No Way to Build an Operating System

David Card | May 29, 2008, 07:21 PM

This is no way to build an operating system. Microsoft Watch opines, based on the D6 conference stage show:

Windows 7 will ship in 2009, almost certainly in time for holiday PCs. Microsoft disclosed today that there would be no major architectural changes from Vista, which would greatly reduce development complications.

Check out this comment, in another of Joe Wilcox's blogs, that appends some internal e-mails released during the dark days of DoJ.

MSFT has worked on WinFS for more than a decade without success in making it fast, reliable, and easy-to-use enough for release. The Longhorn "reset" in 2004 was in large part the realization that WinFS was still not ready for primetime.

At the June 2004 WWDC, Jobs blew away the MSFT engineers in attendance by demonstrating lightning fast Spotlight searches on Tiger (OSX 10.4). The court-released MSFT emails show how flabbergasted they were, and the imperative of getting the Tiger preview DVDs back to Redmond for reverse engineering. Comments by MSFT's Jim Allchin and Lenn Pryor were priceless.

Here's Pryor:

" You will have to take Vic's disk...I am not giving mine up. ;) Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today."

Here's Allchin:

"Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don't believe we will have search this fast."

So, apparently, the 2009-2010 version of Windows will still not have the next-gen file system I was writing about more than 10 years ago -- when "Cairo" was the lead codename -- let alone a microkernel with modules for OS "personalities" and compatibility.

You're gonna fend off Google and cloud computing with a touch screen?? Good luck. I do hope there's a skunkworks Plan B in the labs. No wonder buying Yahoo "isn't strategic."