“…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.]
Wow
Wow is right!
Somehow, I just can’t envision someone with Ballmer’s rather ample physique chowing down on spagetti SOUP. He’s gonna go for the MASH…just sayin’…
“Unmaintainable” is a good description for Windows — kind of like “beleaguered” for Dell
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
Has anybody ever looked at Darwin? It’s pretty scary. Hell, I have an 1100 page book at home just to go over the networking!
Still…
> “Unmaintainable” is a good description for Windows
It’s a good description of Microsoft in general. If your business model for new ventures (Zune, xBox, etc.) is losing hundreds of millions of dollars until the products “eventually” (maybe never) start to make a profit, that’s what you call “unmaintainable.”
Apple products have a profit margin from day one.
Ken1w
Apple will make back the money it invested in developing the iPhone or 3+ years, but it won’t happen on the day of its release.
Developing new technology takes time, energy, creativity, and money. Problem is between Apple and Microsoft only Apple is really able develop anything substantially new, MS is really only able to copy or buy out those that do create (like Bungie for Halo).
While each Zune player is sold for a small profit individually, it does not make enough back to cover the marketing and development costs due to low sales volume.
The Zune really can’t have cost that much, however as it’s just a MS coating on a Toshiba Gigabeat using stock Windows Mobile, the XBox on the other hand likely cost a substantial amount of money to develop and it’s got serious hardware problems.
@ken1w
exactly.
“The original road is not even visible, just little mounds of patches.”
Reminds me of the late days of OS9, how many times I have to dig through my extensions, one-by-one, to find which were causing conflicts, I don’t want to recall. The transition to OSX wasn’t all that easy either (no drivers for thousands of $ of peripherals), but I never gave up because of an unshakable belief that under it all, Apple would not disappoint me, and they did not. OS9 to OSX was the “stripped down and rebuilt” that TowerTone referred to, and we (MAC users) are all the better for it.
You know some people are famous just because they are famous. They aren’t very talented but for some reason people are interested.
Some companies have money because they have money. They really don’t offer anything useful.
Let’s put M$ in Apple’s situation in the mid-late 90’s. I heard at one point Apple had enough money to make payroll for only a couple more weeks. They relied on their people and innovation to bring them back. Take M$’s money away and they are NOTHING! They would never survive in a similar situation, not a chance.
They turn money into money. Apple turns innovation into money. Apple makes great products, M$ makes (usually) great business decisions – buy out, break a law and pay a fine and still be ahead, dump money into a project to bury a competitor.
Both are businesses and are in the business to make money. But there is no doubt who has more of a consumer/end user focus. Here is a good example. M$ promised Universal – I believe – royalties for each Zune they sold, and said DRM is the future this was PURE business. Apple made that huge deal with EMI, is it better business for Apple? I am sure they think it is, BUT the end user benefits tremendously at the same time. That is always part of the plan. If it sells who cares, being beneficial or useful to the consumer is a side effect with M$.
M$ is on top because they are on top. They have nothing to offer, so they use their market strength and all mighty dollar to keep them a float. I know on payday, I consider who should get the money that I work hard for. Who has something that is useful to me, who deserves MY MONEY. It ain’t M$’s they are not worth the paper my check is printed on.
Uh oh…..spaghetto!
Hey, Long… That was “Uh oh, SpaghettiOs!” Wikipedia has an article on that, by the way.
MS Longhorn: The Cow farts Now!