So, as someone who hated Vista, what are my impressions? It’s actually pretty good. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better than what came before, which is exactly what I expect from an upgrade (and exactly what Vista didn’t deliver). Things I like:

• Taskbar – clearly inspired by the OS X Dock, but adds some features of its own too like the jump lists and window previews. I’d prefer if clicking the button when there are multiple windows open switched to the last one you had been using, instead of forcing you to pick one, but on the whole it works well.
• Windows Update gets out of my face – Vista’s Windows Update was a dog, while it was kicking in it sucked resources like a bastard and threw off any performance testing I was doing, sometimes for long periods (made worse perhaps by the fact that I didn’t use Vista that much). The new one seems much lighter.
• Responsive – they say they’ve improved the parallelism in many systems, and it certainly feels like it. The same machine feels faster on Windows 7, compared to feeling slower in Vista.
• Libraries – these are like customising your sidebar in OS X’s finder, but add more features like grouping and collection searching. Nice.
• Devices & Printers – when I looked at this view and saw that it came up with photos of my exact mouse, printer etc, without any specific drivers etc installed apart from the base system, I thought that was pretty cool. It’s actually a useful view in practice too, but the pictures made me grin, because I’m shallow. But then, if you don’t smile at least once when you use an OS for the first time, something is wrong on the usability side.

There are some stupid things though:

• UAC remains dumb – it still text-matches filenames like ‘patch.exe’ and arbitrarily decides that they need to be admin-level. Sure you can tack a manifest onto it to tell it not to, but for Christ sakes, talk about a blunt instrument.
• Startup items – Why is changing what apps load at login still so esoteric? It hasn’t changed since Windows 95, and they’ve hidden the Startup menu by default now (and services are even harder to find). Just not user-friendly at all – compare to OS X where Login Items is very simple for anyone to use.
• Network Drive Login Scope is obscure - This is new in Windows 7 – if you connect to a NAS or other network drive, enter your login and click the ‘Remember’ checkbox, it only actually remembers until you log out, not permanently as in previous versions. To change this is very obtuse and user-unfriendly – you have to open Credentials Manager, delete the existing credential (because editing the scope is not possible for no particular reason), and re-create it with the same details (again, scope is not an explicit option so you just have to go on faith here). By doing this the scope becomes ‘Enterprise’ rather than ‘Session’ (which is obscure in itself) and the result is that your credentials will be remembered across logout / reboots like in XP / Vista. It took me some forum browsing to figure this out, and it’s just not an intuitive design. Adding a ‘scope’ combo to the remember option that says ‘Until logout’ or ‘Forever’ would solve it, but no, that would just be too simple & intuitive.
• Aero Shake is just silly

But, the bottom line is that on balance it’s pleasant to use despite a few oddities, and I’m happy with Windows 7 as my main Windows OS now in a way I never was with Vista. I still find OS X more pleasant to use, but this is the closest Windows has ever come to it, and it adds a few ideas of its own too, that importantly actually work & add value – compared to Vista that mostly imitated and whose additions just fell flat (Flip3D, I’m looking at you). So, a good OS, and the first one from MS since 2001 that I don’t regret spending money on.

This also comes at a time when our use of technology is fragmenting – the PC isn’t the sole device through which we view the tech world anymore, we use all kinds of other devices all suspended in the Internet soup, and the devices that win the most favour are those that are again specialised for the task / environment in hand.

So what does this mean? It means making generalist software such as regular beige-box operating systems is rapidly becoming quite uninteresting, and not something you can sell much product based on (unless you’re in the position of being able to leverage a huge existing install base). Generalism belongs in open source libraries, lego bricks which while fairly uninteresting in and of themselves, can be built into vast arrays of much more interesting combinations. As a commercial outfit, being the generalist jack of all trades really doesn’t get you very much attention any more. Wowing people with how well you can address a particular problem is what gets you noticed.

I say all this in the context of Google’s release of the Chromium OS last week. While it’s not being sold in its own right, make no mistake that it’s definitely selling you something – specifically Google hosted app services. And it’s also a prime example of heavy specialisation – it’s only designed to work with hosted apps, nothing local. Some may scoff at that, and indeed it’s not exactly practical right now for all but specific cases, but that’s the point – it’s an angle, it’s a specific pitch at a specific audience, and as such it differentiates itself. Increasingly that’s what interests people about a product, even if they’re not in that particular segment yet. It’s not trying to please everyone, it’s just trying to polish the offering for a particular subset of the market. I see this becoming more rather than less common.

