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What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective

389 points by ductionist 9y ago

slipstream- 9y ago
Relevant: https://longhorn.ms/ https://longhorn.ms/ - a website containing research about pre-reset Longhorn.
lozenge 9y ago
> I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. >-The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week. http://moishelettvin.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html?m=1 http://moishelettvin.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/windows-shutdown... It was brave to reset after Longhorn but it seems not all the bad ways of working could be shaken off.
oblio 9y ago
To be honest, these days I think if we want a proper OS and if we want the incentives of the vendor to align with ours, we need subscription OSes. Right now we have: * Android - basically ad supported, therefore misaligned incentives * iOS/macOS - locked into Apple hardware * Windows - old school licensing until 10, with the problems they mentioned for Vista; new licensing which seems to be more like Android adware A cheap yearly subscriptions would realign the incentives: I am the client, I want frequent feature updates, I want fast security updates, I want to be the client and not the product, I don't want the company to go under or force development teams into stupid feature development or release trains cause they need to make sure there's a revenue stream. Basically I pay them for providing timely security and regular feature updates, preferably in an incremental fashion. Everyone who's not happy with this can either lock themselves into hardware (Apple) or go DYI, basically, with Linux/BSD or just accept that being tracked isn't that bad (Android). I'd be really sad if the anti-tracking forces within the Windows division lose. There has to be a better revenue model than tracking users and providing ads, somewhere.
- xorcist 9y ago
  There's nothing DIY about a ready made Linux distribution such as the Fedora Desktop. As long as you don't fiddle around too much under the hood, and don't insert random commands in places because someone on the Internet told you to, things will Just Work like nothing else. There's something to be said to having the developers actually caring about making a useful computer without allowing the marketing department to take charge. Don't try to run it on some unsupported hardware (including outside "third party drivers"), anything bog standard Intel based will do, and you'll be absolutely fine.
  - oblio 9y ago
    The OS itself is not that DYI, even though I don't like being constrained in hardware terms. Let's say that I get over that. Then the DYI part begins, at least for me. I like AAA games, almost none of the games I play are available on Linux (primarily Blizzard games). A lot of desktop apps I like or need are not on Linux, etc. In any case, let's just say I used to have a Linux site and forum back in 2007 or so, I'be been through the Linux evangelism cycle a few times. For many people, such as myself, Linux desktop is acceptable but not the best option. And for a reasonable price I'd rather have the best option for me, personally.
    - mcny 9y ago
      > I like AAA games, almost none of the games I play are available on Linux (primarily Blizzard games). A lot of desktop apps I like or need are not on Linux, etc. I don't have any first hand knowledge about the AAA gaming industry but from what I understand, the studios offload a lot of the work to the GPU manufacturer (nVidia most likely) who then "fixes" the bugs in what they call a graphics driver. I think this is the main problem. The so called graphics drivers do too much work and games don't pull their own weight.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
        That's certainly a problem, but that's not why games aren't being ported to Linux, in my opinion, it's that A) the user base isn't large enough to bother in many cases (these same companies often release terrible Windows ports for more or less the same reason) and B) It's a pain in the ass for a multitude of reasons not the least of which is that the Linux community thinks it has a great development environment but it doesn't (at least for Destktop stuff).
tjoff 9y ago
Vista was amazing. I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up (and they just continued creating bloat ever since). Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the perfect opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don't count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did not help. 2. Pre-fetch/super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6 months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9 seconds if run in parallel etc. After enough time this wasn't a problem as all your freely available RAM had been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to start the browser and office applications after boot. Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.
- gattr 9y ago
  I went with Vista in 2008 (having 4 GiB RAM) and never had a reason to complain; in my case, everything from drivers to games just worked. I liked the Aero and UAC. After a few years I permanently switched to Linux, but kept using Vista for compiling some projects for Windows under MSYS2 (until MSYS2 stopped supporting it).
- frik 9y ago
thriftwy 9y ago
What really happened in Windows 8? I mean, it was virtually a BolgenOS, an excercise in flying by pretending.
- Macha 9y ago
  My guess as an outsider: The general consensus among techies (since, I think we can say, disproven) was that the tablet would replace the laptop. I would guess MS also bought into the hype and wanted to provide some continuity to its customers in the hope of retaining them in this new tablet world, and was willing to throw desktop use under the bus to make it happen. It doesn't matter if your UI sucks on a physical keyboard and mouse if users rejected those devices. Instead tablets peaked, then bigger smartphones ate their share instead of tablets taking out the remaining use cases for traditional form factors.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    The fun thing is that there was never such consensus outside of, seemingly, Redmond and wharever place Unity was developed at. Everybody else did not even expect general-purpose Tablet to be a thing and were frustrated OSes tuned for hardware that wasn't even available. And pushing that agenda tooth and nail.
    - ch4ck 9y ago
      You forgot about GNOME...
      - thekingofh 9y ago
        Gnome 3 is where I lost faith in the Linux community's ability to cohesively come up with a solution to user experience. Every time I log onto a system with Gnome 3 it give me a feeling of dread and anger. Gnome 2 had become one of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time. But Gnome 3 was just a complete FU to all the current gnome users. How arrogant. KDE seems to keep it together. KDE plasma 5 seems an incremental upgrade from what came before, getting rid of some of the weirdness and converging on something sane. Progress at least. I can respect what they're doing. Microsoft, in all it's bullshit, every few years seems to give the users what they want. Licensing is a headspinner, and privacy is questionable, but otherwise they still make an operating system that feels good to use.
knolan 9y ago
