This weekend has seen some very intersting news announced: not just Intel's problems in India, but Microsoft's attempt to bully the Korean authorities.
I find it hard to believe that mighty MS can't create a version of Windows without media-player, particularly when they have also been asked to do this by the EU. In fact, I'm sure I recall that they released some sort of version in Europe that is media-player free.
I'm also fairly sure that the Koreans will not respond well to that sort of pressure. The whole affair should probably go some way to demonstrating publicly that MS has not really taken the comments of the US anti-trust settlement on board.
MS continues to bundle additional and somewhat unnecessary features into their operating systems, while failing to innovate in key areas of reliability, security, patch application, remote management and monitoring, etc.
Really, the last thing I want from MS is a new OS release full of fancy graphical bells and whistles, that achieve nothing other than destroy any hope of a consistent user interface for applications, slow down my computer and introduce security vulnerabilities. Whatever improvement goes on under the hood, to the home user that it what it is going to seem like. Server 2003 made great strides forward, but not much of that benefits, or could benefit the home user, who is still stuck running Windows XP, SP2 at best.
If Windows Vista were to be smaller, faster and more secure, I'd be cheering, but somehow I don't think that's what we're going to get. Pretty graphical effects have been available on the Mac and in X Windows etc. for years, but they haven't really done much to pull in masses of users for those platforms.
While it's not going to be in the intial Vista release, I'm also, not really fond of having the OS turn my file system into a database. I can already run a database if I want one. Surely, the OS should support applications, not be one? I don't feel at all comfortable with a database founded, searchable filesystem that doesn't offer absolutely rock solid security.
The idea of some script kiddie exploiting a vulnerability in the filesystem and then being able to perform quick and accurate searches on all my data is terrifying. There is no way I can take that risk, for myself, my customers, or their data.
I'd feel a little better about the indefinitely postponed database filesystem if the whole thing didn't look like a cynical ploy to attack Google and force users to use MSN search. They killed Netscape by bundling IE, and it seems they want to kill Google by pushing MSN search in your face from the moment you start your OS. This time they might not succeed, but the whole attitude leaves a bad taste: it's not innovation, it's repetition and duplication.
For now, I'm not very comfortable with where Microsoft is headed.
posted by Peter Wake @ 5:48 pm
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