AT&T Tech Support 360
- Related Stories
-
Microsoft lays plans for 'Vistagami' tablets
May 24, 2006 -
Microsoft unveils new betas for Office, Vista
May 23, 2006 -
Bounty for Vista coders who squish bugs at home
May 12, 2006 -
Gartner predicts longer Vista delay
May 2, 2006 -
Longhorn will run on some older PCs too
April 28, 2005
Allchin, who's guided many Windows releases in years past, plans to retire once Vista ships. In an interview, he said there are still plenty of things he'd like to see before the operating system is released, including better performance and more application compatibility.
On Tuesday, Microsoft released a broader test version of the software, Beta 2, that will be made available to millions of testers. "All indications are good, and I spend most of my day worried," Allchin said. "But I think getting people using the thing is a huge, huge step."
Vista has been delayed several times, most recently in March, when Microsoft announced that the release would miss this year's holiday shopping season. Market researcher Gartner has already gone on the record as saying it thinks Microsoft will miss the January deadline. Officially, Microsoft has stuck to its January target, though Bill Gates didn't mention a specific month when he announced Beta 2 on Tuesday. Meanwhile, CEO Steve Ballmer appeared to hedge his bets Wednesday at a Tokyo news conference.
"We think we are on track for shipping early in the year," Ballmer said, according to the IDG News Service. "We've talked about the month, but we get a chance to critically assess all of the feedback we'll get from this beta release then confirm or move the launch date a few weeks."
Allchin remains optimistic, however. In an interview at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), the co-president of Microsoft's platform and services division sat down with CNET News.com to discuss progress on Vista, what's next and some lessons learned from the recent stumbles.
Q: How comfortable are you that Microsoft can meet its current target of releasing Vista to manufacturing in November, in time for a January consumer launch?
Allchin: Well, we're feeling fine right now. We'll see how the feedback is on the beta. We know a set of issues that we need to continue to work on--XP upgrades, performance, application compatibility, the prompts for elevation--those are all hot areas that we either have work ongoing already (or are) addressing some in (the next test version) or we need more feedback. So I'm feeling OK.
Quality is what you've talked about as the main consideration. You've been through a fair number of these launches--where are things at from a quality perspective?
Allchin: Much higher. I mean, if I look at this beta release, I would say there are some scenarios that will have issues, and there will be some (application compatibility issues), but if I look at the core code quality, it's much higher. Now it's a question of--it's a lot to work on still, in terms of performance and app compat (application compatibility), and make sure we have the right device driver coverage, and it's just: Find the issue, fix it; find the issue, fix it; and just as fast as we can. So in terms of the raw security, safety and performance, and that sort of stuff, it's coming together OK.
Two weeks ago, Brian Valentine was doing this bug hunt, encouraging workers to take Vista home and install it on their home machines. How did that go?
Allchin: It went very well. It was a good thing to do before we did the beta, we did fix a couple of problems that we found by getting people to put it on their home machines. And so it went fine. I think it's all part of the beta testing; we just need to get more people to use it now. The thing that's most important right now is for people to give us the feedback fast.
There's not a lot of time between now and RTM (release to manufacturing--Microsoft's planned finalizing of the Vista code, slated for the fall).
Allchin: No, no. We have a very short window. There are many things in our favor, which is quite different than other releases though. And there's never been a system that has this much instrumentation in it. You plug in a device, and we don't have the driver, we know about it. You have an app blow up, we know about it. There's all this instrumentation built in. So instead of having to have people explain to us that they couldn't find this device, we will know, and therefore we can categorize the devices that we're missing or application areas. There are places that they can type in even free-form comments--that's easy for us; we have some machine learning stuff to be able to go over that and spotlight down where we have problems. We never had a system to provide this much data to us about what people are doing.
What's the remaining schedule for Vista? Is it Beta 2, then Release Candidate 1 and then straight to manufacturing?
