9 ms·
Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project
- Numberwang 10y agoI wonder if the project name for win10 was shoehorn.
- mwcampbell 10y agoNo, it was Threshold.
- frik 10y agoYes. Vista was actually a fine release, just a bit resource intensive, had a stubborn file copying algorithms, and device driver support from third parties weren't that great at release time. Beside that Win7 is after all a Vista SP1"+", and a damn fine OS until 2020. The worst Win OS was WinME, which was pretty unstable in comparison to older Win9x releases. I switched to Win2000 and then WinXP and never looked back. The second worst is Win8x and Win10 though. Rough and unfinished on the UI side, and too many phone home "features" under the hood. The WinMin kernel would be great though, but Windows is heading in the wrong direction (Azure cloud, OS as a service, plans for monthly subscription). It would have been great if the plans for WinFS and Longhorn shell would have been restarted and based on Win7 shell. A C++ based Longhorn UI shell would be great for enterprise and consumer. The search experience would be what one has today with SharePoint but insanely fast and proper integrated in to the Windows environment. The cloud offerings are a joke in comparison, sadly a regression in all fronts and they have no vision as it seems. The dreams of an x64 based Phone that could run Win32 applications like Photoshop - all gone. There is so much legacy, but very uncertain future of the platform. Even in enterprise world, which applications are still native? Only Office 2010 or the remarkable unstable 2013 is what every enterprise user still uses daily, everything else in on SharePoint, SAP (Java based client) or other intranet web applications or even internet web applications. And copying files around is more of an hassle than ever before. A native WinFS and a Longhorn UI would have been so great. Sadly, it's all history. </rant End>
- rbanffy 10y ago> a damn fine OS until 2020 Can it delete an open file?
- frik 10y agoWeird question. I don't know what you mean with "it". As a user you can delete an open file, if you remove the file handle. A convenient way is the unlocker.exe tool.
- rbanffy 10y ago"It" here is Windows. I know you can do that, but will the process that had it open be able to write to it?
- aaronbrethorst 10y agoIn case you ever wondered where the codename "Longhorn" came from, Windows XP was codenamed Whistler, and the follow-up version was codenamed Blackcomb, after the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains at the popular, eponymous Whistler Blackcomb ski resort in British Columbia a few hours away from Seattle. The Blackcomb release of Windows started slipping, so an interim release was planned. It was codenamed Longhorn, after the Longhorn Saloon and Grill at Whistler Blackcomb: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g154948-d706390-Reviews-Longhorn_Saloon_Grill-Whistler_British_Columbia.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g154948-d70639...
- pedalpete 10y agoI'm from Whistler, and maybe it is just local legend, but we hear that the reason Whistler and Blackcomb were chosen is because so many Microsoft employees come up on weekends. There are a LOT of local Whistler references in microsoft codenames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames Harmony, Symphony, Emerald, Springboard, Bobcat, Cougar in the NT family from what I can tell.
- jlgaddis 10y agoBack in the 90s, before I fully migrated away from Microsoft operating systems, I remember a few other code names as well. If memory serves, "Chicago" was the code name for W95 and "Memphis" was the code name for W98. Also, I want to say that WFWG was called "Snowball" but I'm much less sure about that one (it's been a little while!).
- skaber 10y agoGood memories. I remember leeching longhorn builds from some guy on an irc channel on efnet through xdcc transfers. Every two-three weeks there was a new longhorn build that I would burn on a cd and use to format the family pc. I would've been a great beta tester!
- untog 10y agoThis is really fascinating, though I have no idea why. That said, I'd love to read a series of articles about the development of Longhorn and why it failed rather than a tech dive into the components developed. Does anyone have any recommendations?
- graiz 10y agoRaymond Chen writes a great blog called the OldNewThing that has some good stories. I think asking why it failed is rather hard to explain and I suspect different people who were on the project would have different explanations. I worked on XP and a little bit of Longhorn. In my opinion one of the reasons was that much of the product direction and leadership shifted. The MSN app team merged with the shell team after XP shipped and JoeB, who was running the shell/UX team moved to a new team. I wouldn't categorize Longhorn as a failure, but a step in a larger pattern of large release: 95, XP, Win7 and then, typically shorter releases in between that are managed differently: 98, ME, Vista.