Windows always strikes me as a mishmash of ideas with very little overarching vision. A somewhat superfluous example of this is the branding of basic system tools; you have things like Task Manager, Device Manager, Disk Management etc. On Vista and 7 you can access them by mousing about in the start menu a lot or by trying to search (or using run, or right clicking on Computer and selecting manage). But typing ‘Dev’ into search doesn’t return anything related to Device Manager and only when you type the full name does search return some long winded response like ‘Manage Devices and Drivers on this system’ in the middle of a wall of result text. It shows no connected vision between the ability of the search feature to surface succinct information and the design of the OS to differientiate its core tools. Attempting to be helpful by returning a list of tasks in long winged descriptions betrays the lack of coherence of each tool and its purpose. MacOS largely succeeds in this regard. I can access Disk Utility simply by typing ‘du’ (or even just ‘di' or just ‘d’ since it learns your preference) into spotlight and hit enter. I can launch any app this way without the need to clutter by desktop, dock or taskbar with shortcuts. Disk Utility and the various other utilities generally get large well branded icons and names that set them apart. Many of the Windows tools just use pretty bland and similar looking tiny icons making the visual aspect of search useless. Worse still is that if you can have several Device Manager programs installed. I’ve a lab system that requires Win7. The frame grabber is accessed through its own Device Manager and my flow control system has something similarly named. Reading the article it is easy to see why this behaviour is the case. There is clearly very little time for polish and for a singular vision on how everything should look and feel (taste?). It not surprising to see new Mac users delight in the attention to detail of MacOS. Windows often is obtuse and gets in the way. Windows 10, for all its sins, makes some big improvements. Right clicking the start button or pressing Super-X instantly returns a list of all these system tools.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  A major problem with Windows 10 is that its search is basically retarded. It’s easy to get into a situation where the query ‘printer’ will find the Devices & Printers applet, but the query ‘printers’ will not.
  - 9y ago
zvrba 9y ago
Ha, the truth about AV vendors back then: > that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel — the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our “friends”, the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power!
- proactivesvcs 9y ago
  "Back then?" We haven't quite come full circle with the Meltdown registry compatibility key being set, because of anti-virus vendors hacking their way around, but it's close. All it needs is one of them to throw a sueball and the circle will have been completed!
ancarda 9y ago
>[anti-virus vendors] just wanted their old solutions to keep working even if that meant reducing the security of our mutual customer — the very thing they were supposed to be improving. Wow. Is there a backstory here in regards to the development of Windows Defender? I think that was introduced with Vista?
- oblio 9y ago
  I don't know, but honestly, most antivirus companies are such clowns that it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft created their own antivirus just to force everyone to be up to par. Which they still seem to be failing at...
- proactivesvcs 9y ago
  I always found it interesting that Defender has always been touted as being well-behaved when installed next to other anti-virus. I have preferred to disable it (IME, Defender's detection rate is poor, and the off-set in possible stability problems is not worth it) but haven't actually come across Defender misbehaving, other than false positives. This suggests it's probably using the operating system correctly, in exception to its peers.
Pamar 9y ago
Anectodata, so “caveat emptor”. I helped a non-tech friend migrating from a crumbling XP laptop to a newly bought Vista laptop. Took us the best part of an afternoon, because I was really careful and she was paranoid about losing her stuff. Two things did not work for her: 1) No way to migrate groups (address lists, not sure of the name) from Outlook Express to Vista mail standard app (I also tried Thunderbird and/or another free email app and in the end had to cobble together a small utility to get the addresses out of sent email headers). 2) Word had to be updated (paid) - I don’t remember exactly what the problem was but I think it just wouldn’t run. On top of that the UI felt alien and non-intuitive to us both. So while technically it might have been a jewel, in terms of user experience (including the fact that third-part stuff worked, while MS apps were the only ones giving us problems)it really looked like great advertiing. For OsX...
- proactivesvcs 9y ago
  It's always been a massive pain to get email + metadata into or out of Microsoft products. It's so frustrating as it cannot be difficult to implement half-decent import/export but my heart drops every time I know I have to do it for a customer... OOI, what parts of the UI did you find non-intuitive? I found the new Start Menu odd, but it wasn't long before I was more used to pressing Windows, then typing, to launch a program, rather than find it manually. I can't believe I used to spend so much time manually organising my Start Menu! (And I'm usually the type that doesn't like this sort of change)
  - Pamar 9y ago
    It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly WinNT, Linux, Solaris...) so I cannot recall what specifically felt odd (apart from the UAC that at least for the first hour or so were cropping up with alarming frequency - the person I was helping lives far away from my hometown, so the idea of leaving her with mistery pop-ups wasn't really encouraging). In any case, the UI was only a minor concern: I was confident that everyone can learn and adjust after a few hours of work with it. But what I could not help to notice was that I still remembered clearly what happened when I started my first Macbook (three years before the Vista episode): the UI felt very different than what I was accustomed to... but it felt also much better. Intuitive, empowering. When something unexpected happened it was, most often than not, a nice surprise like "wow, the global search can find strings even in a just-closed Word for Mac documents!" (compare and contrast with stuff like Magellan on Windows) or how the progress bar on file copies worked (compare and contrast with https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/ ).
geokon 9y ago
Man, even a guy on the team felt like WinFS wasn't a great idea... I still think it's potentially revolutionary and that the POSIX filesystem is just old and clunky I think most people would expect /home/geokon/program1/src/ and /src/program1/home/geokon to have pretty much the same content A tag based file system that made the two equivalent would eliminate all sorta of annoyances where you can't decide how to structure your file hierarchy (should you have bin/program1 bin/program2 src/program1 src/program2 or program1/src program1/bin program2/src program2/bin? both layouts have their advantages). Something like a "path/path/bin/path/path/bin" wouldn't work.. but it's hard to find a case where you really need it. Currently I do from time to time come across 'include' folders inside of 'include' folders, but not for any good logical reason.. more b/c an in-source build vomited something up You could also have tag based permissions so sharing files between users becomes a lot more sane (file1 has tag 'bob' and tag 'bill' so that they both can access it, instead of having it in .. /home/bob/ and then sim-linked to /home/bill/ or whatever other workaround you'd do in POSIX) Yeah, the filesystem wouldn't work so great if you have thousands of tiny files... but I'd probably argue that you shouldn't have thousands of tiny files in the first place. If your program needs tens of thousands of tiny files then it should probably use something other than the filesystem
- angelsl 9y ago
  So now we need to invent something else to organise source code repositories?
- macintux 9y ago
  I don’t know that he thought it was a bad idea technically but that it wasn’t necessary for the user-facing features they needed, and would have been much too disruptive for the remaining benefits such as you describe.
- pritambaral 9y ago
  Purely tag based filesystems are not better than hierarchical filesystems because hierarchy is meaningful. The 'pritam' in `/home/pritam` has a different meaning than the one in `~/Documents/taxes/pritam`. > Yeah, the filesystem wouldn't work so great if you have thousands of tiny files... but I'd probably argue that you shouldn't have thousands of tiny files in the first place. If your program needs tens of thousands of tiny files then it should probably use something other than the filesystem That's dismissing a core feature of many production file systems today, some of which are used precisely because they support this feature.
saahtb 9y ago
>By far the biggest problem with Windows releases, in my humble opinion, was the duration of each release. On average, a release took about three years from inception to completion but only about six to nine months of that time was spent developing “new” code. The rest of the time was spent in integration, testing, alpha and beta periods — each lasting a few months. Funny he considers testing a problem. So this is the new Microsoft: testing is not important.