Many have observed that Google is basically just like Apple, but for hosted software rather than hardware. Apple give you a specialised experience which is a combination of hardware and software, mainly so they can sell you some sexy premium hardware. They specialise in making that particular experience the best they can, they don’t try to be all things to all people at once, and it works for them. People notice them as a brand and associate certain things with them inherently – sleek hardware, intuitive interfaces etc. The same goes for Google – they’re known for their free online services and want you to gravitate towards the commercial services they provide either yourself, or your company through the well-understood principle of employees nudging their company to use the stuff they already like.

So it’s interesting to think about where Microsoft sits in this environment. They’re still obscenely profitable of course, more so than a specialist like Apple, but they’re also  increasingly perceived as the ‘dull’ option. On phones, the consumer is raving over the iPhone, and to a lesser extent Palm Pre and Android, while Windows smartphones are increasingly overlooked. Windows 7 is trying to shake things up with some new features, but when it comes down to it, Windows is a workhorse at heart, as is their other flagship, Office. That doesn’t mean they’re bad products – in fact being a decent workhorse for a vast range of uses is hard – but they’re not exactly exciting; you don’t look at a Microsoft product and desire it like you do when you look at the latest Mac laptops or an iPhone (or maybe that’s just me), nor do they get as much community buzz as Google Wave did (deserved or not). Now, given that most of Microsoft’s revenues come from Enterprise users (for whom ‘dull’ is often a desirable feature!) and PC bundles anyway, they aren’t really affected by consumer aspirations, so maybe this lack of a sexy brand is not an issue. Despite years of people saying Microsoft is due to be made irrelevant by Linux or OS X, and releasing a pretty undesirable version of one of their flagship products (Vista), their influence has not waned that much, although it has come down somewhat from what was a frankly unhealthy peak of dominance a few years back. But, nothing ever stays the same forever. Are people in the boardrooms at Microsoft worried that they don’t really have an ‘image’ that ordinary people can relate to positively? The Windows 7 adverts would suggest they do care about this enough to spend quite a lot of money on it, and to create such astoundingly cringe-worthy content as the Windows 7 Party Guides. I hate to think what cocktail of drugs those actors had to take to get them through that particular horror, or what counselling they will need in the aftermath.

But whatever, Microsoft would be right to be concerned about their image, which remains rather vague (mostly because MS seemingly tries to have its fingers in every pie just in case it misses something, but doesn’t excel in very many) . Regardless of all the lengthy and dehumanised procurement procedures, the general inertia which is present at the heart of every large organisation, the inherent resitance to change and dependence on paternalistic vendors that worms its way deep into IT departments; having large numbers of people desire your products on an individual level still matters. It might take a bunch of years to filter through, but that’s where the trends are, at the grass roots – eventually they will drag the enterprise kicking and screaming in that direction too. I’m sure Microsoft knows this, but so far hasn’t really got to grips with a genuine ‘identity’ that appeals to regular people. Arguably the 360 has done best at this, but it’s unlikely that there’s much of an image halo (sic) effect to Windows/Office there, in the same way that you get with the iPod/iPhone and the Mac. Microsoft don’t have much to worry about just yet, but like a trickle of water that carves a canyon eventually, it’s something they must be concerned about long term. Being a decent generalist just doesn’t make waves; it’s time to find a specific vision people can get excited about, then drop everything that’s unrelated to that and concentrate on doing it ridiculously well. Only then will people really know what Microsoft represents versus Apple or Google, or anyone else, and know whether they like that or not. Inertia can only take you so far before you need some more momentum, and that requires direction – which implies a specific direction, not in all general directions at once.

The reason it wasn’t sustainable is that they started to lose the very people they’ve always done a pretty good job of nurturing – developers. Even reasonable, level headed developers who have few extremist tendencies but who could see the many benefits of open source  (I count myself among them) began to turn away from the company as they seemed hell-bent on protecting their vested interests using whatever means possible, and irrespective of the collatteral damage – mostly through lies and threats.