- snuxoll 10y agoJoeB? That wouldn't happen to be Joe Belfiore by any chance, would it?
- balakk 10y agoJoe Beda. https://www.eightypercent.net/post/old/00273.html https://www.eightypercent.net/post/old/00273.html
- graiz 10y agoThis is someone else.
- graiz 10y agoYes. It was the one and the same. JoeB was heading the Windows User Experience team in Windows Shell before going to the TV team and then most recently Windows Mobile.
- partycoder 10y agoI would like to know about what happened with the Windows Future Storage (WinFS)
- orionblastar 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS http://superuser.com/questions/11346/what-happened-to-winfs http://superuser.com/questions/11346/what-happened-to-winfs Apparently it was canceled and part of it was added to Microsoft SQL-Server 2008, and Windows 7 and other software. I think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud. It is why Microsoft bought out Skydrive renamed as Onedrive.
- WalterGR 10y agoI think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud. How so? The point of WinFS was to store an object graph representing your data in a DB. It was more or less antithetical to files. (Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team.)
- mjevans 10y ago'the cloud' is associated with tagging type metadata and searching descriptions; I think that's what is being referenced. The actual implementation of storing and searching also becomes someone else's problem. In a way it's just another slosh back and forth in the cycle of centralization and de-centralization of processing/storage.
- WorldMaker 10y agoSimilarly the sloshing back and forth between predefined ontology/semantics and "deep learning". In a way, isn't Cortana attacking many of the WinFS problems from the opposite direction? Cloud first and "deep learning/AI" versus local first and "deep semantics".
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- unsignedqword 10y agoVista was not a very well-received release, but I remember using 64-bit Vista way back when. Maybe my memory is failing me a little, but I don't really recall Vista being that bad or unstable. UAC, of course, was a little annoying then, but 7 felt a little more unstable and crash-prone than Vista. My dad still uses a Vista desktop regularly (a 2007 install) and as far as I can tell it still works perfectly fine for him. I suppose he's probably leaving far too much to chance, but still.
- ajdlinux 10y agoIf my memory serves me correctly, a lot of the public outrage at the time was about poor drivers for some time after release?
- ams6110 10y agoAlso wasn't that the release that had endless popup warnings asking permission for arcane things. Anyone who used it became trained to just click "Allow" a dozen times just to get on with what they wanted to do.
- yuhong 10y agoOP already mentioned UAC.
- NamTaf 10y agoThe issue was chiefly that XP didn't enforce good programming practices (storing user info in /Program Files/ was rife and one of many issues). Introducing the UAC security structure meant that suddenly all of these applications tried to do things that triggered UAC elevation prompts. This was addressed twofold, as far as I understand: 1) Application developers were railroaded into best practices and forced not to do terrible design ideas, and 2) MS introduced a whole load of compatibility features such as virtualising folders transparently so when bad apps still tried to do bad things, it was securely captured and diverted around requiring a UAC elevation prompt. Regarding the stability issues, Vista's driver model was new when compared to XP. Naturally, the number of bugs in drivers increased initially but slowly settled down. Much of the '7 is more stable / faster than Vista' groupthink is the result of bad drivers getting better in the intervening years.
- ajdlinux 10y agoAnyone else having DNS issues?
- lawpoop 10y agoNo but I'm not running Vista.
- smegel 10y ago> The project, however, failed completely and development had to reset. More than three years late Microsoft released Windows Code Name 'Longhorn' as Windows Vista... ...the project, however, failed completely...
- matthewmacleod 10y agoIt did fail completely. Microsoft started from scratch, using the same codename.
- smegel 10y agoYou didn't get it. I was continuing the sentence.
