“The browser wars may be over, but the battle of the search engines is just heating up. Apple Computer early this week demonstrated a search engine, due next year, that will let Mac users quickly comb the contents of their computers for hard-to-find items such as photos and E-mails. Apple says the technology will give it a lead on similar functionality Microsoft plans to include in its next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. ‘It’s easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk,’ Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at a developers conference in San Francisco this week,” Aaron Ricadela reports for InformationWeek.
“Microsoft is developing a new file system for Longhorn, which is due in 2006 at the earliest, that could make searching a variety of sources easier… In an upgrade to its OS X operating system, code-named Tiger and due next year, Apple plans to release technology called Spotlight that can scan a Mac’s file system, plus indexes of documents’ contents and metadata about their authorship and attributes. At the San Francisco developers conference, Jobs demonstrated Spotlight searches for Office documents, E-mails, address-book entries, Adobe PDF files, and images,” Ricadela reports.
“The ability to quickly find images will become more important as use of Macs and PCs to manage photos and videos grows,” Ricadela reports. “‘Neither Apple nor Microsoft has said that this global hard-drive search is trivial,’ says Tim Bajarin, president of consulting company Creative Strategies. ‘But it is clear if Apple delivers Tiger in the first half of ’05, they’re going to have quite a lead on Longhorn in that area.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: 2006? Microsoft’s ever-slipping, vaporous Windows “Longhorn” could be delayed until 2008 or 2009, according to Gartner. “Longwait” might have been a better codename. Moo.
Talking about search, I hope Google can keep the new MSN search at bay….
Windoze is better now!
Hit search and watch the flashlight and the dog for a few minutes it is really a lot of fun weeeeee!
?
I have never been able to get results out of the search dog in XP. I am already plenty happy with Panther’s search functions.
I think Tiger will be a great OS.
But I think its ridiculous to think that MS would delay shipment until 2007 or beyond, they just can’t afford to do that. MS might suck, but obviously they aren’t idiots.
Is there a site for Wintel systems like MDN is for Macs? I wanted to go to one and see their comments on Tiger (if any)… and maybe make a comment or 2
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
Wingsy,
Try Microsoft Watch. One of their columnists, Mary Jo Foley, keeps an eye on all things OS X, and is usually surprisingly complimentary. Her latest column pits Tiger against Longhorn.
Microsofties are not idiots, but they are also crippled in what they can do. they can’t displace every existing PC. there is just too much software momentum. most of what they are doing right now is probably making sure most of what works in XP also works in Longwait. So, the difficulty is making sure Longwait will be compatible with most things without sacrificing all those supposed advances they are trying to make. As Apple said, it takes a lot of time and work to make your software compatible across vendors, environment, and legacy soft/hard wares. that’s the reason for the delay. if Microsoft’s installed base was more willing to upgrade or simply smaller, they could have done something closer to Mac OS X, but they’re not. that’s their disadvantage, and Apple’s advantage. it’s always easier to turn around a smaller ship than an oil tanker – simple as that. something you need to ride an oil tanker, but something the smaller yacht is way, way better.
The only bad thing about wishing for new Apple products is that I am wishing myself older at the same time.
It is interesting to conjecture how history would be changed by relatively small changes in the timing of certain events. For instance, what if MacOS X 10.3 was the original version of MacOS X? Would that have kicked off an earlier migration to the Mac? Or did that have to wait until the insecurities of MS Windows were repeatedly exposed to the world? What if the G5 had been released a year earlier? It’s a good way to waste some time.
Anyone know how many lines of code OSX has compared to what XP and Longhorn? I would imagine the difference would be considerable and only further proving MS bloated style
Apple has aprox. 1000 engineers working on Mac OS. Ms has many times that amount and takes many times longer to produce a product. Ms will redefine “bloat”, and as such they’ll have a million more locations for a virus to enter.
MS also has tons more money to do what they have to do.
Lines of Windows code version(n) = Lines of Windows code version(n-1) * c ^2
> Try Microsoft Watch
Creepy place, sometimes funny… I go there after Joy of Tech:
How to negotiate with Microsoft — is a good spooky example.