Allchin: We will do something in between there. If you go back into XP, you'll see that we did pretty much--we did an RC 1, we did an RC 2 and we did an RTM. Right now our thinking is to do about the same thing. How broad we make that next one after RC 1, even if we call it RC 2, that hasn't been made, but we will do a drop about a month after we do RC 1 to some set of people. The problem here is that we have to have immediate turnaround, because we're on superdeadline then.
See more CNET content tagged:
Jim Allchin,
device driver,
WinHEC,
Microsoft Windows Vista,
feedback
On the other hand, my current computer came with the pre-SP1 version of XP preinstalled, and that didn't cause any significant problems.
On the other hand, my current computer came with the pre-SP1 version of XP preinstalled, and that didn't cause any significant problems.
Garbage. This will be one of the worst releases ever. Possibly worse than ME.
That way, we dont need a driver and no control over the hardware. Just to let you know, MS's implementation of PnP is far superior to APpls, hence, more control over your devices through apps that can transform that hardware. Example, Try getting your video card on your Mac to change AA settings on the fly using the respected Applications prefence..Oh thats right, its not possible. How about overclocking that video card? or putting unique sound effects through your sound card. Wouldnt ever want to check those memory timings on the fly....Id rather have bloat than nothing et al. Noting that "everything" works on OSX (ROFL) Does that include fonts? and "other" media players... LOL
If there is one thing Id like to see copied from apple, its the damn pinwheel...being since that is such a well known "feature".
Unfortunately, I can't seem to get my non-Apple webcam to work on the Mac. Or my non-Apple keyboard or my non-Apple PPC or my non-Apple monitor. Any tips for me there?
Oh, and by the way, how do I get SharePoint installed on my Mac? Does anyone know how to get Visual Studio working on the Mac? How about SQL Server or Oracle? Oh yeah, I guess I'll have to stick to FileMaker Pro, Cocoa and editing web pages with whatever the Mac-equivalent of notepad is.
I guess I'm having a little trouble with the wonderful plug-and-play features of the Mac. Is there ANY software or non-Apple-approved hardware that works on this POS???
i don't know why you are screaming about debug features in a beta OS...
i'm not here to bash mac users, but it seems exclusive mac users would be less aware of device drivers seeing as how Apple keeps all mac hardware proprietary (i believe this is still the case). once you know all the available pluggable devices on the market for your OS, and knowing that those devices were all developed by the same company...well, it's pretty easy to include all the drivers you'll ever need in the OS. Consider how many brands of PC devices are on the market and you'll get a sense of what MS has to take into account when implementing their drivers.
Garbage. This will be one of the worst releases ever. Possibly worse than ME.
That way, we dont need a driver and no control over the hardware. Just to let you know, MS's implementation of PnP is far superior to APpls, hence, more control over your devices through apps that can transform that hardware. Example, Try getting your video card on your Mac to change AA settings on the fly using the respected Applications prefence..Oh thats right, its not possible. How about overclocking that video card? or putting unique sound effects through your sound card. Wouldnt ever want to check those memory timings on the fly....Id rather have bloat than nothing et al. Noting that "everything" works on OSX (ROFL) Does that include fonts? and "other" media players... LOL
If there is one thing Id like to see copied from apple, its the damn pinwheel...being since that is such a well known "feature".
Unfortunately, I can't seem to get my non-Apple webcam to work on the Mac. Or my non-Apple keyboard or my non-Apple PPC or my non-Apple monitor. Any tips for me there?
Oh, and by the way, how do I get SharePoint installed on my Mac? Does anyone know how to get Visual Studio working on the Mac? How about SQL Server or Oracle? Oh yeah, I guess I'll have to stick to FileMaker Pro, Cocoa and editing web pages with whatever the Mac-equivalent of notepad is.
