It has been a huge endeavor to get Windows Vista out the
door, but according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, there's "plenty
more where that came from.” Sure enough, there is more to come starting
with Vista’s first
service pack which should be released before the end of 2007.
There has been much speculation in the industry, however,
that Vista (and similarly Office 2007) would be "last of its kind.” With
the rise of the Internet and the "have it now" aspects of online
applications like Google
Docs & Spreadsheets and Google
Calendar, many experts believe that Microsoft's model of doing business is
going the way of the dinosaur.
"Microsoft made Vista the old-fashioned way, as a
single packaged product that it puts on a disk so users can buy it in a store
and load it onto their computers," said Dean Takahashi of the San
Jose Mercury News.
Takahashi continues with this scenario, "By contrast, rivals such as
Google are creating spreadsheets and browsers that you simply download from a
computer server, which delivers what you need to your desktop as you need it.
If Google follows through with more offerings of free, ad-supported software
over the Internet, Microsoft won't be able to charge a premium for its
operating systems anymore. Nobody will need its big upgrades anymore."
The Windows operating system has grown more and more complex
requiring an immense amount of manpower and resources. Vista has been a 5-year
endeavor and Takahashi estimates that over 10,000 employees working on the
project have cost Microsoft over $10 billion USD in payroll costs alone. “That
has to be close to the costs of some of the biggest engineering projects ever
undertaken, such as the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb during
World War II,” said Takahashi.
"The current, integrated architecture of Microsoft
Windows is unsustainable - for enterprises and for Microsoft," said Gartner
analysts Brian Gammage, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith.
Despite the skeptics, Microsoft is confident in the
viability of the Windows platform. "We've got a very long list of stuff
our engineers want to do, a long list of stuff all of the companies here want us
to do," he said. "There are so many areas where we need
innovation," said Ballmer.
When
it comes to future variants of Windows, Fiji
will be the first dramatic update to Vista and will arrive sometime in 2008.
According to various reports, Fiji will include WinFS, better integration
with Windows Live services, native HD DVD support and enhanced speech recognition,
among other things.
Vienna, which is
even further out on the timeline, is expected to be a more radical departure
from what we all consider to be a "traditional Windows operating
system." Although not much is known about this release, the leap in
design/functionality is rumored to be akin to the OS 8-9 to OS X transition.