A Massive Windows Vista Rewrite? Umm...
Posted by Harry McCracken | Friday, March 24, 2006 12:23 PM PT
David Richards of the Australian site Smarthouse, who reported earlier this week that an
Apple phone was a done deal, now says that Microsoft is
scrambling to rewrite "up to" 60 percent of Windows Vista's code before the product ships.
Er, sixty percent? Windows Vista has been in the works for years, contains millions of lines of code, and is an upgrade to a decades-old product, not a new-from-the-ground-up product. Ain't no way that Microsoft would presume to redo the majority of it in the few months between now and when it must wrap things up to get the OS into the hands of at least some corporate customers by the end of the year. (Doing so would take years, not months--and would create an infinite matrix of new incompatibilities which would have to be fixed before ship.)
Of course, Richards says it's "up to" sixty percent; maybe the true figure is a tenth of one percent. Or sixty percent of a small subset of the code base. Or maybe sixty percent of the OS needs tiny fixes in certain areas. Or perhaps Richards' use of the word "rewritten" means something other than...well, "rewritten."
I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting in which Microsoft decided to let broad availability slip into 2007. I don't know what was said there--but I'm positive it wasn't "We need to rewrite maybe sixty percent of Windows Vista before the end of the year."
How much is a Mac already?
Why don't they put it back a year and get things right (if that is possible with Microsoft) ? I bet that Vista will need a Service Pack to fix some screw up one month after release.
Maybe they'll wake up an put WFS back in with all that extra time they have now. And monkeys will fly out of my butt, of course.
"And monkeys will fly out of my butt, of course."
I'm willing to wait to see that!!!
Linux
I think he was talking about rewriting 60% of the Media Center portion of Windows. I guess they are calling in Xbox 360 programmers to help with Vista-- which would make sense if the target of their rewrite was MCE. 60% of MCE could probably be rewritten in that alloted time.
I really hope they have enough time to put WFS back in now. That would be nice.
That's it, keep the hype going. We cant deliver on time so let's divert their attention with some good rumours.
Next good rumour, Vista has crashed in second trials !
MS has been getting better about service packs, though. 98 had like seven, NT 4.0 had five (or was it six?), 2000 Pro had four, and XP's final SP is supposed to be SP3.
anyway, i do not beleive for a second the MS expects to be able to rewrite 60 percent of Vista's code before shipping. not gonna happen.
100% of my SUSE Linux is running great.
100% of my Ubuntu Linux is awesome. Not one error or malfunction since I made the switch several months ago. Looking forward to what Novell Desktop 10 might have in store.