Microsoft has been working long years to release the next major version of Windows beyond XP. The typical Microsoft hype over features they would release in Longhorn (now known as Vista) began in around 2003. It seems with each passing year another hyped feature gets canned for the Windows Vista release. At the same time, the expected release date for Windows Vista has been pushed back at least twice, maybe three times (I stopped counting after 2005).
What am I talking about? Here's just a few of the most hyped features for Windows Vista which have been pulled or cut down in scope -- some are now slated to ship as an add-on after the public release, others may never see the light of day.
WinFS - new Windows file system originally scheduled for release in Longhorn (now known as Windows Vista) which was to significantly improve the speed and ease of organizing and searching for files on a users' hard drive. This feature was officially removed from Windows Vista as of 2004. At the same time, the release date for Windows Vista was pushed back (dropped features and a delayed release).
On a side note, most of the hyped features of WinFS were already part of BeOS' BeFS file system back in 1997-2000 and also available today in Apple's MacOS X file system (HFS+).
Windows command shell (Monad I believe they called it) which was to significantly change the way power users would use the command line interface of Windows was dropped from Vista as of 2005 and again the release date for Windows Vista was pushed back to late 2006.
Similar side note, MacOS X has Apple's award winning slick graphical user interface riding atop a proven UNIX command shell with capabilities and flexibility years more advanced than what's currently available in Windows XP, so in essence MacOS X already does what the new Windows command shell was supposed to do but now will not do until sometime after the Windows Vista release.
Support for Intel's EFI (or Extensible Firmware Interface) which is a replacement to the 25+ year old BIOS found on all PCs has been officially dropped from Windows Vista as of 2006 and the release date for Windows Vista has again been pushed back, now to early 2007.
In early 2006 Apple began transitioning their hardware from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel's latest dual core processors. These new PCs from Apple use Intel's EFI and so MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger" already supports this new technology.
Three features removed and three corresponding delays in the scheduled launch date for Windows Vista.
Now let's talk about features that will (or at least as of March 2006 are still expected to) ship in Windows Vista.
User Account Control to allow limited users (ie. non-administrator users) to work without concern that they are too limited to do much of anything. With this, when a user needs administrative rights to install a piece of software or access a secured file, they can (or have their systems administrator) type in the administrative password for the PC to perform the necessary function without logging out the current user. Note that this feature has been part of Apple's MacOS X operating system since its release in 2001.
Aero and Glass - a new user interface for Windows which, based on images of pre-release versions of Windows Vista, looks still quite a bit like Windows XP but slightly cleaned up and supports window transparency -- a feature, by the way, which even Windows 95 supported, the difference now is that Microsoft is using it in the OS rather than simply providing support for third party developers to use it in their programs. MacOS X has also supported transparent and translucent windows since its original release in 2001 and has made use of it throughout the OS to produce translucent application menus, etc.
A new, faster search feature quite reminiscent of MacOS X 10.4's built-in Spotlight search which finds files not only by name but also by contents and maintains a database of a user's files for quick searching. This was supposed to work in concert with the new WinFS which has been dropped from the initial release of Vista, so there's no telling how this search feature will be affected.
Windows Sidebar is a new feature that allows "Gadgets" (small utility programs with one or two simple functions each) to be docked to one edge of a user's display. MacOS X 10.4, released in 2005, has a similar feature called Dashboard and calls its utility programs Widgets (widgets, Gadgets, I'm sure you see the similarity here). The difference is that in MacOS X the widgets float free and are not constrained to one fixed location.
Windows Mail to replace the venerable Outlook Express and which includes a quicker search index of a user's email is also rather reminiscent of Apple's Mail which ships with every version of MacOS X and is searchable by the system's built-in Spotlight search utility already mentioned in MacOS X 10.4 released in 2005.
Speech recognition - a feature which shipped in 1996 with IBM's OS/2 Warp 4 PC operating system. Just as with the OS/2 implementation a decade ago, Windows' speech recognition is expected to allow users to control their computers, navigate through program menus and dictate (email messages, letters and reports, etc.) into any program that takes text input. It's nice to see that Microsoft is finally advancing the industry more than ten years after IBM shipped the same feature to the world.
Internet Explorer 7 with built-in tabbed browsing and RSS newsfeed support, which have both been built into Apple's Safari browser (included in every copy of MacOS X for at least the past 3 years) and also supported by the increasingly popular Firefox web browser which runs on Windows, Linux, MacOSX, OS/2 and several other platforms. After more than five years without a single significant improvement to their nearly ubiquitous web browser, Microsoft is charging out of the gate with features others have had for three or more years.
Windows Calendar, which should provide similar functionality to Apple's iCal which is included in every copy of MacOS X.
Windows Photo Gallery looks interesting. It can capture images directly from digital cameras, create slideshows and burn image galleries to CD or DVD. Of course, Apple's iPhoto has been doing this for MacOS X users for years already and has been included with MacOS X for free since at least version 10.2 in 2002.
When all is said and done, it looks like I've already been using Windows Vista (scheduled for release "as early as 2007") since 2004 when I bought my first Macintosh computer. On the plus side, Windows Vista should look a bit nicer than XP, which was absolutely garish and distracting due to too many bright colors being used throughout the user interface for things that really did not warrant so much attention being drawn to them (window title bars and the task bar for example).
It is important at this time to note that I am not the only person who perceives Windows Vista as a failure for Microsoft and a shameless copy of Apple's MacOS X. Paul Thurrot, well known Microsoft evangelist and operator of the Windows Supersite, noted (in a quite lengthy article about where Microsoft has failed with Vista) that "From a technical standpoint, the version of Windows Vista we will receive is a sad shell of its former self, a shadow." and shortly after that wrote "Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials." Not exactly high praise from a Windows user and Microsoft supporter.
On a slightly related note, in the same article mentioned above, Mr. Thurrot notes "But what Media Center, like much of Windows Vista, does is punish people for being familiar with the previous interface." In my own use of Windows XP (which I uninstalled and replaced with Windows 2000 after just two weeks of use) I find this statement to be absolutely true. Nearly every feature of Windows 2000 that I found so useful (so useful that I stopped using my beloved OS/2 and, after five years, gave in to the dark side and ran Windows as my primary operating system) was hidden away or removed entirely in Windows XP, meaning that XP was far less useful and much more annoying for me than Windows 2000. Now if Windows Vista and Vista Media Center are doing the same bad things all over again, I will certainly be happy to use my Macintosh more and my Windows PC less rather than shell out $200+ for a copy of Windows Vista.
©1996, 2008 by Don K. Eitner