I don't understand the longhorn-hype

There will be a new operating system among us in a couple of years: the OS currently code-named 'Longhorn'. The date today is September 29th, 2003. Longhorn is expected in late 2005. That's almost 2 years from now. In these two years, we have to live with Windows XP, that's the current top desktop OS Microsoft has to offer.

Don't get me wrong, I love to look at and play with new software, what the (near) future will bring us, I'm a geek after all. However the last couple of weeks started me thinking why is Microsoft not fixing Windows XP more and why isn't Microsoft releasing service packs for Windows XP on a more frequently basis? And I don't mean just service packs to fix code bugs, but also to fix design bugs. What I understood from reading the material that is available about Longhorn is that it is an OS that should be fixing a lot of the design bugs we run into today. However, that will be 2 years from now, the 'fixes' will be brought to us in a new OS, which will bring us new problems, which will be patched... when? In the Longhorn successor?

"But Windows XP is already rock-solid and stable, you're whining!". I know XP is pretty stable, I haven't seen a crash in ages, so it's not XP's stability per se, it's the awkwardness that's in the shell that's bugging me. Let's walk through some examples to get a clear picture.

  • Spontaneous restarting of the shell. It just happened to me again. I clicked on the shortcut of the explorer on my 'quick-launch' bar and the shell completely vanished, taskbar, everything. Out of nowhere, 'explorer' restarts itself and the shell is back up. I'm a software developer, so instead of thinking 'Ah, that's a handy feature, it restarts itself when something is wrong', I wonder: 'who put that 'RestartOurselves();' call in the outermost catch() clause of explorer.exe so bugs in the shell don't have to be fixed' ? This simply should not happen. The shell should be rock-solid. However, it's not, it's far from 'solid'. Placing a restart call in the outermost catch clause is the hint that something serious is wrong in the design of the shell. This behaviour was already present in windows 2000's shell, so it isn't anything new either. Still, we have to wait till 2005 to see if this gets fixed, eventually. Why isn't this fixed today? Can anyone answer me that, please? When you're drooling over Longhorn's Avalon Shell, please consider that today's shell isn't good enough. We don't need anything new in 2005, we need something new that works today. The irony is, the shell is integrated with internet explorer (when explorer.exe is killed, all iexplorer.exe processes die too) and internet explorer is not updated anymore. This gives me the feeling we won't see serious updates in the XP shell in the two years (!) to come either.
  • Silly GUI behaviour. I don't run my desktop in 640x480 mode, I run a 1600x1200 desktop. There are a number of silly things in the Windows XP shell and I want to enlighten one in particular so you get a picture about how silly some stuff is. When I right-click on the taskbar near the clock, I can select 'Properties'. Do you know where that properties dialog is placed on the screen? On the other side of the desktop, above the start-button. Now, this might sound irrelevant but the problem, as tiny as it might be, is perfectly illustrative of the common problem of the Windows XP desktop and why we need a replacement today: it is not designed to be helpful. Why is that dialog not popping up above my mouse-cursor like other property windows are? There are more examples of this: when you develop a winforms application or a win32 desktop application and you have a couple of windows to open, ever thought: "Why are these windows opened at random places on the screen." ? Why can't the default of the Windows XP shell be that it opens the window in the center of the screen, unless the developer has stated otherwise? With a desktop of 640x480 it is not a big problem, with desktops bigger than that it is.

My point is not to enlist a couple of shortcomings in the Windows XP shell. What I want to illustrate is that Microsoft acts too late and wrong when it comes to shortcomings to their own products. Some irritating shell behaviour was already present in NT4, why are we still accepting the fact that we have to deal with them today? I find that weird. Are we tired? Are we convinced that asking for patches (for Windows XP, the next service pack is not released in the near future, we have to wait at least a year) or functionality updates that are really necessary is useless? Why are we forgetting the current problems when we're talking about Longhorn? I don't get that hype. Longhorn might be good, better than whatever is on the planet at that date. However till that day, we have to deal with the current problems which are not addressed today nor will be in the near future, if ever.