- ealexhudson 9y ago
  He's not complaining about testing, he's complaining about the length of the iteration cycle. Taking 2 or 3 years to ship 6 months of effort is incredible inefficiency.
- teh_klev 9y ago
  I've read those two sentences three times, it's not even close to suggesting "testing is not important" or a problem. The problem is the duration of each release and the lack of time spent developing new code.
shusson 9y ago
> An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product Interesting point, reminds me of https://laughingsquid.com/organizational-charts-for-tech-companies/ https://laughingsquid.com/organizational-charts-for-tech-com...
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  It's called Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- geraldcombs 9y ago
  The sentence after that ("Open source doesn’t have that problem.") is absolutely wrong in my experience. Team communication and dynamics aren't somehow magically different with open source, and pretty much every piece of open source software you use reflects the organization that produced it.
  - jrochkind1 9y ago
    Yes. And sometimes that's chaotic and disorganized ball of mush.
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    Cases in point: Mozilla, Canonical, Apache Foundation...
ebbv 9y ago
Man people love to rewrite history. I ran Vista. It was ok. But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement, annoyed most users a lot. They were introduced suddenly without fully explaining why they were necessary. Additionally requiring device manufacturers to write new drivers meant lots of people’s printers went obsolete without warning. That was a PR nightmare. Also the fancy Aero UI looked cool but was taxing for the average user’s computer. So a lot of people when they installed Vista didn’t get the experience they had been shown in commercials and screenshots. On top of that literally everything in the OS had moved around from where people had been expecting it to be as far as settings and configuration stuff. Keep in mind people had a pretty consistent experience from 95 to 98 to XP. Vista flipped the script and users no longer knew how to do things. A mistake Microsoft repeated and was similarly punished for in Windows 8. The whole world was not delusional to say they didn’t like Vista. When all your users say something sucks then you should listen. Windows 7 was mostly PR but the big thing is that it had device support on rollout.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  > But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement It wasn't a security improvement. For one, it mostly just got in the way and trained users to ignore it, negating the purpose of its existence, but it also never protected the user from anything. Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    It trained developers to develop their apps properly to not need a prompt.
  - rossy 9y ago
    > Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions. That's the result of how we drew up the security boundaries on desktop operating systems. You don't need admin permissions to rewrite your most important documents, so ransomware running under your user account doesn't either. See also: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ Linux and macOS have this problem too. The solution isn't to remove the security boundary between the user and admin accounts and to go back to the Windows 9x-era of having zero OS-level security. The solution is to create more security boundaries, so that not every program running on your behalf has the permission to rewrite all your documents. UAC was an unpopular, but not totally ineffective step in the right direction.
jancsika 9y ago
> The chaotic nature of development often resulted in teams playing schedule chicken, convincing themselves and others that their code was in better shape than other projects, that they could “polish” the few remaining pieces of work just in time, so they would be allowed to checkin their component in a half-finished state. I'd love to get clarification on what "checkin" [sic] means in this context. Were they waiting for permission for their equivalent of a feature branch to be merged, or were they actually waiting for their code to be added to the repository in the first place?
- chiph 9y ago
  I believe it means to be allowed to merge their code into a higher level branch, which is on the path towards release.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    This sounds exactly like the problem Linus described with centralized version control systems in his Google Talk.
    - dpark 9y ago
      No. The problem described is that the unstable code is being pulled upstream. Merging into the root branch is equivalent to merging into Linus’s repo. Nothing prevents a Windows developer from checking unstable code into a feature branch without merging up, just as nothing prevents a Linux developer from checking unstable code into a private clone without Linus pulling it in. The difference here is simply whether the feature branch has a central host. Decentralization doesn’t fix this issue. Proper code health practices do.
cm2187 9y ago
For those interested in the history of windows, I also recommend a recent episode of .net rocks about the parallel history of windows and .net: https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1500 https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1500
julienfr112 9y ago
My two cents : I use linux for like ten years, and never touched a ms-windows during this time. Recently, I wanted to use windows only software, so I took a Nuc (intel small computer) I own, and install windows 10 on it. While ubuntu, xunbuntu, alpine and so on work out of the box with any nucs, with windows, there was no wireless after install.I had to download a intel driver installer (in another computer, copy the .exe to a usb key, and install it with a gui setup program (click yes yes yes agree yes yes). I had the clear impression that right now, Ubuntu is the friendly way while MS-Windows is the diy/hacker way.
- mkohlmyr 9y ago
  I've had the same experience installing Ubuntu on a computer with a broadcom wireless chip. It all just comes down to chance unless you buy a hardware + OS combo, which generally actually means mac or Windows. If you install your own OS you have to expect there may be driver incompatibilities, that's just how it is.
  - swebs 9y ago
    Ubuntu comes with drivers for Broadcom chips. You just have to select "yes" when the installer asks if you want to use proprietary drivers. Otherwise you have to open to the Software and Updates app, go to the Additional Drivers section, and manually check it.
- swozey 9y ago
  My desktop PC is Skylake with all fairly high end, popular brand parts that people use in gaming rigs specifically made for running Windows and I have to keep a folder around with about 20-25 things (drivers, chipset drivers, nic drivers, yadda yadda) everytime I boot. Reinstalled a few months ago and forgot to install Samsung Magician for my NVME drives and so they were capped at something like half their speed. I don't expect Microsoft to keep up with every vendors drivers but it'd be really nice if they let them tie into Windows update/device manager to tell you "Hey, swozey, I see hardwareID XYXYASUhF12 is running a generic driver, do you want to update to your vendor proprietary driver?" Maybe they do have that and hardware manufacturers just don't utilize it. After dealing with that 3-5 times over the last year (migrating to NVMEs, realizing I couldn't encrypt mine, migrating back, yadda yadda) I finally made a Veeam restore ISO which hopefully next time I do this will handle all of it. But I feel like it shouldn't take that to get my system up and running from a fresh install.
protomyth 9y ago
Vista was odd for our community college. None of our educational or testing software vendors would offer support until Windows 7 was introduced. It was very much like the whole Windows 8 release where we waited until Windows 10 was released. Heck, we still have one vendor who only supports IE and not Edge. The people who did get it weren't real impressed, but at least it wasn't the "get this crap off my computer" reaction that Windows 8 received. It was the first time we ever held on while a new operating system was out. Windows NT to 2000 to XP was just so automatic.
