Vista goes gold: the frenzy begins
Vista’s final code has been signed off by Microsoft execs early this morning, US time. It’s good to go — or as good as it is going to be until the first round of patching begins.
Vista Product Manager Nick White, paid homage to the PC enthusiast community after five long years of development and testing. “You gave us unprecedented support in testing and providing your feedback while we designed, developed and refined Windows Vista — so much so that it has in many ways become a reflection of your involvement.”
“Consequently, you should feel the same sense of accomplishment that we feel today,” he said.
However, Microsoft isn’t saying that everything’s bedded down yet. It has done its bit in finishing the operating system, but now it says there’s going to be a hard slog ahead for hardware makers worldwide to finalise device drivers for Vista.
“We can confidently say that Microsoft is done with Windows Vista,” said White, “and we’ll be handing it off to our industry partners: PC makers, ISVs and IHVs. They in turn will continue to ramp-up in earnest now that the target is locked — for example, by refining hardware drivers — in order to complete the cycle and make Windows Vista available via retail channels on 30 January 2007.”
As we revealed last week, Microsoft now starts the countdown clock to the official launch of Vista and Office 2007 to the business community, which will take place on November 30. This will be bookended by a ‘consumer launch’ which we’ve already tipped as January 30 2007, although Microsoft spokespeople are still towing the company line of ‘late January’ rather than circle a specific day on the calendar.
Vista RTM followed the announcement Monday of Office 2007 RTM, so we expect quite a bit of partying at Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus.
The Vista gold code (christened with the build number 6000) will be available for download to members of the MSDN network within the next seven days, along with Office 2007, so next week should be a big one for downloading.
The availability to MSDN also means that Vista and Office are likely to leak quickly to Bittorrent tracker sites and newsgroups long before official release to the public.
Microsoft hopes to head off this threat by releasing a 60 day trial version of Office 2007 on its web site in December.
Microsoft says there is much more to come in Vista that hasn’t been disclosed in betas yet.
“We’ve got some really, REALLY great things to come [...] so keep your eyes peeled,” said Microsoft Product Manager Nick White.
It is yet to unveil the “Ultimate Extras” that will appear only in the hyper-expensive $751 Ultimate edition. They’re expected to take the place of the “Plus” packs that have accompanied previous versions of Windows and included screensavers, sounds, backgrounds and other fluff.
One aspect of Windows that no-one has seen yet is the much-hyped sound-theme performed by Robert Fripp.
The road from Longhorn
The road from Longhorn has truly been a long and winding one. When APC was first briefed on Longhorn, it was as part of a reviewer’s workshop on Windows XP held at Microsoft’s campus in Seattle in very early 2001.
At that stage, Longhorn was meant to be more akin to a service pack or mid-lifecycle ‘refresh’ to XP, which would then be followed by the release of the ‘Blackcomb’ Windows client and server. (The Blackcomb edition has since been scrubbed in favour of the Vista ‘Fiji’ service pack expected in 2008 and the Windows ‘Vienna’ OS for 2010-2012).
Hence, the Longhorn moniker bestowed by the Microsoft ski fans who frequented the Canadian slopes of British Columbia, just a few hours north of Seattle. Initial design retreats for what became XP were held at the Whistler resort.
Whistler and Blackcomb are the names of two mountains popular with the powderhounds, while nestled at the foot of Whistler is the Longhorn Saloon and Grill. Thus, Longhorn was considered a place where you stop, take a break and refresh after Whistler, before you tackle Blackcomb.
In 2002, however, Longhorn was elevated to lofty Everest-like heights as it moved beyond ’service pack’ status to becoming a full-blown OS version to succeed XP. And not just any new release, but a watershed edition of Windows which would radically recast the OS from its foundations through to the user interface.
However, over the successive years, many of what were once considered cornerstone technologies and, in Microsoft parlance, ‘platform pillars’ were crossed off the Longhorn wish list.
This included a .NET-based file system code-named “Storage+” and built around the engine of what became SQL Server 2005, which later morphed into the WinFS (Windows Future Storage) service for NTFS; the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base architecture, which contributed BitLocker drive encryption and TPM support to Vista; 32-bit support for Intel’s EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS replacement technology; a P2P-based folder synchronisation utility which spanned multiple PCs; and the ‘Windows PowerShell’, code-named Monad.
Some of these were cut entirely, some were scaled back, and others were ‘decoupled’ from the OS in order to be released on their own in the post-Vista period.
Still other elements, such as the desktop sidebar, were subject to much to-and-fro through the operating system’s long gestation and underwent evolutions of their own.
As a result what you’ll see as in the coming months (and the next several years) as Windows Vista is indeed a long way from the initial Longhorn vision of circa 2001.