I was figuring that I would have to replace my b/w G4/500 to enjoy the next MacOS. However, Tiger will support all Macs with native Firewire, i.e. the b/w G3s and iMacDVs.
Tiger will ship in early 2005 and will be the up to date MacOS until at least Fall 2006. The G3s will be 8 (eight !) years old and still supported by the current OS! Now, that is ROI.
Longhorn, by contrast, will only run on machines that aren’t even developed yet. Let all the Win apologists try and install Longhorn on a Pentium III @ 350 MHz!
Apple spends between $400-500 million/year on R & D and Micro$oftopoly spends approx 10x as much on average. Makes you wonder what the problem is.
michael said:
“Microsofties are not idiots, but they are also crippled in what they can do.”
While this is true, one must really understand Microsoft’s motives. They only care a little bit about whether or not OS X – or any other OS – is better than Longhorn. What they care is that Longhorn is “Just Good Enough” to fool the average consumer, and get the majority of folks to upgrade. That’s it. Excellence in engineering is not a goal for them. Making money with the least possible engineering effort IS the goal.
The browser wars are not over. Safari rocks.
Wow…i am so excited…wow…all the hype about finding a file on a computer…wow…hoo-hah.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
As if the computer is going to find my photo file named:
“1adf930faa93ser02.jpg” (and i can�t remember the name) any faster…give me a break.
The os developers have just run out of ideas and hyping stuff hardly anybody really, really cares about so that they can get you to justify spending $249 for the next version.
Totally disagree with you there Skreptik. OK, it won’t help you much for pictures unless you add the metadata but I work in science where much information is stored in reports and so on and it is a major hassle to try to keep track of everything. Being able to search reports and so on stored on your hard drive would be great. What would be even better, however, would be able to do the same thing on large network shares which are commonly in a total mess organisationally because so many people use them. There is vast quantities of data on there that is almost lost if you don’t know where it is, a technology like Spotlight could revolutionise the way people find old documents – it was a report about subject x and was from a conference last June. Easy.
I also do a fair amount of web development where it can often be a pain to remember how you implemented some feature in the past using a certain function. I currently keep a Filemaker Pro database where I put bits of useful code so that I can search for them later, rather than try to remember the page in which I used it. Being able to instantly find an example file for a given function would be brilliant. Sure, I could do it in OSX now, but it needs to be almost instantaneous and that is not currently the case when searching file content.
So anyway, roll on Q1 2005 is what I say!
‘almost lost if you don’t know where it is’ – from the John Motson school of English Language that one!
And what’s with the “going to” in the title to this story? Hasn’t Steve Jobs already shown us, earlier this week, that the lead is very real, since he displayed the working demo of Tiger? Apple’s Tiger is, from my perspective, so far ahead of Longhorn at this point. Is there anything comparable out there that shows what Longhorn already CAN and WILL be able to do rather than what they are SAYING it SHOULD do, if and when released?
Re: Buried Caesar..
Only when the product is released.
Re: Buried Caesar:
Beyond the eye-candy Avalaon demo, I have not seen a demo of “Search” in Longhorn!! Does anyone else know whether MS has demoed?
PhilC….maybe for a large scientific data base like you describe…but how many Mac customers are in the same situation as you?
I remember a shareware program a long time ago (OS 8 time frame)that would search for documents based on words or letters. Can�t think of the name, but worked amazingly well.
And what is wrong with the search engine already in the OS…?
Seems like another hyped up gimmick that most will never need.
It can�t find what I can�t remember what it is I called it.
“The os developers have just run out of ideas and hyping stuff hardly anybody really, really cares about”
OK “Skreptik”, I’ll bite. What, in your considered expertise, do computer users “really, really” care about?
It’s true that Microsofties aren’t idiots, however they are taste-deficient.
Skreptik,
Just admit it, you have no clue. It doesn’t just search on the name of the file you dolt. To explain more is beyond your capacity to comprehend, so I won’t belabor the point.
(Belabor, by the way, means beat a dead horse. Beat a dead horse means to waste one’s time. Is that still too hard for you to understans?)