vondur 9y ago
I believe the main issues was that Vista needed decent hardware at the time. Many people were buying lower end PC’s at the time and they seemed slower than their older XP based PC’s. However, it seemed to me that Vista SP1 fixed a lot of the issues with the original release and worked very well.
- navjack27 9y ago
  Pretty much. If you had a desktop that was worth a damn at the time you sounded like a crazy person when you said that nothing was really wrong with Vista. I was that person in high school who was running a test version of Vista and also the RTM on a pretty powerful Alienware laptop.
- chaoticmass 9y ago
  It didn't help that many PC makers simply took their PCs with specs suitable for XP and put Vista on them with predictably bad results.
yuhong 9y ago
I was wondering what was happening to PatchGuard in Win7 when Skywing joined MS.
throwaway12332 9y ago
Vista was crap, especially compared to contemporary Windows Server 2003
dbdr 9y ago
Obligatory xkcd with another explanation: the "Ballmer Peak" (http://xkcd.com/323/ http://xkcd.com/323/)
B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
> Would we make different decisions today? Yup. Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know then what we know now. From very far away, WinFS looked like a turkey even a dozen years ago. I don't know how a smart cookie like Gates went for it. Probably was standing too close.
mdip 9y ago
It's fun reading these retrospectives, especially having lived somewhat close to them. I was as much a full time developer back during the NT to Vista days as I am, today. Most of my development career centered around Windows technologies. I got my start, in the professional sense, writing apps in C++/(cough)VB and quickly moved on to C# -- which I still really love. It was both interesting and sad to watch Microsoft during these days. I'll never forget the SCO(/IBM/Microsoft) vs. Linux(/TheGPL/etc) days. Such a strange time to think back on Microsoft hating on Open Source ... or trying to create a competitor in the MSPL/CodePlex mess. It was almost comical to see a company that thrived in a world of "general purpose tools to solve many computing problems" (a.k.a. Office)[0] live in their own NIH world. It was a hard time as a developer to feel proud of being part of that world. I saw a company that I admired behaving idiotically and under poor management[1]. I loved developing in C# (especially after .Net 2.0 with Generics), but I was generally unsatisfied with my operating system (Windows XP and later Windows 7 ... my company never went Vista). Because of the massive numbers of competing factions that this author points out, Windows tended to get everything but the kitchen sink and managed to do so in a sub-par manner. Oh, how I loved, killing the file/URI associations to Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player on my own PC in favor of Firefox and VLC only to have to make sure that all of the crap I wrote played well with both of those if they applied to the project[2]. The classic Bill Gates rant about Windows Movie Maker summed up that time pretty well[3]. The last few years under Nadella have been something special to me. Windows 10, despite its flaws/spyware bordering on malware, is enjoyable to use. I have bash (well, zsh, in my case) that functions far better than cygwin/msys ever did, PowerShell -- despite my general hate for its syntax and performance -- can basically handle any scripting task I need to throw at it and is far superior to cmd. Heck, in Windows 10, I can even have a True Color experience in conhost. Visual Studio Code, unlike Visual Studio, is an editor I actually go out of my way to use (as do all of my Linux-only coworkers). Microsoft is developing .NET out in the open and has embraced open-source in a way that a decade ago would have been met with suspicion related to "Embrace and Extend". And when I mention that I write code in C#, I don't have to listen to Java/other folks yelling at me about how evil Microsoft is. And then there's my home-computing life. Despite my previous statements about Windows 10, some of my love for Ubuntu on Windows actually turned me away from Windows. I'd always run Linux at home. All of my servers are bare-metal Linux with one Windows host in a KVM virtual. I started loathing any time I had to do something that took me out of the tooling I use in the Linux world. Just try fighting with gpg-agent on Windows to get SSH key-auth working using the vanilla command-line SSH. It sucks and PuTTY/Pageant is far from a suitable alternative. Jumping and moving things among hosts via SSH, shell and just generally interacting with Linux is far less painful than Windows. So when I got my new laptop this Christmas, I had no intention of ever running Windows 10 on it. I actually booted it and it hung on "set up Windows Hello". I'm not even sure why I bothered to boot it to the hard drive in the first place. This is the first time in a decade of running Linux that I'm actually running it full-time on the machine I spend the (second) most time on. And I discovered, much to my surprise, Windows 10 flies in a KVM virtual with virtio drivers set up in the relevant places. Any time I'd tried to run any Linux variant in Hyper-V and actually use KDE, Gnome or any graphical interface, I gave up after swearing a bit. No clipboard support, and performance was unacceptably laggy. The other way around, I can barely tell I'm in a virtual (I toss the console off to Desktop 2 and I can flip between Windows and Linux) all without doing fancy things like GPU pass-through. And I really only have it there so I can compile a program with MSVC and test the Windows side of it. At this point I don't ever see going back (or switching to fruit). I love endless configurability (even if it comes at the cost of things not being close to "quite right" at the start) and having a mountain of good, free, choices at my disposal. And that work computer is getting reloaded next month when I'm done with the project I'm working on and have a free moment to do so. [0] The bane of my existence being Excel and Access -- which employees at the company I worked at at the time used to solve incredibly complicated problems, incorrectly, and then panicked when their drive failed or the Access database become corrupted to the point of no return and we discovered how many hundreds of thousands of dollars was about to be lost due to worker creativity. [1] Ballmer less so than Gates. That's my opinion, which I would normally be happy to back up, but I'm leaving it alone, today. [2] Don't use that particular CSS, or worse, mangle it in this manner in case of IE 5/6. And why do we have this massive extra video file, oh yeah, that's the best format we can encode it in to guarantee playback on stock Windows without additional codecs installed -- because expecting a codec installation to work across all PCs always ends in tears. [3] I'm not actually sure if that's urban legend or not and don't care to dig into finding out -- even if it is, and wasn't spoken by The Bill, every statement made described the mess that had become Windows at that time pretty well.
throwawaymsft 9y ago
I worked in security around the Vista timeframe, and remember the “think of the children” logic for the UAC prompts. It’s insecure to not warn people constantly. Full stop. (Never mind that desensitizing people or any of a dozen predictable side effects are ignored). It’s oversimplified black-and-white thinking endemic of many management mistakes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bbarn 9y ago
> Windows XP had shown that we were victims of our own success. A system that was designed for usability fell far short in terms of security when confronted with the realities of the internet age. Interesting point I'd never considered. Talk about a requirements shift.
nvr219 9y ago
Is there any way to get rid of the annoying bottom bar on medium without signing in?
- SlySherZ 9y ago
  Using uBlock with Firefox, you can right click anywhere on the page and open the "block element" thingy, which allows you to block anything on the page that you don't like :)
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
File search has been broken since Vista. It constantly fails to produce results even when you know the search string exists in an indexed directory tree. Thanks MS.