A similar approach is taken in the Office group and the VS.NET group. I blogged some time ago (more than 2 months ago) about when the service pack for Visual Studio.NET 2002 would be released, after all it was promised by Microsoft. As it turned out, VS.NET 2003 seems to be the service pack for 2002, but it comes with a price tag. It's not the money the 2003 upgrades costs (however, after September 30th, it will cost a lot of money), it's the principle of fixing errors customers run into. Microsoft more and more seems to create hype around unreleased upcoming products and simply forgets to release updates for current products. I switched to Open Office because of the lack of serious bugfixing in Word XP. I could buy Office 2003, but why? To get fixes for a word processor I already own a license for? That's the world upside down. I don't need more functionality, I want the current functionality to work as planned. Word XP already contains more features I'll ever need, but a lot of them are broken (tables, bullet lists, headers) one way or the other. It might be caused by whatever I have installed on my system, but if that's the case it would be truly bad: software should be atomic, if application A can break functionality in application B, in the year 2003, application B is not well designed.

I'll check out Longhorn when it arrives. However 2 years is a long period. I thought I'd never say this, but I might have switched over to another platform by then (since Mono will be mature enough in 2005); this 'just wait for the next release'-attitude is not what customers deserve and I'm not willing to support it any more and neither should you. Hype is fine, looking at fancy screenshots and video's of demonstrations at the PDC on a rainy Sunday is fun, but never forget what the current situation is and that with the effort that is put into producing 'the next release', the current release would have been much better. After all, Windows XP was Windows 2000' successor, and it isn't perfect either, so why should Longhorn be?

17 Comments

  • Agreed!



    I guess the reasoning behind this is they consider that the current versions work well enough. And they want to avoid touching it because changes may be break them in unpredictable ways.

    Microsoft prefers to start a new beta program with a lot of bug to fix than introduce more bugs in a deployed release.

  • Alot of it, I think, is that we just simply get used to the foibles and work around them. I have one major shell complaint: when you have a large number of files in a folder,say 500-3000, not only does the shell load way too slowly(especially if they are pictures), but if you switch from Tile to List, the list view doesn't paint properly and you end up with 2 or 3 files in each column off the screen. The result of this is that I automatically hit refresh after changing the view type, because I know I'm going to have to.



    Another large part is, does anyone ever complain about such things? Has it occured to anyone to email microsoft to complain about where the taskbar properties shows up? Until reading this post I hadn't even considered an issue with it, it was simply "there", and I would automatically move my mouse there, To be perfectly honest, changing it now would confuse me more than it would help, I'm far too set into that pattern. I agree it is a little bit of a strange behaviour, but it is cleanly set into my mind now.



    Another piece is maybe, just maybe, most people like things the way they are in situation A, or no one can agree on what behaviour situation B should exhibit, so they do something and let it be. In any system you work with, you are going to find things that you don't like, its just a fact of life. It applies to computers, cars, tv's(takes 3 buttons to set the sleep timer, I think it should only be one), microwaves(I have to press a cook button before I can put in the time to cook. why? Its a damn microwave, I obviously usually use it to cook.), and lawnmowers(one pull ignition takes 3-5 pulls). If you move on to Linux, MacOSX, FreeBSD, whatever, I'm sure you will find things you don't like about that system too. And I'd be willing to bet that some of the things you don't like the primary developers will not change because they or a majority do, or because its minor enough that its pretty far down the list. Sure, in some of them you can go down and change it yourself, but if you have time to hack into and recompile your system code everytime you think something should be different, then I'm jealous of the amount of time you have.



    Now, I agree that Microsoft does a bad job on fixes. Having to contact product support services to get a QFE to something is really silly in my opinon. Especially since half the time you don't even know a patch exists until someone tells you on the newsgroups. A granular, automated, system wide update tool is needed. By this point it should be beyond easy to be well aware of every patch Microsoft has available for windows, office, or any other microsoft software, which patches you have installed, etc.



