OK… so, unless you have a life, you probably heard that Vista and Office are both delayed, and here at Microsoft we’ve had some major re-orgs, such as moving Steve Sinofsky over to head up Windows Live and putting Yusef Medhi, who is the SVP for ISMP (where Search is located), as the Chief Advertising Strategist. So what does this mean?
Well, first off, all those folks that say that Microsoft can’t ship anymore will get to chalk up another two big examples. And there’s likely to be more chaos than less inside MS as SVPs shuffle around, and invariably cause some cascading changes as they re-arrange their teams.
As far as the Vista ship delay… fine. I’m probably not going to use it until SP1 anyway, just as I did with Windows XP. Why? Well, quite frankly, I value stability over new features, and regardless of how well tested Vista is, change introduces instability. Fundamentally, all I want is a fast, stable OS that will run the applications I want, like Firefox, Photoshop, Adobe Reader, and TaxCut (used to be a TurboTax guy, but that activation stunt Quicken pulled a few years ago moved me over and I’ve stayed.) I don’t want eye candy… in fact, I hate eye candy. I don’t need transparent windows and 3D effects. I want the window to minimize instantly when I minimize it, and menus to pop up immediately when I click. Flashy transitions just slow me down.
Same goes for Office… I can’t think of any features I use that haven’t been around since Office 97. I mean, what more do you need from a WYSIWIG word processor? Going to more than 64K rows in Excel is nice, but not that I’m not running scripts at that point anyway. So yeah, not a terrible need to move forward.
And that’s why we had a re-org. Fundamentally, I think a lot of people out there are thinking like me. Why upgrade? What I have works just fine now, and I don’t want to go through the hassle of changing unless I’m getting something good. What is that?
And to prove I’m not just a cranky no-bird (note: link to MSN Search, not Ken’s spaces blog. Spaces uses exclamation points in the URL, which messes up WordPad. Come on guys, you know better than to include exclamation points in the URL…. right?), here’s what I would like from a new OS & Office:
New OS:
- Instant on. Like Apple IIe instant on… it’s on before your monitor warms up.
- Instant off. Like the power button, only safe.
- Real backups - mirrored and versioned. And not this OneCare or .Mac or whatever subscription service either… make a backup standard and let vendors out there create machines that can act as the backing store. I don’t trust any random service to store my files, as I’m too concerned about privacy. But the amount of setup I have to go through just to mirror a disk… blech. (Note: I have this now, but it’s a Linux solution using a script called “snapback” that uses rsync and hard links).
- True modularity. If I want to completely ditch the accessibility software (such as sticky keys that come up when you hit the shift for 6 seconds, and turns on even though you tell it not to), let me. I think this would also help shipping… look at Linux — zillions of packages that are all pretty much independently developed and can be shipped whenever.
- Optimized for headless operation. One of the reasons Linux and other UNIX based systems are great in the headless (i.e. no monitor / graphical UI) configuration is that the GUI is optional. Ever try to get through an internal firewall in Windows? You have to term serv into a bastion host, then term serv from within the term serv to the host you want. This is just painfully slow. I’d much rather just have some SSH tunnels and be done with it.
- Include the most useful UNIX tools — like rsync and ssh. Come on guys, I’m sick of seeing home-grown retreads. And get over the Open Source phobia… we should be using the best of Open Source to our advantage, and not just turning our back on it completely!
New Office:
- Instant up… please stop doing weird dialogs asking what I want to do. A blank doc is fine, and if I want to open something, I will.
- Automatic checkpointing auto-save — not just the last version from X minutes ago. It’s like Tracking Changes, but instead of storing all the changes in the doc, you just store copies / deltas somewhere that can be accessed upon demand.
- Can somebody please make copying a section in Excel to Word work?
- Can somebody please fix the bug regarding when you move an image to high / low in Print Mode and it locks up against the top / bottom of the paper, clearly outside the margin?
- Can somebody please make including an image in Word not cause it to bloat by megabytes?
- Fix how styles are done. I still don’t get them and how to apply them properly.
- Somebody please, please fix Exchange. When I point an Exchange server to a 200G disk, I’d like to be able to store at least 150G worth of messages on it.
- And fix Outlook such that it doesn’t require such a heavy pipe to the server. Come on guys, haven’t you tried using Outlook over a modem in a hotel somewhere? Fix that!
OK, enough ranting. Seriously, the moves MS made are all aligned with getting something useful to the customer sooner. Otherwise, Microsoft doesn’t make money, and we know that. I can’t wait to see how things start to shake out!