Microsoft’s tenacity
You have to love Microsoft’s tenacity in attempting to innovate:
In the next version of Windows, still in its early stages of development, and in the soon-to-be released new version of Mac OS X, users won’t have to know where a file is stored.
Since Apple has already released (effectively) its Spotlight technology both the SDK and the user interface. While it’s not on shelves, that’s only weeks away, and developers have had nearly done copies for months. Microsoft, on the other hand, is still a year or more away—which means sometime in the future, which may never happen given their past targets. Given that, we can assume that the technology is effectively equivilent, since Apple will have time for at least 3-4 minor releases and perhaps another major release before Longhorn ships.
The Longhorn preview Microsoft gave reporters last week revealed that with the new OS, the software giant is introducing composited graphics for the desktop, something Apple has had since Mac OS X’s debut.
Yeah, more leading innovation. While Apple releases Core Image (which can also work with video) that leverages the GPU, Microsoft is still trying to catch up to Apple’s ideas from 5 years ago. Way to lead the industry! Nimble as Jabba the Hut.
“You can imagine videos on top of videos and even translucency,” said Jim Allchin, head of Microsoft’s Windows unit.
Some of us can do more than imagine it! I can do it right now.
In one application of the new technology, windows that are maximized or minimized spring to life in a way similar to the “genie effect” through which Mac OS X windows are sent down to the Dock.
More innovation?
Microsoft also plans to reshape icons within Longhorn. Instead of being a static graphic indicating the type of document a file is, an icon in Longhorn will be a smaller representation of the first page of a document. In its preview pane, today’s Mac OS offers that for some document types, such as PDF files. However, its implementation is not as universal as what Microsoft is proposing.
Proposing isn’t doing. Talking about isn’t shipping. Microsoft can talk about all it wants, but until it ships, it’s nothing but vaporious FUD and marketingware.
Allchin said Microsoft plans to go further [with search] than Apple has with Tiger.
So Microsoft plans to go further than Apple has as of months ago? Well, there’s innovation. If you’re going to compare what plans are, that might be interesting, but more useful is to talk about what Microsoft has already done in this area, which is next to nothing. The searching on Windows XP is nearly useless. I have to use Google Desktop to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.
Allchin rejects the notion that Microsoft is a Tiger copycat, noting that the company demonstrated some of the virtual folder concepts in its Fall 2003 preview of Longhorn.
“They just might have copied us,” Allchin said.
But unlikely, since the V-Twin search technology dates from the mid-90s and was a core component of the OpenDoc architecture. It provided near real-time searching of document meta-data and contents. My understanding is that a lot of the current search architecture is built on the V-Twin engine. You can read more in the tech report (available from NIST in Postscript) entitled “V-Twin: A lightweight engine for interactive use”. It doesn’t have a date, but I have books discussing V-Twin dating from 1996. New my ass. This stuff isn’t new, it’s just finally coming to fruition.
But similarities—and the issue of who copied whom—aside, there’s a key difference between Tiger and Longhorn.
Apple is coming out with Tiger in two weeks; Microsoft hopes to have Longhorn out by the second half of next year.
Apple is “first out of the box,” Jupiter’s Gartenberg said. “We have to give credit where credit is due.”
About damned time. You might give them credit for more than just being out of the box first, but with actually pushing the box and breaking its boundaries. Then again, asking for intellegent analysis from someone in the industry is like asking a politician to tell the truth. Unfortunately, the truly interesting pieces of Longhorn have been dumped or pushed back to some unknown release in the future.
This entry was posted at 11:30 pm on 19 April 2005 and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
It has. Personally, I think the approach they were taking (which seemed to be more “stuff it all in a RDBMS” was flawed). What you really want is a full meta-data system attached, which Apple has had for a long time, and with Spotlight they now have the indexing component.
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Am I remembering correctly that the proposed Longhorn File System has been scrapped? That was what I was really looking forward too from this release, otherwise there won’t be any fundamental changes in the OS.