- maslam 10y agoI have vivid memories of working on Longhorn as an intern. It was an incredibly ambitious project - rewrite of the "filesystem" (really, a relational object store!), driver framework and display stack to name a few. The project failed the same exact way many projects fail - they are too ambitious and not well-scoped. The demo Hillel showed, IIRC, was complete vaporware.
- frik 10y agoWinFS wasn't a filesystem, but implemented upon NTFS as filesystem filter driver and dotNet based service, the files were stored in a hidden directory (SQL Server Compact and raw files with generated filenames in sub folders). The dotNet service was just very slow. The original vision of "information at your fingertip" was behind the Cairo project. And Cairo had an object stored in the NTFS filesystem driver. WinNT4 and 2000 got several of the Cairo inovations. Well, some hidden APIs were still left in (at least in WinXP era).
- jug 10y agoI think Longhorn was in large where we have now finally got with Windows 8 and onwards (not 7). An OS with core apps written in .NET, an object oriented data management system in Powershell. PS unites e.g Windows Registry and common files under the same umbrella. Windows 10 also completes the vision of a shared OS for all appliances. Unfprtunately I think it took MS too long to get here. Other vendors got to the home appliances part before them, which is mind boggling given the traction MS had once upon a time.
- pjmlp 10y agoI agree, just with the caveat that .NET returned back to its roots. The original implementation was based on COM, the idea to implement CLR instead came afterwards. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... So, WinRT is nothing more than COM+ Runtime brought back to life, with some of the lessons learned in all those CLR years.
- cyanbane 10y agoCould this be one of the most expensive software development failures of all time? Is MS putting money on top of that to show how much of a failure it was and how they decided to deal with it? At a minimum, just letting the story be told from the grave to allow for people to look out for similar things in other projects? Interesting I think. I don't know of many companies who allow/support documentation of a failure of this magnitude. MS continues to amaze me these days.
- rgsteele 10y agoI am certain that this site is not in any way sponsored or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago> Could this be one of the most expensive software development failures of all time? It's probably going to be a while before anything beats the F-35 on that count.
- rasz_pl 10y agoOS/2 was couple of billion dollars.
- yuhong 10y agoThe Microsoft part of the OS/2 2.0 fiasco is so bad and unethical it is one of my favorite topics (I'd say it is even worse than Longhorn).
- BitHunter 10y agoWhat an unfortunate name. Of all the animals the longhorn just so happens to be associated with my glorious alma mater.
- ErikAugust 10y agoI remember getting a Longhorn build - it took all day to install, and 15-20 minutes to boot. The first and only time I booted it up, I was greeted with an analog clock. The seconds hand tended to get stuck and jump 3-10 seconds at time. The only reference I can find to it: http://lifehacker.com/5078415/analog-clock-adds-a-classic-timepiece-to-your-system-tray?comment=8772452#comments http://lifehacker.com/5078415/analog-clock-adds-a-classic-ti... That's when I knew that it might be a good idea to stick with XP until further notice. Further notice ended up being 6-7 years, when I finally went and bought Windows 7.
- saganus 10y agoHow come they can distribute binaries of an OS that belongs to a company? I mean, even though it is a failed project, it still may have valuable stuff, patents, etc. So how come they are able to distribute without issues? are they going to potentially get a C&D? should we start archiving these just in case?
- chungy 10y agoThere's a few possible answers: * Microsoft doesn't know about it * Microsoft doesn't care about it * The website has ignored C&Ds * [insert other reasons] I'm actually most inclined to think "Doesn't care" is the correct answer. None of these builds are under support and it's unlikely that your necessary drivers or apps will run on it. They're alpha and beta builds of Windows Vista, for crying out loud -- even the full release is getting long in the tooth (and programs like Chrome and Firefox are dropping support).
- saganus 10y agoYeah, I definitely agree on the first and the third, but I'm not so sure about the second. Even though they might be unsupported or unusable that doesn't mean that the legal team would be happy to ignore them. Sometimes (most times?) companies are very aggressive when it comes to their IP, especially when it's a core product. Don't get me wrong. I think it's really cool that we have access to these things, just out of curiosity (although I doubt I'll ever download and install them, because of laziness). But things like the emails and such, just seems like a fuzzy/gray area. In the end I was hoping there was some other kind of answer like, Microsoft actually let them publish things or something like that, but I'm skeptical.