389 points by ductionist 9y ago

Relevant: https://longhorn.ms/ https://longhorn.ms/ - a website containing research about pre-reset Longhorn.

> I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. >-The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week. http://moishelettvin.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html?m=1 http://moishelettvin.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/windows-shutdown... It was brave to reset after Longhorn but it seems not all the bad ways of working could be shaken off.

oblio 9y ago

To be honest, these days I think if we want a proper OS and if we want the incentives of the vendor to align with ours, we need subscription OSes. Right now we have: * Android - basically ad supported, therefore misaligned incentives * iOS/macOS - locked into Apple hardware * Windows - old school licensing until 10, with the problems they mentioned for Vista; new licensing which seems to be more like Android adware A cheap yearly subscriptions would realign the incentives: I am the client, I want frequent feature updates, I want fast security updates, I want to be the client and not the product, I don't want the company to go under or force development teams into stupid feature development or release trains cause they need to make sure there's a revenue stream. Basically I pay them for providing timely security and regular feature updates, preferably in an incremental fashion. Everyone who's not happy with this can either lock themselves into hardware (Apple) or go DYI, basically, with Linux/BSD or just accept that being tracked isn't that bad (Android). I'd be really sad if the anti-tracking forces within the Windows division lose. There has to be a better revenue model than tracking users and providing ads, somewhere.

xorcist 9y ago
There's nothing DIY about a ready made Linux distribution such as the Fedora Desktop. As long as you don't fiddle around too much under the hood, and don't insert random commands in places because someone on the Internet told you to, things will Just Work like nothing else. There's something to be said to having the developers actually caring about making a useful computer without allowing the marketing department to take charge. Don't try to run it on some unsupported hardware (including outside "third party drivers"), anything bog standard Intel based will do, and you'll be absolutely fine.
- oblio 9y ago
  The OS itself is not that DYI, even though I don't like being constrained in hardware terms. Let's say that I get over that. Then the DYI part begins, at least for me. I like AAA games, almost none of the games I play are available on Linux (primarily Blizzard games). A lot of desktop apps I like or need are not on Linux, etc. In any case, let's just say I used to have a Linux site and forum back in 2007 or so, I'be been through the Linux evangelism cycle a few times. For many people, such as myself, Linux desktop is acceptable but not the best option. And for a reasonable price I'd rather have the best option for me, personally.
  - mcny 9y ago
    > I like AAA games, almost none of the games I play are available on Linux (primarily Blizzard games). A lot of desktop apps I like or need are not on Linux, etc. I don't have any first hand knowledge about the AAA gaming industry but from what I understand, the studios offload a lot of the work to the GPU manufacturer (nVidia most likely) who then "fixes" the bugs in what they call a graphics driver. I think this is the main problem. The so called graphics drivers do too much work and games don't pull their own weight.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
      That's certainly a problem, but that's not why games aren't being ported to Linux, in my opinion, it's that A) the user base isn't large enough to bother in many cases (these same companies often release terrible Windows ports for more or less the same reason) and B) It's a pain in the ass for a multitude of reasons not the least of which is that the Linux community thinks it has a great development environment but it doesn't (at least for Destktop stuff).

tjoff 9y ago

Vista was amazing. I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up (and they just continued creating bloat ever since). Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the perfect opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don't count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did not help. 2. Pre-fetch/super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6 months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9 seconds if run in parallel etc. After enough time this wasn't a problem as all your freely available RAM had been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to start the browser and office applications after boot. Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.

gattr 9y ago
I went with Vista in 2008 (having 4 GiB RAM) and never had a reason to complain; in my case, everything from drivers to games just worked. I liked the Aero and UAC. After a few years I permanently switched to Linux, but kept using Vista for compiling some projects for Windows under MSYS2 (until MSYS2 stopped supporting it).
frik 9y ago

thriftwy 9y ago

What really happened in Windows 8? I mean, it was virtually a BolgenOS, an excercise in flying by pretending.

Macha 9y ago
My guess as an outsider: The general consensus among techies (since, I think we can say, disproven) was that the tablet would replace the laptop. I would guess MS also bought into the hype and wanted to provide some continuity to its customers in the hope of retaining them in this new tablet world, and was willing to throw desktop use under the bus to make it happen. It doesn't matter if your UI sucks on a physical keyboard and mouse if users rejected those devices. Instead tablets peaked, then bigger smartphones ate their share instead of tablets taking out the remaining use cases for traditional form factors.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  The fun thing is that there was never such consensus outside of, seemingly, Redmond and wharever place Unity was developed at. Everybody else did not even expect general-purpose Tablet to be a thing and were frustrated OSes tuned for hardware that wasn't even available. And pushing that agenda tooth and nail.
  - ch4ck 9y ago
    You forgot about GNOME...
    - thekingofh 9y ago
      Gnome 3 is where I lost faith in the Linux community's ability to cohesively come up with a solution to user experience. Every time I log onto a system with Gnome 3 it give me a feeling of dread and anger. Gnome 2 had become one of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time. But Gnome 3 was just a complete FU to all the current gnome users. How arrogant. KDE seems to keep it together. KDE plasma 5 seems an incremental upgrade from what came before, getting rid of some of the weirdness and converging on something sane. Progress at least. I can respect what they're doing. Microsoft, in all it's bullshit, every few years seems to give the users what they want. Licensing is a headspinner, and privacy is questionable, but otherwise they still make an operating system that feels good to use.

knolan 9y ago

Windows always strikes me as a mishmash of ideas with very little overarching vision. A somewhat superfluous example of this is the branding of basic system tools; you have things like Task Manager, Device Manager, Disk Management etc. On Vista and 7 you can access them by mousing about in the start menu a lot or by trying to search (or using run, or right clicking on Computer and selecting manage). But typing ‘Dev’ into search doesn’t return anything related to Device Manager and only when you type the full name does search return some long winded response like ‘Manage Devices and Drivers on this system’ in the middle of a wall of result text. It shows no connected vision between the ability of the search feature to surface succinct information and the design of the OS to differientiate its core tools. Attempting to be helpful by returning a list of tasks in long winged descriptions betrays the lack of coherence of each tool and its purpose. MacOS largely succeeds in this regard. I can access Disk Utility simply by typing ‘du’ (or even just ‘di' or just ‘d’ since it learns your preference) into spotlight and hit enter. I can launch any app this way without the need to clutter by desktop, dock or taskbar with shortcuts. Disk Utility and the various other utilities generally get large well branded icons and names that set them apart. Many of the Windows tools just use pretty bland and similar looking tiny icons making the visual aspect of search useless. Worse still is that if you can have several Device Manager programs installed. I’ve a lab system that requires Win7. The frame grabber is accessed through its own Device Manager and my flow control system has something similarly named. Reading the article it is easy to see why this behaviour is the case. There is clearly very little time for polish and for a singular vision on how everything should look and feel (taste?). It not surprising to see new Mac users delight in the attention to detail of MacOS. Windows often is obtuse and gets in the way. Windows 10, for all its sins, makes some big improvements. Right clicking the start button or pressing Super-X instantly returns a list of all these system tools.