    The open source community has the luxury of releasing bug fixes every step down the line, of course, they can also release 80 minor versions a year, or even nightly builds. It is simultaenously an advantage and disadvantage. While its easy to keep your products up to date with bug fixes, etc, it is impossible to ever really be caught up or maintain feature equivilence across the board. I imagine it can make support and training a nightmare, because person 1 has 1.1.1, person 2 1.1.2, person 3 1.1.2.1b, and so on, especially if 1.1.2b adds a menu entry or changes wording slightly.



    The open source and small companys have that luxury; Microsoft needs to find a way to provide equivilant fixes and feature upgrades to its users. I just don't see how they can realistically do it. With the level of security scrutiny and testing they are expected to provide, how can they? If they were to make a quick fix for something not vital and it changed something distant, something no one expected(and stuff like that happens, you know that, no matter how rarely), it is a very straight forward fact that the media and the users would roast the company for it. If Redhat did it, no one would give a damn. There is politics in this too. It is unfortunate, but sometimes it is us, the users, that make it impossible for Microsoft to provide us with the services we demand.



    If you expect perfection, the only thing you will probably ever get is perfect disappointment.



    I dearly hope no one really expects Longhorn, or anything else for that matter, to be perfect, it will not be, it cannot be, nothing ever is.

  • I hate to say it (I am not one of those anti everything Microsoft types), but my belief is that this is the result of the dominance Microsoft has in the marketplace. In comparsion to say, the car market where there's lots of competing players around - new cars are released around once a year, if the new model isn't as good as the competition, people simply buy the other model. Both cars essentially offer the same features for around the same price and you could say that they run on the same 'platform' (ok, bad pun...it's a road...). Bugs in cars are extremely costly for the manufacturer both in terms of repair costs and in terms of future sales (would you buy a car who's gas tank explodes? Would you buy another car from the same manufacturer?). Basically if you work in the buisiness world ,you have very limited choice in the software you run, one company in essence controls the roads AND the cars.

    Bugs in the products they supply don't really affect future sales - there's no real competition so the spectre of potential lost sales is very minimal - Linux and OpenOffice are not percieved as real alternatives (ask around a normal office - who's even heard of OpenOffice?).

    One thing in Microsoft's defence, bugs are in general just annoying (though in terms of Security, they can prove VERY annoying) - they probably won't kill anyone. Also, the products are pretty good (I have WAY more issues with OpenOffice / Star Office than MS Office 2003).

    I also don't begin to imagine that Longhorn will be perfect - but I do believe that for the ordinary user it will be WAY ahead of the competition (umm...not counting Macs here...that's a fantastic OS...they just lost the war when it comes to user base)...

  • There could be a few other reasons too.



    First, fixing any kind of bug increases revenue by... zero? There simply is no finanacial impetus for MS to spend any more time than absolutely necessary on things like bug-fixing. Unfortunate but true.



    Second, however much one may argue MS never truely innovates, one thing they have made a name on is working feverishly to stay ahead of the curve. Focus on the future - oddly enough, the antithesis of "Where do you want to go today?" - and pour money and resources into the next product, the next release.



    I've questioned time and again recently a concern that this time they may actually get hurt. Literally hundreds of bloggers are posting delerious items about this year's PDC to the point that some are even begging for donations to attend now. In the meanitme MS is not only foregoing an XP service pack for another 3 quarters, they are not working on any new versions of some of their existing products - including IE. There _are_ competitors out there making good products and supporting them. Products that run _today_ on today's PC. In the meantime MS is focusing on a killer OS that won't see the light of day for at least 2 more years and virtually no machine out there right now could even run it!

  • Daniel: good solid piece of writing. Your remark "If you expect perfection, the only thing you will probably ever get is perfect disappointment. " deserves to end up in a lot of signatures :) I agree that perfection can't be achieved easily, however I get the feeling Microsoft isn't even trying: after a release there will be errors and bugs but MS refuses to patch these.