I developed my early career around the time that Microsoft was rising, with their software replacing the mainframes and minis that were so tricky to work with at times, and I really appreciated them for it. They made my life easier as a developer in the 90′s. In the new millennium though, when they started rattling sabres over open source, and trying to bind me and my products into ever more of a restricted, Microsoft-only environment, they did precisely the opposite. The notion that you could use their really nice tools, so long as you only targetted Windows & Office, and with constant posturing over whether using open source was ‘communism’, drove me and probably plenty of other developers in precisely the opposite direction.

For as long as Steve Ballmer is in charge, I’ll have a healthy amount of skepticism about whether Microsoft can really, genuinely change its stance at its core. Like Bill Gates before him, these are agressive 80′s-style businessmen who  I can never hope to understand or remotely trust. But what’s clear is that either he’s learned how out of step he is with his potential customers, or he has been forced by others in the company to accept a changing stance on open source.

2009 is for me the year that Microsoft became a regular citizen of the open-source environment. Sure, before that they set up Port25 and CodePlex, but these were mostly self-serving and didn’t necessarily demonstrate MS’s ability to play well with others, which is precisely what open source is about. What really changed in 2009 is that Microsoft began to use external open source, intentionally and unintentionally, and crucially played it squarely by the rules with little or no fuss. This is a very big deal.

One of the first steps was Visual Studio using jQuery, which is entirely sensible. Historically Microsoft has had a terrible tendency to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, which ends up being more hassle for everyone. Re-use of mature components for everyone’s benefit is what open source is about.

This year though, Microsoft has issued code under the GPL, something I’m sure many people thought would never happen. Firstly there was contributing code to Linux for Hyper-V, and most recently they (unintentionally) used some GPL code in a USB/DVD boot tool for Windows 7, an issue that was raised by a third party but which on investigation Microsoft confirmed – leading them to commit to releasing the full code under the GPL to customers.

Of course, this is precisely what they are bound to do legally. But the fact that it is being resolved in an open and completely unemotive manner, in the same way that any other responsible company would deal with it, is quite significant. This is Microsoft, the company that said the GPL was anti-American and borderline communist – openly and contritely resolving a GPL issue in the correct way with no sleight-of-hand or posturing. I respect that a great deal.

Welcome back to the community Microsoft, it’s about bloody time. Congratulations to all the reasonable people inside the corporate beast who are finally managing to turn the supertanker. I really hope you convince Ballmer to retire soon though, he’s a relic of a bygone age and an impediment to the new image you’re trying to create.

I have Vista installed as a secondary boot on my 2007 MacBook Pro, something I’ve come to regret as it’s regularly far more hassle than XP would have been. In practice, I’ve found that I hardly use it, with weeks passing without me bothering to boot up Vista (which makes it worse, because when I do boot it up its intrusive and wholly unstoppable update process starts kicking in in the background, making me grind my teeth at the CPU / RAM loss). Nevertheless, it’s useful at times.

I’ve dallied with virtualisation occasionally, from Parallels to VMWare to VirtualBox, but have been generally disappointed – my day-to-day work and most of my recreation involves 3D acceleration in one form or another, and virtualisation has historically been pretty bad at supporting it, making it an impractical option. VMWare Fusion 3, however, claims support for Shader Model 3, which is good enough for the vast majority of the work that I do (Dx10+ is still a tiny, tiny niche that is still rarely in demand), so I thought I’d give it a shot.

One of the nice things about Fusion 3 is that it lets you boot your existing Boot Camp partitions in a VM, which meant I could test it quickly. Parallels supported this too but I found it didn’t work that well in practice when I tried it. Fusion 3′s support is excellent – just a few minutes of adaptation and the requisite install of VMWare Tools on the Windows partition and it was up and running. The main problem I initially encountered is that the default 1GB memory allocation is, of course, absolutely no use for running the sweating hunk of lard that is Vista. This is the OS that is capable of getting up to 1.2GB on my machine after first boot with only Explorer open, if you’re unlucky enough that it feels it needs to run update processes in the background. I only (only??) have 2GB on my laptop so I had limits, but a quick tweak of the VM to 1.6GB (and also letting it use multiple CPUs) made it run OK and still let me jump back to OS X, albeit a bit slower than usual (but show me a post-millennium Windows OS that can stay usable on 400MB!).