tinus_hn 9y ago
A major problem with Windows 10 is that its search is basically retarded. It’s easy to get into a situation where the query ‘printer’ will find the Devices & Printers applet, but the query ‘printers’ will not.
- 9y ago

zvrba 9y ago

Ha, the truth about AV vendors back then: > that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel — the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our “friends”, the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power!

proactivesvcs 9y ago
"Back then?" We haven't quite come full circle with the Meltdown registry compatibility key being set, because of anti-virus vendors hacking their way around, but it's close. All it needs is one of them to throw a sueball and the circle will have been completed!

ancarda 9y ago

>[anti-virus vendors] just wanted their old solutions to keep working even if that meant reducing the security of our mutual customer — the very thing they were supposed to be improving. Wow. Is there a backstory here in regards to the development of Windows Defender? I think that was introduced with Vista?

oblio 9y ago
I don't know, but honestly, most antivirus companies are such clowns that it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft created their own antivirus just to force everyone to be up to par. Which they still seem to be failing at...
proactivesvcs 9y ago
I always found it interesting that Defender has always been touted as being well-behaved when installed next to other anti-virus. I have preferred to disable it (IME, Defender's detection rate is poor, and the off-set in possible stability problems is not worth it) but haven't actually come across Defender misbehaving, other than false positives. This suggests it's probably using the operating system correctly, in exception to its peers.

Pamar 9y ago

Anectodata, so “caveat emptor”. I helped a non-tech friend migrating from a crumbling XP laptop to a newly bought Vista laptop. Took us the best part of an afternoon, because I was really careful and she was paranoid about losing her stuff. Two things did not work for her: 1) No way to migrate groups (address lists, not sure of the name) from Outlook Express to Vista mail standard app (I also tried Thunderbird and/or another free email app and in the end had to cobble together a small utility to get the addresses out of sent email headers). 2) Word had to be updated (paid) - I don’t remember exactly what the problem was but I think it just wouldn’t run. On top of that the UI felt alien and non-intuitive to us both. So while technically it might have been a jewel, in terms of user experience (including the fact that third-part stuff worked, while MS apps were the only ones giving us problems)it really looked like great advertiing. For OsX...

proactivesvcs 9y ago
It's always been a massive pain to get email + metadata into or out of Microsoft products. It's so frustrating as it cannot be difficult to implement half-decent import/export but my heart drops every time I know I have to do it for a customer... OOI, what parts of the UI did you find non-intuitive? I found the new Start Menu odd, but it wasn't long before I was more used to pressing Windows, then typing, to launch a program, rather than find it manually. I can't believe I used to spend so much time manually organising my Start Menu! (And I'm usually the type that doesn't like this sort of change)
- Pamar 9y ago
  It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly WinNT, Linux, Solaris...) so I cannot recall what specifically felt odd (apart from the UAC that at least for the first hour or so were cropping up with alarming frequency - the person I was helping lives far away from my hometown, so the idea of leaving her with mistery pop-ups wasn't really encouraging). In any case, the UI was only a minor concern: I was confident that everyone can learn and adjust after a few hours of work with it. But what I could not help to notice was that I still remembered clearly what happened when I started my first Macbook (three years before the Vista episode): the UI felt very different than what I was accustomed to... but it felt also much better. Intuitive, empowering. When something unexpected happened it was, most often than not, a nice surprise like "wow, the global search can find strings even in a just-closed Word for Mac documents!" (compare and contrast with stuff like Magellan on Windows) or how the progress bar on file copies worked (compare and contrast with https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/ ).

geokon 9y ago

Man, even a guy on the team felt like WinFS wasn't a great idea... I still think it's potentially revolutionary and that the POSIX filesystem is just old and clunky I think most people would expect /home/geokon/program1/src/ and /src/program1/home/geokon to have pretty much the same content A tag based file system that made the two equivalent would eliminate all sorta of annoyances where you can't decide how to structure your file hierarchy (should you have bin/program1 bin/program2 src/program1 src/program2 or program1/src program1/bin program2/src program2/bin? both layouts have their advantages). Something like a "path/path/bin/path/path/bin" wouldn't work.. but it's hard to find a case where you really need it. Currently I do from time to time come across 'include' folders inside of 'include' folders, but not for any good logical reason.. more b/c an in-source build vomited something up You could also have tag based permissions so sharing files between users becomes a lot more sane (file1 has tag 'bob' and tag 'bill' so that they both can access it, instead of having it in .. /home/bob/ and then sim-linked to /home/bill/ or whatever other workaround you'd do in POSIX) Yeah, the filesystem wouldn't work so great if you have thousands of tiny files... but I'd probably argue that you shouldn't have thousands of tiny files in the first place. If your program needs tens of thousands of tiny files then it should probably use something other than the filesystem

angelsl 9y ago
So now we need to invent something else to organise source code repositories?
macintux 9y ago
I don’t know that he thought it was a bad idea technically but that it wasn’t necessary for the user-facing features they needed, and would have been much too disruptive for the remaining benefits such as you describe.
pritambaral 9y ago
Purely tag based filesystems are not better than hierarchical filesystems because hierarchy is meaningful. The 'pritam' in `/home/pritam` has a different meaning than the one in `~/Documents/taxes/pritam`. > Yeah, the filesystem wouldn't work so great if you have thousands of tiny files... but I'd probably argue that you shouldn't have thousands of tiny files in the first place. If your program needs tens of thousands of tiny files then it should probably use something other than the filesystem That's dismissing a core feature of many production file systems today, some of which are used precisely because they support this feature.

saahtb 9y ago

>By far the biggest problem with Windows releases, in my humble opinion, was the duration of each release. On average, a release took about three years from inception to completion but only about six to nine months of that time was spent developing “new” code. The rest of the time was spent in integration, testing, alpha and beta periods — each lasting a few months. Funny he considers testing a problem. So this is the new Microsoft: testing is not important.

ealexhudson 9y ago
He's not complaining about testing, he's complaining about the length of the iteration cycle. Taking 2 or 3 years to ship 6 months of effort is incredible inefficiency.
teh_klev 9y ago
I've read those two sentences three times, it's not even close to suggesting "testing is not important" or a problem. The problem is the duration of each release and the lack of time spent developing new code.

shusson 9y ago

> An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product Interesting point, reminds me of https://laughingsquid.com/organizational-charts-for-tech-companies/ https://laughingsquid.com/organizational-charts-for-tech-com...

