“…Vista sales are far from impressive… I believe there are a number of factors working together here, principally the high cost of the OS, the need to buy better hardware, driver/hardware incompatibility issues and the plain fact that – sexy party dress aside – it’s the same old tart underneath. Contrasting what was originally promised with what was finally delivered, Vista (nee Longhorn) has spectacularly failed,” Dave Jewell writes for The Register.
In “2004, I met with one of the biggest disappointments of my life. Part of the source code to Windows 2000 was leaked onto the net and – yes, you’ve guessed – I took a little peek at it. Instead of the finely honed (well, fairly finely honed) assembler code which had graced the early days of MSDOS, I found a vast sprawl of spaghetti in assembler, C, C++, all held together with blu-tack,” Jewell writes. “I hated that loathsome, tangled, interdependent, unstructured source code. I knew that it would take forever and a day to understand it all, and frankly – why bother? Just one word stuck in my mind: unmaintainable.”
Jewell writes, “As you may remember, Windows XP was already out by the time that source code got leaked. In fact, back in 2004, Microsoft had been talking about Longhorn/Vista for three years. Just a few months after the leak, it was announced that WinFS, the flagship relational file system, wouldn’t ship with Vista after all. And I knew why: unmaintainable.”
Jewell writes, “Microsoft have managed to cobble together a new look and feel for Windows, but a lot of folks are scratching their heads wondering what other advantages there are in upgrading your graphics card and adding another GByte of RAM? What’s the reason? Unmaintainable.”
“In the long years since XP was launched, Apple have come out with five major upgrades to OS X, upgrades which (dare I say it?) install with about as much effort as it takes to brush your teeth in the morning. No nightmare calls to tech-support, no sudden hardware incompatibilities, no hassle. Why hasn’t Microsoft kept up? Unmaintainable,” Jewell writes.
Jewell writes, “Right now, Microsoft has nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. After all the hype surrounding Vista, the Emperor has finally been revealed in all his naked glory. Some folks have been predicting the demise of Microsoft. I wouldn’t go that far, but I am wondering how we’re ever going to take Microsoft seriously again?”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Chas,” “RadDoc,” “Switched,” and “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
Well, I agree with most of what Dave says. Except for this one bit: “Instead of the finely honed (well, fairly finely honed) assembler code which had graced the early days of MSDOS…” What the hell. Does he really think a modern operating system should be written in assembly? That’s assinine. Sure, there will be some functions and methods that contain inline assembly for optimized inner loops, but the bulk of the OS will be C or C++.
“…Vista sales are far from impressive…
I completely disagree. That fact that someone would relinquish their hard earned cash to Microsoft to receive Vista is mind-blowing. I guess that Microsoft now has the most updated database of morons and profligrates.
Sum Jung Gai,
No, he doesn’t expecit it all to be in assembly language, but neither should he exect it to be spaghetti.
“I found a vast sprawl of spaghetti in assembler, C, C++, all held together with blu-tack.”
This article needs to be picked up by every publication on the planet, because this is the truth about Microsoft.
Like it or not MS is damned and no amount of spin and cover up will stop it.
About time.
Every single day we see more and more evidence of how horrifically Micro$haft sucks. It gets tiresome at times, but the clarion call must continue. Why, you ask? Simply this: among the Windoze sufferers are people we love. We must help them overcome their Stockholm Sydrome-like love of this inferior piece o’ s#!t.
There is a road in front of my late grandmother’s house that the city has been patching for over 30 years. Never resurfaced. Never stripped down and rebuilt. Just patched.
The original road is not even visible, just little mounds of patches.
It is a very bumpy ride.
Chris, like I said, I agree with most of what he said. Spaghetti bad. No argument there.
My only criticism is that he seems to be implying that it’s bad to have some assembly, some C, and some C++. That’s nonsense. Every modern application or operating system will, <i>and should<i>, be built of modules created in different languages.
Mac OS X, and all of the major Apple applications, are combinations of Objective-C, C++, C, and assembly. Many also use Objective-C++. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the spaghetti that’s bad in Windows, not the combination of languages.
why is it this site has nearly more vista news than it does mac news?
@tommy
Again, the clarion call must ring! Its to save the hearts and minds of those we love.
(and anyway, it really doesn’t have more vista news)
Spaghetti? MS took so long to release Vista, they could have written it in alphabet soup.
MW “Feed”. Phreaky.
Soup… that explains the delay.
Ballmer couldn’t keep his face out of the bowl.
MW “defense”. I defended Vista!
With all the accounting stuff Microsoft did, it is really hard to tell how Vista is doing. Profits are up, but does that mean that Vista sales are doing well?
tommy,
My guess is that Apple just hasn’t done much in the past few days, and the more people discover how bad Vista is, the more people are going to start considering the Mac platform.
mmmmmmmm…..spaghetti
If there isnt a “Vista” brand name for Swiss Cheese .. there should be
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– “Vista sales are far from impressive”…
It’s just the beginning. Wait until the third and the all important fourth fiscal quarter numbers start rolling in.
– “the high cost of the OS”…
Just a bunch of BS fud. The same kind MDN accuses of others levying against Apple. Most people already have XP and it’s just a $160 upgrade.