For general non-specialist use, Fusion 3 is as awesome as other virtualisation tools. Either in a window, full screen, or in ‘Unity’ mode, where Windows apps look like first-party OS X windows in your task list (a bizarre feeling to have Explorer and Visual Studio show up in Exposé), it works great. They even fix the track pad issues, it works much better than in Boot Camp natively. I’d definitely want to upgrade the RAM on my machine if I did this regularly, but it’s certainly solid. But, for me, it’s all about the 3D, so let’s get to that.

I ran through a few GPU tests, after having to wait an hour or so for Vista to go through its background update processes so that it stopped sucking CPU and RAM, distorting my performance sampling (grr), and sure enough all the OGRE demos ran ok. They did, however, run pretty slowly; simple fixed-function demos that usually run at 2000fps on this machine ran at about 300fps, and moderately complex SM2 demos usually pegged at 250fps here ran at about 40fps. Highly complex SM3 demos (e.g. OgreSpeedTree) were unfortunately almost unusable. So, you can expect a pretty steep performance penalty of at least a factor of 6 times running virtualised 3D in my experience. Clearly, at this performance degradation, this would be no good for me as a sole Windows option on this machine. But, it still is valuable, since it’s using the Boot Camp partition, I can use this to quickly test things for compile & run-time behaviour, albeit at unrealistic performance levels, and reboot ‘properly’ into Windows for the times where I want to performance test or demo something.

That is, I would be able to if it wasn’t for Windows Activation. As we all know, this is Microsoft’s anti-piracy strategy and involves requiring you to re-activate your copy of Windows within 3 days if a ‘significant’ hardware change is detected. Since a VM basically emulates all of the core system processes, inevitably Windows sees that as a ‘significant’ change and requires you to reactivate. You can do this online, but only 5 times, after which you have to phone someone every time you want to do it. If I used my Boot Camp partition in both modes, as is useful to me, I’d have to reactivate way too often.

There are some threads and articles about this issue on the VMWare site; they claim that provided you follow this article, then the Windows activation monster will be sated and leave you alone when switching between Boot Camp and Fusion 3. No such luck for me, I’ve rebooted many times between Boot Camp and VMWare and have had the VMWare Tools installed since the first boot, and all I continuously get is an activated product when I use Boot Camp, and a ’2 days to activation expiry’ message in VMWare. I’m not the only one: people are reporting this issue in the forums, including with Windows 7.

If they can’t get the activation issue fixed, so that I can choose to use Boot Camp and VMWare interchangeably, this effectively kills the product stone dead for me, as with every other virtualisation product before it. Which is a shame, because apart from this,  it works great. It’s Windows fault of course, rather than VMWare’s, but regardless the effect is the same. This is a perfect example of bad, customer-unfriendly DRM – it’s especially galling to have MS accuse me of stealing when in fact I’ve paid through the nose for many, many copies of Windows before, and am set to do so again with their expensive Windows 7 (Pro+) pricing – where they still seem to stick to this ridiculous principle. Another option would be to free up a spare Windows license from my collection and have separate Boot Camp and VMWare partitions, but I’d really prefer not to burn the time & disk space on maintaining two installs.

Fix the activation issue and I’ll be buying a copy of this plus a 4GB RAM upgrade immediately. Until then, it’s another nice product that’s scuppered by one small, but nevertheless major issue.

Edit: Ok, I’ve resolved this issue. Actually the original KB article on the VMWare site was correct, I just didn’t follow it correctly. In my defence, the key to success is in the small print at the bottom of the article rather than the ordered steps: you have to make sure that you’ve booted once into Boot Camp with the VMWare Tools installed, then afterwards to start the VM under OS X and reactivate Windows. Having done this, both my hosted VM and Boot Camp configuration show up as ‘activated’, which is precisely what I need.

So, now to buy a copy of this puppy and get 2 new sticks of RAM to shove in the laptop.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that I’d never live to see the day this happened. It’s 20,000 lines of driver code to make Linux run better under Hyper-V, which is of course in their interest (since you have to buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 as the host) , but that’s par for the course for open source contribution (you scratch your own itch!), and it’s a massive watershed regardless. From what I hear there’s still a lot of concern at Microsoft about how to manage contributions across the company boundary (in both directions), so I’m not sure what extra procedures they would have put in place for the developers involved in this process to keep the corporate legal army satisfied – perhaps pre- and post-project selective mind-wipes – but the fact that they managed to make it happen is a big deal.

