[WBHoenig]

I've been a bit curious lately. If memory serves, I think it was about this time in XP's between testing and RTM stage that news began to leak about "Longhorn". Now that Longhorn/Vista is almost out, has anyone heard anything yet about the next next version of Windows, codenamed "Vienna" (formerly "Blackcomb")?

[luke.mccormick]

i havent heard much of vienna...but if memory serves me correctly there was supposed to be a release between vista and blackcomb yet..not necessarily Vista R2 either.

[gamehead200]

Wow... What could they possibly put in Vienna that they haven't put in Vista? I think they've just about fattened-up Vista as much as they could, don't you all think?

[awergh]

they could put in winfs or the other features they were going to put in vista but didnt

This post has been edited by awergh: 18 November 2006 - 11:47 PM

[Aegis]

One rumor I heard is that they're redesigning the thread management, since the original NT architecture did not foresee a future where everything is becoming massively multicored.

[WBHoenig]

Sounds to me like Vienna will be no more than what they hoped Longhorn to be in the first place.

Blackcomb's been in the works for a long time (e.g. 1998 or so). It has always been seen as a huge upgrade of Windows, much bigger than win95. There's an old video (circa 1999) on YouTube of the 3D interface Microsoft was hoping to put into Blackcomb. But now, with it being renamed to Veinna, it may not be as big.

[awergh]

want vista meant to be the biggest upgade since 95, i dont think it is but anyway i havent used it.

[WBHoenig]

Nah, it's about the same as 2000-XP.

[cluberti]

Internally, Vista's upgrade (even from XP) was like going from Win95 to WinXP. However, from a user's perspective, it's probably not going to be too different (the 2000 - XP analogy works well here). It's all under the covers, but hopefully some of the really neat usermode stuff will make it into Vienna.

[Biohead]

Wasn't it said that Blackcomb would do away with the taskbar idea?

And I believe the interim release (Vista R2??) is Codename "Fiji".

[sylvianorth]

Supposedly, Blackcomb was going to have some sort of wheel instead of a taskbar. It was also supposed to have massive amounts of 3d involved, but then, things change.

Personally I can't see MS releasing Vienna in it's "radical departure from xp" form as a primary os as it would scare off too many people. It'll either be less experimental or will be a limited release and not a sequal to Vista.

[Puggsley]

When Blackcomb/vienna does come out, it will only have half the features planned, be 2 years late, and will be the most unstable os ever! Microsoft cannot cope with upgrading products, have you seen how many redundant files there are in XP? To make vienna a success they need to start from scratch, and remove the thousands of lines of code that don't do anything.

[cluberti]

Do you know how crucified Microsoft will be (already is, to a point in Vista) for not being 100% backwards compatible with crap from forever ago? And make changes - what about the uproar about the annoyances that UAC or IE7 changes have brought (for security reasons no less - "we want security but we don't want to be inconvenienced or have anything change at all" )? Oh, and our OSes are unstable (baloney), and our products are always late (that part is true ).

[WBHoenig]

cluberti, on Nov 22 2006, 05:37 PM, said:

Do you know how crucified Microsoft will be (already is, to a point in Vista) for not being 100% backwards compatible with crap from forever ago? And make changes - what about the uproar about the annoyances that UAC or IE7 changes have brought (for security reasons no less - "we want security but we don't want to be inconvenienced or have anything change at all" )? Oh, and our OSes are unstable (baloney), and our products are always late (that part is true ).

Tell me about it. At my school, teachers are always requesting for this software, copyright © 1998, to be deployed on every computer on the network. We have a very strict active directory system where one teacher on the campus gets admin rights, but most teachers and all students don't. Our problem is that when the software is running, it's trying to swap out new XP/2000 dlls with ancient win95 ones... but they can't because they are running without admin rights. Anyways, it can be a mess without proper backward compatibility.

Quote

When Blackcomb/vienna does come out, it will only have half the features planned, be 2 years late, and will be the most unstable os ever! Microsoft cannot cope with upgrading products, have you seen how many redundant files there are in XP? To make vienna a success they need to start from scratch, and remove the thousands of lines of code that don't do anything.

Notwithstanding my above comments, I agree 100%. They need to pull an OS X.

[Slimy]

I see Vista as a stepping stone to Vienna. Microsoft has the technology (as we've seen in the videos) but the average person's computer isn't up to par. So they put out Vista. Vienna is going to be the real revolution although I still believe Vista is a great improvement over XP

[Spooky]

It doesn't matter what they do to it as long as it remains 'web-centric and internet/network orientated' because unless we get some real broadband connections in the US (like the 45 MB/s connections in Japan) like the phone company promised us back in the 90's (but later decided not to do it, they made this promise to win concessions from Congress which they got), were gonna be up S*** creek as far as using something like Vienna. You guys do know that MS's future aim is a move back to a 'main frame' type set up where a windows computer is simply acting as a terminal running applications off the MS servers. I think we will see something sort of like that with Vienna where certain content and applications will need to check with MS before they will run.

[MGadAllah]

Microsoft race will never give up an end

[TheTripleX]

Well, the next major release (except Server 2007/2008) will be Windows Server "Centro", a kind of SMB sh*t I think. I didn't had the chance to install it though. It's divided into 3 DVDs...

[cluberti]

"Centro" is in the same vein as the "Small Business Server" product line - think of it as Windows Server "Medium Business Servers" (it takes 3 servers to run). It installs (currently, anyway) Windows Server Longhorn, Exchange Server 2007, System Center Essentials, SQL Server 2005, Forefront security, and ISA Server, and has a custom MMC that allows management of all of these systems from one location.

[ringfinger]

Interesting... 3 servers huh? Makes sense I suppose, so many hugely used apps.. We'll just have to wait to see how it turns out