    The myth about 'it might break something' is IMHO totally bogus. When a piece of code isn't working as planned, you should make it work as planned. That doesn't have to require interface (code) changes, just reimplementations of current code.



    Scott: I agree, however I think Linux will be an alternative for a lot of people within a year. KDE and Gnome are really on track to become solid platforms.



    Dave: Exactly. I think it is revenue driven not to patch a lot or better: to spend a lot of resources on customer support. On the other hand, they have enough revenue to get customer support on a higher level and still make money.

  • My shell restarts very infrequently and when it does i always assumed this was because of a 3rd party app hanging the system. I would rather have restart called and have the OS pull out of the nose-dive as opposed to having to give a 3 finger salute and start all over possibly losing work. I never attributed the restart to a known bug in the shell that they refused to fix (maybe im wrong?). As for the other issue of the properties dialog, I cannot reproduce this on my system nor have i ever seen it on anyone elses (even on dual monitor setups). That issue not withstanding, I havent obeserved many other bugs of this nature either.



    But besides the fact that i dont agree with the specific issues you raise, the overall sentiment i can agree with.. especially the one about competition. I hope OSS gains more momentum and puts more pressure on MS to start delivering better products at more competitive prices.

  • I agree with your sentiments regarding the lack of bug-fixes.



    But regarding your post title "I don't understand the longhorn-hype":



    I think you understand the hype very well - people are excited about a new OS, and XP is old news.

  • "I think you understand the hype very well - people are excited about a new OS, and XP is old news."

    Well, I understand that the hype is there and what's causing it, and at the same time do not understand why the hype is there, because XP might look old news, it will still be the reality for the next 2 years to come, without a big improvement in sight (perhaps a new moviemaker, oh the joy). People should realize that hyping the next-generation OS is not what we need, we need focus on today's problems with solutions available today, not tomorrow nor next year but today.

  • Another thing, after sleeping on it, one of the things I'm looking foward to in longhorn is the hope that some of the major platform issues that cause programs to break (COM plugins, etc) may be resolved as .NET style designs are used....that may still be a dream however

  • Let's face it: it was hype that got people to purchase Windows XP in the first place. Windows 2000 had been out for a good 2 years when it was released. The smart consumer would have purchased Windows 2000 back in '99, skipped the incremental Windows XP release and had a solid and financially smart 6 years between OS upgrades. That is unless of course you managed to justify spending $100-$200 on a brand new skin and a new login screen with pictures. People need to start making smarter choices as consumers. You don't complain to car companies when the release a new model each and every year, do you? No, you just don't buy it. Period.

  • "You don't complain to car companies when the release a new model each and every year, do you? No, you just don't buy it. Period."



    True, but if said car company refused to maintain their products that were over eight years old, I would complain. And, look for another car company.



    I beleive that Microsoft has some really innovative products, but that their biggest product, Office, is peaked and invation saturated. How much more can you change a word processor? How many more features can you add? I agree with Fran, if you want to keep the client, fix the bugs.



    I see in corporate offices the decision makers are asking why they need to spend more money on technology. How can the CIO justifiy spending more money on a tool they just bought two years ago and probably haven't even fully amortized yet. A goat takes five years to amortize, why should a word processor be any less?



    If your not part of or contributing to the bottom line, you are overhead. Overhead is dispensable.

  • Now Darren, I believe I must disagree. A year ago I'd stand alongside your comment about Office and new features and changing word processors. But have you checked out those exact things in Office 2003? InfoPath and native XML come to mind immediately.



    Granted, at this moment those two things are completely meaningless to 'consumers', but given a year or two of developers creating their part and, well, I find Office 2003 to be the first version with significant improvements since Office 97.



    Oddly enough, MS in many ways did get it right with Office 2003. First off, the new features I just mentioned are very good reason to purchase it - reasons that didn't exist for Office 98 through XP. I realize this also means MS gets the increased revenue too, but then again... during the development/beta cycles for 2003 they also released a slew of SRs too. Something they don't seem to be doing for Windows XP.