Microsoft has wielded by far the most acrid rhetoric about open source in the past – we all hear that it’s changing, and I know particularly of specific people at Microsoft (mostly developers) who take a much more open view, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that while the top brass who set the ‘old’ policies remain in situ, substantive change will be difficult. But this move is one of many lately that make me think that just maybe, people higher up the chain are starting to get it. Or at least, they’re starting to defer to people who know better.

I’d argue that very few people in the open source community are inherently anti-Microsoft, they’re just a little more free-thinking when it comes to technology choices, a little more honest with their opinions, and have come to view MS as ‘the enemy’ primarily because of the old rhethoric the company used to use on a regular basis to attack them (and some parts of the company still don’t seem to be getting the ‘openness’ memo – as TomTom found to their detriment). Microsoft, or rather, Mr Gates and Mr Ballmer specifically, effectively made themselves the enemy of the open source community with their often ill-conceived tirades, and that’s something that will take a long time to heal. But, as we all know, actions speak louder than words – and if the company continues to make these kinds of conciliatory moves, they will start to win people in the open source community back, at least those people that judge on facts rather than old predjudices.

Trust takes a long time to be earned, particularly from where MS started from, so it’ll be a long road – but if this is how things are going to develop in future, then bon voyage, MS.

I have several copies of XP and Vista on my bookshelf. The Vista ones currently grace only test machines (although post-SP1 it was somewhat more tolerable to use, if still blissfully flagrant with resources), but nevertheless I own several copies. In the US, there was talk of a $99 limited pre-order offer for an upgrade of Win7 Pro, which is still expensive alongside Snow Leopard’s $29 upgrade (which offers a similar level of refinement), but would still be doable – that pales in comparison to £180 (or $295).

This is actually for a ‘full’ copy, not an upgrade, because the fact is that there will be no upgrade version for Europe. The official excuse is that the “E” version requires a re-install, but anyone with a handful of brain cells to rub together knows that’s a crock; the nuances of the install procedure have little to do with the price that they can offer for the license itself – after all upgrade software has for years been able to be used as a fresh install too, provided you have an original CD from the previous version (I doubt anyone would buy an upgrade copy of Windows if they were unable to reinstall afresh at some point – a regular ritual for many users). No, the lack of an upgrade version, and the pricing policy in general, is blatantly a “screw you” to Europe because of the whole IE debacle.

The original word was that “European customers will be able to buy a full retail version of Windows 7 E at the same price as the usually cheaper upgrade version, at least for the rest of this year” (link). Ok, shame that that ‘upgrade’ price, that limited time ‘special deal’ price, is actually 3 times the price of the limited time upgrade offer that  the US had. So in fact what you’re saying is that while the upgrade pre-order already looks extortionate, the price is going to be even higher in 2010.

I’m going to have to buy a copy or two anyway, but jeez, way to make me feel totally ripped off guys. I’m going to be upgrading OS X to Snow Leopard at pretty much the same time, and the price difference is going to be glaring. Microsoft made their name originally by bringing value to the masses. Where did that principle go?

Some Cisco VPN software which I was trying to install to help a client completely f*cked all my network access on my primary workstation, effectively rendering it useless. Not only that, but it refused to uninstall (hang), or disable (hang) in any way, even from safe mode, and appeared to install no useful tools or documentation with which to diagnose said problems, while disabling all other useful diagnostics (ipconfig returned nothing, device manager claimed both Cisco and regular network devices were fine, all other configuration tools just hang). After much swearing & experimentation I remembered System Restore, which I’d never had cause to use before, since I’ve never got myself into such a dead end before, but which worked like a charm.

I’ve used Window’s own VPN connections before and they’ve been fine. Cisco though, what a PITA – I’ll definitely think twice about trying to use that again. That combined with my server’s PSU mucking about today has not made this one of the most stress-free days. I guess it’s karma for having a good day yesterday.