– “the need to buy better hardware”…
Vista upgrade works just fine on my 2 year old hardware.
I could just go on and on but I won’t bother. MDN is, as usual, catering to the gullible mac asses (sorry, masses) that want any evidence pointing to the demise of MS. Just who on earth is “regdeveloper.co.uk” ?
“same old tart underneath”
Shouldn’t that be “terd”?
If the world was to stay still I believe MS would not have a problem with maintaining their existing code. The problem is that Apple is about to change radically:
• most Mac models are severely overdue for revisions
• most iLife and iWork apps are also overdue, yet should not rely on a new OS unless they were also undergoing radical change
• Apple’s Cinema displays are way overdue for revision
• Leopard was way overdue (in normal MacOS release times) even for June
• Steve J. has said with glee that there are exciting features ahead for Leopard, yet we have not seen any hint of what these are
• We have some indirect confirmation that Apple is working on a multi-touch screen interface
* Apple likes its products to inter-relate (iMac looks like/works with iPod)
All this adds to interdependent products that cannot be released until the other components are ready – Leopard that drives touch screens that work with touch-screen Cinema displays that work with touch-capable apps and sync to touch-sensitive iPhones.
In a nutshell, once PC 3.0 becomes a reality (character-based IIe & DOS are PC 1.0, WIMP-based MacOS & Win are PC 2.0, multi-touch, integrated, multi-platform Leopard is PC 3.0), MS will start to look old very quickly. Vista has shown MS has found it hard to change anything in its code to make even one radical change, so to get the whole lot cleaned up and working together would be impossible. Buying another app company is no longer going to solve MS’ problems – the consumer is going to expect way more.
Jovial !!!
You’re back from detention you SOB. Now just get the hell out of here before I throw up my lunch reading your moronic comments.
Holy Mackerel, indeed! So what will PC 5.0 be like? I shudder at the thought!
“why is it this site has nearly more vista news than it does mac news?”
Because until iPhone and Leopard are released, there’s really nothing else to talk about.
coolfactor,
didn’t you mean ‘turd’?
Why do I want Microsoft Windows Vista?
@ jovial pc boy
– “Vista sales are far from impressive”…
It’s just the beginning. Wait until the third and the all important fourth fiscal quarter numbers start rolling in.
I heard Microsoft actually has to give <strike>the real</strike> numbers on their earnings. Interesting.
– “the high cost of the OS”…
Just a bunch of BS fud. The same kind MDN accuses of others levying against Apple. Most people already have XP and it’s just a $160 upgrade.
<strike>But says Microsoft,</strike> 20 million people have Vista, and it’s still $200 <strike>for Home Basic</strike>.
– “the need to buy better hardware”…
Vista upgrade works just fine on my 2 year old hardware.
(Note to <strike>us</strike> lemmings: <strike>stripped-down</strike> Vista may be running.)
I could just go on and on but I won’t bother. MDN is, as usual, catering to the gullible mac asses (sorry, masses) that want any evidence pointing to the demise of MS. Just who on earth is “regdeveloper.co.uk” ?
Masses? MASSES?? It’s only about 22 <strike>million</strike>, versus 20 million Vista licenses in the first two months, so why call Mac users “masses”?
I’m sorry, jovial pc boy, but I <strike>don’t</strike> know what the heck you’re talking about.
jovial pc boy…
Well, goody for you!
Sadly, your experience on its own does not represent a valid statistical sample; you could always go and add your positive feedback to this now notorious site.
Whether you like it or not, Vista is an unmitigated disaster: it’s a poor product that delivers no substantive benefit to anyone except Microsoft, their hardware OEM partners and a cosy little netherworld of consultants, integrators and support providers.
In a sane, reasonable world, Microsoft would stop the process of adding to Windows/NT’s world of chaos – which could be likened to Japanese Knotweed – and aggressively reorganise the code into a highly object-oriented (or, at the very least, object-based) system where subsystems keep their private behaviours hidden behind well-documented (for which, read “exhaustively written”) public APIs.
But they won’t do that and one of the reasons is simple: if they reorganise the code, the “smoke and mirrors” which keep people locked into the Windows monoculture will probably become a lot less mystical and Microsoft won’t be able to prevent more agile ISVs from developing applications that outperform MSFT’s own offerings.
Other reasons are that Microsoft’s coding standards are, to say the least, pretty poor: some years ago, some professors from either MIT or Harvard discovered that Microsoft’s OS development almost seems to work in small, isolated teams that don’t talk to each other in any substantive or productive way. The public manifestation of those shortcomings can be multiple instances of the same core behaviour with inconsistent UI behaviours and messages.
You may set your personal standards for the technology you buy at a relatively low level, because – for all we know – you have the “geek” chops to keep your system well-tuned and maintained to provide as optimal an experience as Windows is capable of delivering.
However, for Joe and Jane Public, those standards have to be higher because they are unlikely to have those skills nor are they likely to want to continually delve into their wallets to pay someone to keep their systems “up to snuff”.
At that level, the current SP0 version of Vista is nothing more than a commercial beta and is wholly unsuitable for anyone who has a mildly complex setup with multiple peripherals and a range of software either from Microsoft or beyond.