Steve Sinofsky, the current head of Microsoft Office.
Having taken Microsoft from zero market share to a market-leading position in the server operating system market, Allchin has earned his crust. But, as he admitted, ”I was naive about how big a deal the attacks [on Windows XP] were going to be”.
Being handed a PC that was so infested with malware, even he could not clean it up, was ”a humbling experience”, he confessed.
A lot of the work that has gone into Vista is invisible because it has been devoted to cleaning out insecurities, hardening services and sandboxing applications such as Internet Explorer 7+. Vista now seems much better than XP SP2, which was dramatically better than XP. Whether it’s enough, only time and the attentions of thousands of criminal, commercial malware writers will tell.
A lot more work is equally invisible, because it caters for the needs of Vista’s biggest and most important market: businesses. For example, Vista now installs as a single image, which is simply copied across, rather than as a sequence of separate files. Big companies like to construct and deploy their own operating system image — typically including Windows and their main applications — but Microsoft’s system is novel in that it can install an image on an existing hard drive without destroying applications and data. These can be picked up later.
This also explains why all the versions of Vista, from Home Basic to the Ultimate kitchen sink version, appear to take up the same 15GB of hard drive space. You get the whole thing, and can upgrade from one version to another just by entering a code, without doing another installation or a long download.
It’s clever, but risky. Decisions have not been taken, but I was given to understand Microsoft was unlikely to ship the full image in countries with a high incidence of software piracy.
Vista also uses Windows PE (pre-installation environment) and, according to Windows’ client group product manager Stella Chernyak, it can self-repair an otherwise unbootable system about 80% of the time. Since the main costs of an enterprise operating system are installation and support, Chernyak argued, Vista could save companies money.
And from a corporate point of view, it is extremely important Microsoft is launching new versions of Windows and Office at the same time, then a new version of Windows Server. After years without a significant upgrade in functionality, companies will be able to make one great leap forward. This will obviously be very convenient, and money could pour into Microsoft’s already overflowing coffers.
For those of us who have been following this particular development from the storage principles that appeared in the 1990s (Cairo) through to the Longhorn ideas that Microsoft showed even before the release of Windows XP, Vista looks a bit of a disaster. If Microsoft had delivered what it promised in, say, 2004, it would have led the market. Instead, it’s offering much less, and delivering it much later — probably after three or even more versions of, say, Mac OS X.
But, of course, we’re an insignificant number of people with little money and even less influence. Vista is probably going to ship about 500-million copies in 2007/08, with more than 10 000 PC manufacturers pre-installing it on almost every machine they make, across the four corners of the earth. And paying Microsoft about $25-billion in cash.
I suspect most of these naive users will find a lot to like in Vista. They will like the clean interface and the speed of Windows Media Player 11, the extra security and enhanced features of Internet Explorer 7+ (quick tabs, RSS feed detection, page zooming, print-to-fit), and the vastly improved Start menu. They will love the way little screen images pop up from the taskbar, and the way they can mouse-wheel rapidly through screens in Flip 3D mode — with videos still running. Some less jaded users will enjoy the gadgets — clock, slide show, weather information etc — that show in the Vista Sidebar, as per Konfabulator, or on accessory screens.
At least the geekier ones may discover other little features, such as the ability to link two PCs via Wi-Fi, in Vista’s MeetingSpace, the ability to use plug-in USB thumb drives to add to their PC’s memory (ReadyBoost), hard drives with built in Flash memory (ReadyDrives), and support for things like 802.11i networking and Internet Protocol IPv6.
Vista will not get people dancing in the streets — except maybe Allchin — but it will probably keep the Windows market rolling for a few more years. Microsoft has certainly been through a bad patch, but the worst may be over. – Guardian Unlimited Â