So I hear that MS have a new set of ads out, where “regular” people go and look for a laptop, whereby they look at the Mac and say “whoah, far too expensive!” and then go and buy a Dell instead. Fair enough, the 3rd party PC market certainly gives you a wider choice of blending specifications than Apple does – in practice, Macs aren’t actually much different in price to a similarly specced PC, it’s just that all the components are generally of similar ‘grade’ – so you can’t cut corners to save money like buying something with a big screen but a crappy GPU, or a large HD with a slow motherboard, or a fast CPU but crappy battery life.  Of course, many people don’t realise they’re making these sacrifices and just look at the price – but if you do know what you’re doing, you can tailor a machine closer to your needs. Anyway, I enjoyed the “Homeless Frank” spoof of these new ads:

A couple of years ago I would have made the same arguments against the Mac that MS makes with it’s Laptop Hunter series; and indeed I did, when a Mac-owning friend tried to convince me to buy one, despite being a .Net guru (who now works for Microsoft!). However, now that I’ve owned a Mac for almost 2 years, I feel completely different – in a laptop at least, I’m very willing to sacrifice a little configuration flexibility in favour of having a device that is of uniformly good quality, and is nice to use. After all, laptops are always compromised in terms of upgradability once you’ve bought them, so it’s generally better to buy something decent from the outset anyway.

I know that buying a Mac laptop is going to encourage me to spend a little more money than I otherwise might get away with. But, what I get for that is a really nice device, that has the added bonus of being able to run OS X as well as Windows. I still use Windows every day, almost exclusively because of Visual Studio these days (and some games) since everything else I use runs on the Mac too anyway, but running both Windows and OS X on the same machine merely serves to make me love OS X more, despite still being a newbie with it in many ways. Windows is fine to use and all, but there’s something about the way OS X just gets out of the way, doesn’t pester me with stupid warnings all the time, doesn’t need a virus scanner to slow it down, allows me to unmount my USB drives without hunting down every Explorer window that is using it first, and countless other little things that have slowly endeared me to it despite being a total skeptic to begin with. I’m a technical guy by nature, but even I can appreciate technology that doesn’t waste my time with trivial stuff I don’t want to care about – and at the end of the day Windows (and Linux) still feels like it’s designed for “PC users”, whilst OS X feels like it’s designed for people, specifically people with stuff to do other than worrying about keeping the computer happy. The day that XCode equals Visual Studio in functionality (it’s not far off, but it’s not there yet), and I can run Steam on OS X, is the day I might seriously consider not using Windows on a daily basis anymore. But, we’ll see whether Windows 7 changes that view.

Yes, my flight details (this was Gatwick airport) should have been on that second monitor – it’s so nice to be reminded of the frailty of technology when you’re about to entrust your life to a tin box full of electronics and software.

Still, it was amusing to listen to a confused couple trying to read & decipher the BSOD text, clearly thinking it was an official announcement of some sort.

At first it all sounds pretty damn good, paving the way for MS to ‘do an Apple’ and redesign things more fundamentally without having to worry about being backwards-compatible forever. However, there’s a catch – XP Mode will only be available to licensees of the Professional edition of Windows 7 or above, it will be missing from the entry-level versions. Gah.

Rant mode: all these versions of Windows are bloody stupid. It’s a client operating system for feck’s sake, it’s not an enterprise application where people have wildly different requirements. It sits on a bloody desk doing work for one user at a time, how realistically do you imagine that those tasks are highly partitionable? You know the argument that with Linux, things are too complicated because of the fragmentation? Well, then why are MS deliberately doing the same thing to their own product? It beggars belief.

The argument may be that only businesses and professional users need this backwards compatibility, to which I say total hogwash. I just can’t believe you would come up with basically a silver bullet for finally breaking away from the legacy of poor Windows OS design, and then say you won’t include it in every box, thereby leaving a class of users without the option to rely on that facility as a bridging point. You think only businesses have legacy apps? As a software guy, it seems a stupid decision motivated by the bean counters who want to find new and inventive ways to upsell to customers. The baby is most definitely surfing away on the bathwater.

For God’s sake MS, make this a standard feature. It looks excellent, but locking some customers away from it totally undermines it and just looks like greed. And really, think seriously about unifying your client OS offering into one product and limiting your bizarre urge to partition everything into 20 confusing editions to your higher-end server / developer products.  A client OS should be a standard, simple affair.