FeepingCreature 9y ago
It's called Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
geraldcombs 9y ago
The sentence after that ("Open source doesn’t have that problem.") is absolutely wrong in my experience. Team communication and dynamics aren't somehow magically different with open source, and pretty much every piece of open source software you use reflects the organization that produced it.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  Yes. And sometimes that's chaotic and disorganized ball of mush.
- smitherfield 9y ago
  Cases in point: Mozilla, Canonical, Apache Foundation...

ebbv 9y ago

Man people love to rewrite history. I ran Vista. It was ok. But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement, annoyed most users a lot. They were introduced suddenly without fully explaining why they were necessary. Additionally requiring device manufacturers to write new drivers meant lots of people’s printers went obsolete without warning. That was a PR nightmare. Also the fancy Aero UI looked cool but was taxing for the average user’s computer. So a lot of people when they installed Vista didn’t get the experience they had been shown in commercials and screenshots. On top of that literally everything in the OS had moved around from where people had been expecting it to be as far as settings and configuration stuff. Keep in mind people had a pretty consistent experience from 95 to 98 to XP. Vista flipped the script and users no longer knew how to do things. A mistake Microsoft repeated and was similarly punished for in Windows 8. The whole world was not delusional to say they didn’t like Vista. When all your users say something sucks then you should listen. Windows 7 was mostly PR but the big thing is that it had device support on rollout.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
> But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement It wasn't a security improvement. For one, it mostly just got in the way and trained users to ignore it, negating the purpose of its existence, but it also never protected the user from anything. Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions.
- user5994461 9y ago
  It trained developers to develop their apps properly to not need a prompt.
- rossy 9y ago
  > Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions. That's the result of how we drew up the security boundaries on desktop operating systems. You don't need admin permissions to rewrite your most important documents, so ransomware running under your user account doesn't either. See also: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ Linux and macOS have this problem too. The solution isn't to remove the security boundary between the user and admin accounts and to go back to the Windows 9x-era of having zero OS-level security. The solution is to create more security boundaries, so that not every program running on your behalf has the permission to rewrite all your documents. UAC was an unpopular, but not totally ineffective step in the right direction.

jancsika 9y ago

> The chaotic nature of development often resulted in teams playing schedule chicken, convincing themselves and others that their code was in better shape than other projects, that they could “polish” the few remaining pieces of work just in time, so they would be allowed to checkin their component in a half-finished state. I'd love to get clarification on what "checkin" [sic] means in this context. Were they waiting for permission for their equivalent of a feature branch to be merged, or were they actually waiting for their code to be added to the repository in the first place?

chiph 9y ago
I believe it means to be allowed to merge their code into a higher level branch, which is on the path towards release.
- jancsika 9y ago
  This sounds exactly like the problem Linus described with centralized version control systems in his Google Talk.
  - dpark 9y ago
    No. The problem described is that the unstable code is being pulled upstream. Merging into the root branch is equivalent to merging into Linus’s repo. Nothing prevents a Windows developer from checking unstable code into a feature branch without merging up, just as nothing prevents a Linux developer from checking unstable code into a private clone without Linus pulling it in. The difference here is simply whether the feature branch has a central host. Decentralization doesn’t fix this issue. Proper code health practices do.

cm2187 9y ago

For those interested in the history of windows, I also recommend a recent episode of .net rocks about the parallel history of windows and .net: https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1500 https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1500

julienfr112 9y ago

My two cents : I use linux for like ten years, and never touched a ms-windows during this time. Recently, I wanted to use windows only software, so I took a Nuc (intel small computer) I own, and install windows 10 on it. While ubuntu, xunbuntu, alpine and so on work out of the box with any nucs, with windows, there was no wireless after install.I had to download a intel driver installer (in another computer, copy the .exe to a usb key, and install it with a gui setup program (click yes yes yes agree yes yes). I had the clear impression that right now, Ubuntu is the friendly way while MS-Windows is the diy/hacker way.

mkohlmyr 9y ago
I've had the same experience installing Ubuntu on a computer with a broadcom wireless chip. It all just comes down to chance unless you buy a hardware + OS combo, which generally actually means mac or Windows. If you install your own OS you have to expect there may be driver incompatibilities, that's just how it is.
- swebs 9y ago
  Ubuntu comes with drivers for Broadcom chips. You just have to select "yes" when the installer asks if you want to use proprietary drivers. Otherwise you have to open to the Software and Updates app, go to the Additional Drivers section, and manually check it.
swozey 9y ago
My desktop PC is Skylake with all fairly high end, popular brand parts that people use in gaming rigs specifically made for running Windows and I have to keep a folder around with about 20-25 things (drivers, chipset drivers, nic drivers, yadda yadda) everytime I boot. Reinstalled a few months ago and forgot to install Samsung Magician for my NVME drives and so they were capped at something like half their speed. I don't expect Microsoft to keep up with every vendors drivers but it'd be really nice if they let them tie into Windows update/device manager to tell you "Hey, swozey, I see hardwareID XYXYASUhF12 is running a generic driver, do you want to update to your vendor proprietary driver?" Maybe they do have that and hardware manufacturers just don't utilize it. After dealing with that 3-5 times over the last year (migrating to NVMEs, realizing I couldn't encrypt mine, migrating back, yadda yadda) I finally made a Veeam restore ISO which hopefully next time I do this will handle all of it. But I feel like it shouldn't take that to get my system up and running from a fresh install.

protomyth 9y ago

Vista was odd for our community college. None of our educational or testing software vendors would offer support until Windows 7 was introduced. It was very much like the whole Windows 8 release where we waited until Windows 10 was released. Heck, we still have one vendor who only supports IE and not Edge. The people who did get it weren't real impressed, but at least it wasn't the "get this crap off my computer" reaction that Windows 8 received. It was the first time we ever held on while a new operating system was out. Windows NT to 2000 to XP was just so automatic.

vondur 9y ago

I believe the main issues was that Vista needed decent hardware at the time. Many people were buying lower end PC’s at the time and they seemed slower than their older XP based PC’s. However, it seemed to me that Vista SP1 fixed a lot of the issues with the original release and worked very well.

