Steve Jobs thoughts on Longhorn

[Excerpt]:

With Mac OS 9 and the current Windows it's like you have a house that's eight stories and when you want to add on that ninth story, you spend 80 to 90 percent of your energy not working on the ninth story but shoring up the first eight stories, because if you put the ninth story on, it will collapse of its own weight. ... With OS X we don't have to do that any more. We can spend 90 percent of our time adding floors above the eighth floor, and so look at how much faster we can go.

We're seeing tremendous software innovation within Apple because of that, both in the operating system itself and the applications that go with it, as well as our applications division. Tremendous, tremendous innovation. I think we can out-innovate Microsoft. I think we have, I think we've proven that. I think we will continue to. We're on our fourth major release of Mac OS X within three years. Microsoft, they're looking like they're running four years between software releases, and we're roughly one a year right now. ... Their last release was in 2001, and Longhorn looks like it will get out in 2006, maybe. Maybe. That's five years! ...

They're hoping in 2006 to be where we were in Jaguar, basically. That's what they're hoping. Obviously we're going to have a few more releases before 2006 so we'd be way ahead of them by then. But that's what they're hoping for, and maybe they'll do that. They have a lot of people to work on it, but it's a rough row to hoe. You've got a lot of apps that have to change. It's taken us -- Jaguar was really the first release of Mac OS X that really took off and it was our third release, before we finally had all the developers on board, everybody had learned about the new stuff enough, rewritten their apps enough, enough apps were out, and I don't see that the laws of physics are going to be too different for them. It's going to be a long road. They have perseverance, and they'll make it, but it's not going to happen the year they release their operating system. It takes a while. But in any event, I have a lot of confidence that we can be the most innovative software company ... going forward.

Source: Seattlepi.com

One point I agree with Steve Jobs is the fact that I don't believe Longhorn will be fully debugged and operational on the launch day.

When you look at the number of bugs outstanding in the current Windows versions, you can imagine what it's going to be after a big shake up like Longhorn.
And it's not only a question of service packs, it's more like Steve experienced with Mac OS X, a question of embracing all the developers community, convincing them of all the benefits they can get from a new platform. Hard task !

That's why I decide like surely many others 'feet-on-the-ground' developers, to not working too much for the moment on Longhorn.
Of course, curiosity is part of every developer's brain, so I'll continue to read and comment the future.

The only exception is Whidbey with a release in 2004, which is a more closer step to achieve.

 

2 Comments

  • another in a long line of "The Steve & Bill show".....



    :-) two smart guys who have been out doing each other for years.....



    and for contrast back when steve was doing NExT

    he said in a Red Herring intervew that Netscape would lose the browser war and should focus on server software to make money, he also said it was better to write software for Windows than to fight windows.



    BTW: this is true and was said at a time when netscape was selling browser packages to users and to ISP's.

  • One other thing to bring up is the time between releases. It is ok to do frequent releases when your installed user base is the size of OS X's. But Microsoft understands with the size of their user base that people don't want to upgrade every year (like OS X).



    Also, it speaks to the mission-critical nature of the apps running on the operating system. Regardless of how much better it is, businesses have fixed or work-around the current setup. Any mission-critical app will be tested for *long* periods of time before rolling out a new OS release. This is why so many people are still running Windows NT4.

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