  • 1995

    ====

    Bob: Boss! There's a great new Office product to go with that new OS!



    Boss: Great! Email!?! This will help productivity! Get it for every one!



    1997

    ====

    Bob: Boss, there's a new Office product out, it fixes a lot of bugs!



    Boss: Great! Bugs are bad! You computer guys sure are helping out the company!



    2000

    ====

    Bob: Boss, there's a new Office product out, it is Y2K compliant.



    Boss: Well, this is getting a bit expensive but corporate did just make it the standard. Make sure everyone gets a new Anti-virus too, someone out doesn't Love Me.



    2002

    ====

    Bob: Boss, there's a new Office product!



    Boss: No.



    Bob: It has increased security!



    Boss: No.



    Bob: It looks cool!



    Boss: No.



    Bob: There's someone fromt eh BSA at the front desk.



    Boss: What! Ok, we can upgrade, but we have to lay off half the IT staff. We can outsource the help desk.



    2003

    ====

    Bob: Boss! There's a new Office product!



    When will it end?

  • Derek-the difference with car companies is that they can be forced to recall vehicles to fix problems that are wide spread-at no cost to customer. They also have the warrenty itself to cover the vehicle. There are guidlines for safety set forth by the government that they must adhere to. Would you except it if your model's A/C system failed and the dealership said wait for the '04 model it should be fixed in those-for 16,000 dollars? Microsoft has no accountability-that's the problem. Mercedes-benz had a slew of issues in the last few years with the managment of all the new electronic systems and they were forced to buy back all the e-class models that were having issues. Oes microsoft buy back copies of office-no.

  • Frans, sure XML functionality has been part of 'open office' or even MS Office (in case you meant StarOffice or whatever). But _native_ XML storage of Excel spreadsheets? XSL formatting? You might as well say do your webpage development in Word and use the utterly useless "Save as HTML" feature for comparison.



    I never meant to say that Office was bug-free, onl.y to say that MS never stopped publishing coherent bugfixes while developing a new version. Which is something that they are with Longhorn.



    Derrick, please note I did not say Office 2003 offered _immediate_ paybacks to the 'consumer'. Only that the development features I mentioned will in time be used by the consumers in ways that will IMHO make it considered the next 'true' version since Office 97, when Outlook became an official part of the product.

  • - If you look at the reliability of Windows starting from 3.1 to 2003, the OS has been improved alot and with many new productivity features. MS could have improved 3.1 for 13 years and give us a rock solid Windows 3.1 but MS is in the business of making money and companies would have moved to Novell, Unix or Mac if Windows 3.1 stayed with its current features. MS needs to fix its security and the updates feature. I read just today that MS admits that its security update strategy is flawed and will patch it using a new method.



    I like MS products and they have increased my productivity as a user and as a developer many times. My only gripe is that every new version demands more computer resources. However I don't mind upgrading my computer every 2 years. Need to do this anyhow for games too :)



    If there's anything you don't like about an MS product, you need to let them know. If enough people complain, they will notice and hopefully do something. It doesn't them any good if you complain quitely.



    Every product I use has annoyances and you learn to live with them or use something else. For example, my inlaws' Blazer's cupholder is the most idiotic one. It doesn't have enough depth to hold a tall cup and has no grip. I have to take easy turns to avoid spilling the cup. Can I call this a design bug?

    My alarm clock off button is in an obscure place. I have to be 60% awake to find it and turn it off. Time to buy a new one. .. and so many other annoyances.



    Abdu

  • Explorer loads lots of 3.party DLLs in its process space. In fact it can host IE, Thumbnailviewers (e.g. thumbnails of .eml-files) and lots of extensions to the menus of files.



    I wonder whether such a thing can ever be stable!



    But you can just replace the explorer.exe-shell with cmd.exe or Cygwin Bash if you want. Or progman.exe (in XP). Just do it!

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