navjack27 9y ago
Pretty much. If you had a desktop that was worth a damn at the time you sounded like a crazy person when you said that nothing was really wrong with Vista. I was that person in high school who was running a test version of Vista and also the RTM on a pretty powerful Alienware laptop.
chaoticmass 9y ago
It didn't help that many PC makers simply took their PCs with specs suitable for XP and put Vista on them with predictably bad results.

yuhong 9y ago

I was wondering what was happening to PatchGuard in Win7 when Skywing joined MS.

throwaway12332 9y ago

Vista was crap, especially compared to contemporary Windows Server 2003

dbdr 9y ago

Obligatory xkcd with another explanation: the "Ballmer Peak" (http://xkcd.com/323/ http://xkcd.com/323/)

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago

> Would we make different decisions today? Yup. Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know then what we know now. From very far away, WinFS looked like a turkey even a dozen years ago. I don't know how a smart cookie like Gates went for it. Probably was standing too close.

mdip 9y ago

It's fun reading these retrospectives, especially having lived somewhat close to them. I was as much a full time developer back during the NT to Vista days as I am, today. Most of my development career centered around Windows technologies. I got my start, in the professional sense, writing apps in C++/(cough)VB and quickly moved on to C# -- which I still really love. It was both interesting and sad to watch Microsoft during these days. I'll never forget the SCO(/IBM/Microsoft) vs. Linux(/TheGPL/etc) days. Such a strange time to think back on Microsoft hating on Open Source ... or trying to create a competitor in the MSPL/CodePlex mess. It was almost comical to see a company that thrived in a world of "general purpose tools to solve many computing problems" (a.k.a. Office)[0] live in their own NIH world. It was a hard time as a developer to feel proud of being part of that world. I saw a company that I admired behaving idiotically and under poor management[1]. I loved developing in C# (especially after .Net 2.0 with Generics), but I was generally unsatisfied with my operating system (Windows XP and later Windows 7 ... my company never went Vista). Because of the massive numbers of competing factions that this author points out, Windows tended to get everything but the kitchen sink and managed to do so in a sub-par manner. Oh, how I loved, killing the file/URI associations to Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player on my own PC in favor of Firefox and VLC only to have to make sure that all of the crap I wrote played well with both of those if they applied to the project[2]. The classic Bill Gates rant about Windows Movie Maker summed up that time pretty well[3]. The last few years under Nadella have been something special to me. Windows 10, despite its flaws/spyware bordering on malware, is enjoyable to use. I have bash (well, zsh, in my case) that functions far better than cygwin/msys ever did, PowerShell -- despite my general hate for its syntax and performance -- can basically handle any scripting task I need to throw at it and is far superior to cmd. Heck, in Windows 10, I can even have a True Color experience in conhost. Visual Studio Code, unlike Visual Studio, is an editor I actually go out of my way to use (as do all of my Linux-only coworkers). Microsoft is developing .NET out in the open and has embraced open-source in a way that a decade ago would have been met with suspicion related to "Embrace and Extend". And when I mention that I write code in C#, I don't have to listen to Java/other folks yelling at me about how evil Microsoft is. And then there's my home-computing life. Despite my previous statements about Windows 10, some of my love for Ubuntu on Windows actually turned me away from Windows. I'd always run Linux at home. All of my servers are bare-metal Linux with one Windows host in a KVM virtual. I started loathing any time I had to do something that took me out of the tooling I use in the Linux world. Just try fighting with gpg-agent on Windows to get SSH key-auth working using the vanilla command-line SSH. It sucks and PuTTY/Pageant is far from a suitable alternative. Jumping and moving things among hosts via SSH, shell and just generally interacting with Linux is far less painful than Windows. So when I got my new laptop this Christmas, I had no intention of ever running Windows 10 on it. I actually booted it and it hung on "set up Windows Hello". I'm not even sure why I bothered to boot it to the hard drive in the first place. This is the first time in a decade of running Linux that I'm actually running it full-time on the machine I spend the (second) most time on. And I discovered, much to my surprise, Windows 10 flies in a KVM virtual with virtio drivers set up in the relevant places. Any time I'd tried to run any Linux variant in Hyper-V and actually use KDE, Gnome or any graphical interface, I gave up after swearing a bit. No clipboard support, and performance was unacceptably laggy. The other way around, I can barely tell I'm in a virtual (I toss the console off to Desktop 2 and I can flip between Windows and Linux) all without doing fancy things like GPU pass-through. And I really only have it there so I can compile a program with MSVC and test the Windows side of it. At this point I don't ever see going back (or switching to fruit). I love endless configurability (even if it comes at the cost of things not being close to "quite right" at the start) and having a mountain of good, free, choices at my disposal. And that work computer is getting reloaded next month when I'm done with the project I'm working on and have a free moment to do so. [0] The bane of my existence being Excel and Access -- which employees at the company I worked at at the time used to solve incredibly complicated problems, incorrectly, and then panicked when their drive failed or the Access database become corrupted to the point of no return and we discovered how many hundreds of thousands of dollars was about to be lost due to worker creativity. [1] Ballmer less so than Gates. That's my opinion, which I would normally be happy to back up, but I'm leaving it alone, today. [2] Don't use that particular CSS, or worse, mangle it in this manner in case of IE 5/6. And why do we have this massive extra video file, oh yeah, that's the best format we can encode it in to guarantee playback on stock Windows without additional codecs installed -- because expecting a codec installation to work across all PCs always ends in tears. [3] I'm not actually sure if that's urban legend or not and don't care to dig into finding out -- even if it is, and wasn't spoken by The Bill, every statement made described the mess that had become Windows at that time pretty well.

throwawaymsft 9y ago

I worked in security around the Vista timeframe, and remember the “think of the children” logic for the UAC prompts. It’s insecure to not warn people constantly. Full stop. (Never mind that desensitizing people or any of a dozen predictable side effects are ignored). It’s oversimplified black-and-white thinking endemic of many management mistakes.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bbarn 9y ago

> Windows XP had shown that we were victims of our own success. A system that was designed for usability fell far short in terms of security when confronted with the realities of the internet age. Interesting point I'd never considered. Talk about a requirements shift.

nvr219 9y ago

Is there any way to get rid of the annoying bottom bar on medium without signing in?

SlySherZ 9y ago
Using uBlock with Firefox, you can right click anywhere on the page and open the "block element" thingy, which allows you to block anything on the page that you don't like :)

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

File search has been broken since Vista. It constantly fails to produce results even when you know the search string exists in an indexed directory tree. Thanks MS.