Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously

techcrunch.com

19 pointsjasonlbaptiste40 comments

Open articleView on HN

MS's blog post linked: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/...

This did not need an entire blog post. The title's one liner sums it up fine.

That blogs design hurts my eyes. Its pure form over function.

Who decided to use white text on a nearly white background for the navigation?

The same people who thought UAC was a good idea.

I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm worried about Windows as a platform.

The code base has now been recycled 5 times over, and they keep adding layers to it instead of cleaning it up.

(One thing I admire about Apple. When the OS code got old and crufty, they weren't afraid to start at the beginning and do it right.)

Windows has had to promise and deliver complete backward compatibility to retain their market share. They've painted themselves into a corner, and at a certain point, they are going to have to break that promise or figure out some clever way to unchain themselves from that anchor. (I think I read something about them trying virtualization as a possible solution.)

Windows 7 is breaking application binary compatibility. My understanding is that if your executable's manifest does not specify 7, then you get <= Vista. The next version will provide <= Vista, 7, and 8. And so on.

I may have misunderstood, but this seems like it will relieve many compatibility woes.

Apple's start-from-the-beginning effort was Copland. That turned out pretty badly for Apple. (Which is part of the reason they abandoned it in favor of buying NeXTSTEP (Which turned into OS X))

But in a way, Copland wasn't Steve Jobs, but NeX was. Apple is Steve Jobs.

By way of agreement with you, I will say there's no "but in a way" about it. As I recall--I was a Mac developer at the time--Copland was everything Jobs is not. A large, bureaucratic team. Infighting and feature poaching between the Pink and Blue teams with nobody to step in and provide Adult Supervision. No hard ship date with a command to abandon anything that wouldn't fit (real artists ship, Copland did not ship).

Much has been made of how little Jobs contributed to the original Macintosh. However, looking back we see what he did contribute: the all-consuming focus on shipping a product, and the willingness to make the hard decisions needed to do so.

This was entirely unlike the Copland effort in every which way.

http://tinyurl.com/2lrwzd (Wikipedia article on Copland)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent (and Taligent)

I have to admit, as a user I rather miss OpenDoc. Cyberdog was nifty.

> I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm worried about Windows as a platform.

I'm worried that it might still dominate the world after 5 years.

Windows has had to promise and deliver complete backward compatibility to retain their market share. They've painted themselves into a corner

I think that's correlation, not causation. Look at Sun and their Solaris backwards-compatibility guarantee (which is, if your old binaries break on our new version, it's our bug and we'll fix it).

    The code base has now been recycled 5 times over, and
    they keep adding layers to it instead of cleaning it up.

There have been lots of stupid extensions - technologies in the space we call COM - but they don't reflect on the core. And with the core - they've cleaned it up multiple times. Microsoft have been excellent at doing incremental releases with the exception of Vista. Everything else (including Windows 95) has just been a steady increment on the previous version. Dot net is an attempt to create a clean new alternative stack to allow them to stablise the legacy system so they can get it stable and then just leave it.

With NT3 they did as little as possible by taking lots of inspiration from OS2 but fixing up the things it got wrong such as single input queue. What were the major features improvements of Windows 2000 over NT4? Some steady interface improvements that were already available for NT4 as a patch, plus you could change IP addresses without rebooting. XP over 2000? More annoying user interface, support for some new hardware.

Also, you say 'recycled'? It has and respects legacy, and I agree that this holds it back - there are certain things about the core that are awful and hard-wired that way for the rest of time. One of the major reasons I avoid it for anything more than running browsers and office is that I can't stand the command-line limitations. But code doesn't get worn out through reuse. The major criticism I'd have of Vista is that they were so carried away by the prospect of duplicating the ridiculous operating environment that I hate about my OSX environment that they didn't recycle enough!

    (One thing I admire about Apple. When the OS code got old
    and crufty, they weren't afraid to start at the beginning
    and do it right.)

They didn't though. They just rolled NeXT forward and wrote compatibility layers for the Apple stuff. I can't cite this exactly, but when he was launching NeXT, Jobs said something along the lines of "it's late, but there may just be enough time left to establish one more workstation platform". And really they cheated because it's just unix with their own GUI.

Darn. And I had all my money on Windows EX Hyper Fighting Alpha: The New Challengers Turbo.