- reDunDantReDund 10y agoWho are these people, and why are they desperately clinging to the history of what essentially amounted to a company killing project? Is this a manifestation of some sort of post-traumatic stress? I despised Vista, and recounting it's origins and history of such a thing, to me, is like recounting the childhood of your daughter's murderer.
- Razengan 10y agoI was most interested in the rumors of a vector-based GUI (which persisted in the guise of "Aero Diamond") and the promise of a fully object-oriented native API. Thankfully I found the latter in OS X at least.
- cpeterso 10y agoI have some screenshots from 1998 of Microsoft's "Neptune" project, a prototype of a task-based GUI to replace the Windows 95-style GUI. I keep meaning to publish these screenshots online for historical reference..
- carlesfe 10y agoWell now I'm curious, please upload them to imgur :)
- breakingcups 10y agoIIRC, Neptune was basically XP's Longhorn. It was designed to be the new consumer version of windows, a successor to Windows 98. Built on Windows 2000, it had quite a few new features that were new to consumers. However, the relevant work was eventually merged with the new business version of Windows to form what would become Windows XP. There's plenty of screenshots you can already find online, you can even find ISO's for build 5111 and run it in a VM yourself.
- petepete 10y agoHere are some, for the lazy. http://winsupersite.com/windows/supersite-flashback-neptune http://winsupersite.com/windows/supersite-flashback-neptune
- cpeterso 10y agoElse where on the longhorn.ms website are PDFs from some Microsoft internal emails from 2001–2002 that are interesting reads in their own right: "Notes and Next Steps from Windows Client Business Plan Review": http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX06977.pdf http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX06977.pdf "FW: Longhorn search": http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX08378.pdf http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX08378.pdf Steven Sinofsky: http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX07069.pdf http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX07069.pdf
- latenightcoding 10y agoI remember using the longhorn theme on windows xp
- xiphias 10y agoI loved the concept video, the only problem was that it wasn't executed: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y
- rbanffy 10y agoI used it to poke fun at my friends at Microsoft for almost a decade.
- DoctorBit 10y agoI remember this old article from 2004: Allchin: Don't call it 'Shorthorn' Despite the removal of WinFS, Longhorn will not be short on features, Windows chief Jim Allchin tells CNET News.com. http://www.cnet.com/news/allchin-dont-call-it-shorthorn/ http://www.cnet.com/news/allchin-dont-call-it-shorthorn/
- lmrs 10y agoWhy?
- lmrs 10y agoWhy?
- tostitos1979 10y agoI'm curious if the Microsoft of today has learned its lesson and changed its ways? As an outsider now, I see lots of positive things going on such as acceptance of other platforms (especially Linux), open source activity, etc. Is Microsoft a good place to work again for a hacker (who doesn't play politics)?
- elevenfist 10y agoI highly doubt it, based off the people I know who work there at the ground level.
- mtkocak 10y agowtf?
- brooksc 10y agoDuring the Longhorn project (before the reset to use Win 2003 code and create Vista from it)... There was plans for a "Castle" feature which would allow you to roam your profile, data across multiple PCs in the home. Parts of castle made it into Win7 homegroups later, but it was very much scoped back. At the time I was in the WMDRM team which handled content licensing. We had a feature that built on Castle if you purchased audio/video content (purchased music still had DRM then) we'd automatically roam the content licenses among all the PCs in the home. We had the typical challenges from content owners that this could be used to share content in a dorm, over the internet. We had to design in things like proximity detection to ensure you aren't sharing beyond a home network. It was somewhat complicated (DRM couldn't be simple), but it would have provided a far better user experience. We also planned a centralized DRM licensing backup/restore service so you weren't beholden to the service you bought content from deciding to let you have another license years later. All of this was cancelled with the reset unfortunately...
- VOYD 10y agoWhy is anybody writing about this monumental fail?