I guess I'm having a little trouble with the wonderful plug-and-play features of the Mac. Is there ANY software or non-Apple-approved hardware that works on this POS???
i don't know why you are screaming about debug features in a beta OS...
i'm not here to bash mac users, but it seems exclusive mac users would be less aware of device drivers seeing as how Apple keeps all mac hardware proprietary (i believe this is still the case). once you know all the available pluggable devices on the market for your OS, and knowing that those devices were all developed by the same company...well, it's pretty easy to include all the drivers you'll ever need in the OS. Consider how many brands of PC devices are on the market and you'll get a sense of what MS has to take into account when implementing their drivers.
case."
You're telling me that Microsoft's compatibility issue is more
complicated than running an Application designed for ONE
PROCESSOR (PPC) on ANOTHER PROCESSOR (x86) in an
absolutely seamless manner, even while interacting with the OS
that is running under a different processor. Is that right?
Wow, either Microsoft is incredibly inept or incredibly arrogant.
their products are a JOKE compared to Apple's (or other
companies) original versions.
Never underestimate MS ability to spread FUD or to BLOW in
terms of quality. They do a good job of supporting their
fanboys, and leveraging the monopoly, but that's about it.
Developers! Developers! FUD Spreaders!!!
As for what some of my fellow posters are saying about Apple, it
almost goes without saying that you have no experience
whatsoever with anything not out of redmond. You sound like
complete idiots saything, for example, that standard keyboards/
monitors/printers/ etc... ad nauseum do not work with Mac.
There can be driver issues, but it's nothing compared to what we
have to do in Windows.
Also, MS has never had to go through a single transition that
was anywhere near the complexity of any of the following:
Apple's switch to PPC
Apple's switch to OSX
Apple's switch to Intel.
Make up some more believeable FUD, please, Apple needs the
"competition".
case."
You're telling me that Microsoft's compatibility issue is more
complicated than running an Application designed for ONE
PROCESSOR (PPC) on ANOTHER PROCESSOR (x86) in an
absolutely seamless manner, even while interacting with the OS
that is running under a different processor. Is that right?
Wow, either Microsoft is incredibly inept or incredibly arrogant.
their products are a JOKE compared to Apple's (or other
companies) original versions.
Never underestimate MS ability to spread FUD or to BLOW in
terms of quality. They do a good job of supporting their
fanboys, and leveraging the monopoly, but that's about it.
Developers! Developers! FUD Spreaders!!!
As for what some of my fellow posters are saying about Apple, it
almost goes without saying that you have no experience
whatsoever with anything not out of redmond. You sound like
complete idiots saything, for example, that standard keyboards/
monitors/printers/ etc... ad nauseum do not work with Mac.
There can be driver issues, but it's nothing compared to what we
have to do in Windows.
Also, MS has never had to go through a single transition that
was anywhere near the complexity of any of the following:
Apple's switch to PPC
Apple's switch to OSX
Apple's switch to Intel.
Make up some more believeable FUD, please, Apple needs the
"competition".
"...reason to have hope that Microsoft may yet meet its latest deadline to ship Vista."
By definition, anyone always meets the latest deadline.
Can't ship in 2006? that's easy, make the "latest deadline" 2007? Still can't meet that? make the "latest deadline" 2008.
It's the earliest declared deadline that matters, too bad that was some three years ago.
"...reason to have hope that Microsoft may yet meet its latest deadline to ship Vista."
By definition, anyone always meets the latest deadline.
Can't ship in 2006? that's easy, make the "latest deadline" 2007? Still can't meet that? make the "latest deadline" 2008.
It's the earliest declared deadline that matters, too bad that was some three years ago.
- Hope I Can Turn Off Vista Services
-
by maxwis
May 25, 2006 9:52 AM PDT
- The only way that I get decent performance and an acceptable boot with XP is by turn off 2/3 of the services, most of which are unnecessary anyway. I hope that I can do the same thing in Vista to cull the bloat that MS is apparently building into it.
-
Reply to this comment
-
See all 38 Comments >>