With Windows Longhorn soon (already?) to be the subject of great interest .... should I say hysteria? ... at the upcoming Professional Developers' Conference it seems to me that I maybe should flag some of what I see as the priorities in Longhorn.
Don't misinterpret the "hysteria" terminology, I am very interested in Longhorn. [There are several promised features that, if implemented well, could contribute significantly in Microsoft's favour in the "Big Software War".] It's just I would rather see more investment in the engineering and less in the hypology.
For me priority number 1 is that Longhorn is reliable and stays reliable. I don't expect to take my car for repair every few days. Why should I expect less reliability of my computer(s)?
I don't think I am being unfair by stating that every Microsoft operating system I have used (back to Windows 3.0) starts off moderately reliable (or better). But add a few programs and do a few Windows updates ... and just plain use the machine .... and reliability becomes much less.
Sometimes it is that the machine won't shut down cleanly. Recently I had my first blue screen of death on XP just after upgrading to Office System 2003 RTM. Maybe I was unlucky in that specific timing aspect but this progressive erosion of reliability is something I have seen too often before and I want not to see that lack of reliability in Longhorn.
I am not alone in finding such lack of reliability disturbing. For example, Chris Anderson in an entry vividly entitled I Hate My Computer also highlights unreliability as a problem.
Chris writes: "But right now I'm just finding my home PC to be almost useless for anything but email and browsing the web. When a Microsoft produced game won't run on my Microsoft operating system I really start to get frustrated."
Multiply Chris's frustration and my own by tens of thousands of Windows users around the world.
This frustration with poor reliability ... and I see little point in pretending it doesn't exist ... is very likely a fertile recruiting ground for the open source movement.
Which, I guess, brings me on to a second wish. That reboots are totally a thing of the past in Longhorn.
It is a shock to many who move from Windows to Linux, for example, that rebooting the computer after installing new software or updating software isn't something inherent in the hardware but is imposed by the (Windows) operating system software.
Please let's see the back of that anachronism in Longhorn.
More wishes later.
Posted by Andrew Watt at October 6, 2003 04:28 PM