Personally, I think Vista should have kept the name "Longhorn" from development. I like the sound of "Windows 7" but I too am a bit concerned with how Windows in itself will fare with a future that looks like Vista which was, in my opinion, a step away from the enterprise class that Windows has always had a firm grasp on. As someone who works in IT for a university and has worked for other schools in the past, I found Vista showed no reasons to be used in an enterprise setting. Vista tailored WAY too much to a home user perspective. All pretty pictures and no power.

Windows 7, we can perhaps expect a step back in the right direction. I've seen rumors but nothing official that suggested Windows 7 was going to be Microsoft's first Operating system since Windows 2000 to not use the NT core? Anyone care to confirm that?

Also... just some funnies... http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/13/windows-7-the-search-for-a...

But they told me it was going to be called Mojave.

it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be more bland

Probably not. It is a little bland, but there is nothing all that exciting about an OS like Windows. Its most exciting function is drawing window decorations and showing icons on your desktop. Who cares?

Agreed. I think it couldn't be less confusing. I love the name and look forward to it coming out(still on XP, definitely going to skip Vista). I hope it has built in version control, faster file search, and no stupid security pop ups. Also, could we please get a better version of Paintbrush?

Going by the numbers this should be a serious downgrade from windows 2000

It's a sort of reversal of how they expanded their numbers with the XBox 360, so it wouldn't be a 2 versus the PS3.

Still, I like it. It's no-nonsense and it's got a nice ring to it.

I love it!

Functional. Simple. Easier to get businesses to buy 7.5 or 8.0 instead of switching from "XP" to "Vista". I like it.

3.1, NT, 95, 98, ME, XP, 2000, Vista, 7 -- just pick a scheme and stick with it guys.

You forgot about Bob

Wasn't that just a new UI, not a new OS completely?

Hmmm actually, that's possible. I only remember hearing about Bob and seeing some screenshots. I wasn't fortunate enough to have bought a copy of it.

I better be impressed, or I'm sticking with XP.

not for long you won't, unless you're going to start writing your own security patches and backporting apps.

Or he'll have moved to a Mac by then?

Disclaimer: I don't own a Mac... Yet.

How would that be "sticking with XP"?

It's not. The assumption - following on from cstejerean's comment - being that once XP is no longer receiving security updates, any reasonably knowledgeable person would feel compelled to move to something else. I know I will be.

My comment was really just a facetious one, coming from my personal point of view, which is that Mac's are looking better and better these days.

Vista is a big part of why I made the switch to a Mac (for my laptop, I'm running Linux on the desktop).

I'm almost the opposite, Debian on my Laptop. XP Pro on my desktop (until my next big hardware upgrade, anyway).

But as I'm very partial to Linux, I'm starting to think Mac might be the way to go for my next big upgrade. I use my laptop almost purely for development work, but my desktop I use for work/multimedia entertainment.

While I know it's certainly doable to set up a Linux machine for multimedia capabilities, I'm somewhat attracted to the (hopefully) more "batteries included" functionality of a Mac if say, I want to watch a movie piped out to my TV or whatever. In cases like this, I'd prefer to just be able to click a few buttons and make it happen rather than trawl through mailing list archives looking for the right combination of xorg.conf directives for my particular graphics card.

My XP box works fine for this kind of stuff already, but with a Mac, I get the bonus of the familiar Unix-like underpinnings.

Still probably be a while before I might say goodbye to Bill, though.

Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me every time I tried. Getting an external project to work usually has issues, wireless is sometimes flakey and battery life typically sucks. I highly recommend checking out OS X on a laptop. I always found the Mac desktops to be too expensive for what I need (since I already have a laptop I don't need heavy multimedia just an always-on workhorse).

> Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me ...

Then you need to try out an IBM/Lenovo T60. :) This is what I've got (bought it cheap second hand, it was a great buy) and it's rock solid running Debian Lenny, everything works, and works well. ThinkPads in general are great for Linux compatibility.

But thanks, I will definitely take your words under advisement when upgrade time comes around.

Windows 7 != Midori ?

No, Midori is something very different...

Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it’s catchy, and we have no idea what it means.

I thought it was commonplace knowledge within the geek community that XP was short for "eXPerience"?

If he is going to go on a long rant commenting on the name of different Windows-releases, he should at least know the topic he is talking about ;)

"I thought it was commonplace knowledge within the geek community that XP was short for "eXPerience"?"

It's news to me. I think it's still fair to say that the name "doesn't really mean anything".

That makes the rant even more pointless.

Seriously, why does the name matter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com