Sounds like Fiji will end up having all (or some) of the features originally promised with Vista but got left out. Maybe it will have the new filesystem and the new "command prompt" that actually offers powerful features like a bash terminal session does on Linux or Mac OS X.

This is ridiculous. 'Speech Recognition' as an OS interface is revolutionary? I've been a linux user for years, and am almost exclusively a linux user these days (4 out of 5 machines), and I've seen no compelling features. The best thing Windows has going for it is games, and I think I can survive with an OS that lacks the diversionary ease that my Windows/Counterstrike days had...

Speech recognition is not a sound replacement for explorer shells, context menu's etc. This because some areas of the human short memmory that are used by speech are also used for other tasks. This means using speech recognition will cause less productivity. The second thing is that speech recognition means people make noise. Do see it happening in a corporation. I work with clients on the phone, don't you think they get confused while coversating with my clients I also talk in between to my computer? I don't think so. Speech recognition is highly overrated by people who have no experience in the cognitive sciences. Intelligent usable behaviour is far more than minimalisation of clicks and fuzzy logic.

I think Microsoft will do more usability research to optimize their os for the user. The User Centred Design methodology and empowered design will become more important to deliver software with a good look and feel. You will see a shift were people don't care about features, more about how userfriendly those features are presented.

"When Vista is released to the public, it will not ape all the features of Apple's OS X until R2 (codenamed Fiji), scheduled for release in 2008. Innovation will be part of a subsequent product "Vienna", still over 3 years away at a minimum. Although of course if it were to be delivered inside 5 years, you might feel justifiably ripped off if you purchased Vista, as it can be assumed that similar upgrade conditions from XP to Vista will apply re Vista to Vienna."

"When Vista is released to the public, it will not ape all the features of Apple's OS X until R2 (codenamed Fiji), scheduled for release in 2008. Innovation will be part of a subsequent product "Vienna", still over 3 years away at a minimum. Although of course if it were to be delivered inside 5 years, you might feel justifiably ripped off if you purchased Vista, as it can be assumed that similar upgrade conditions from XP to Vista will apply re Vista to Vienna."

One thing is for certain, Vienna won’t be just an operating system, but a new generation in computing.

One thing is for certain. MS will ALWAYS over-hype their new OSes. Vista was way overhyped, XP was overhyped. The only good Windows I've seen so far, was Win2k. Stable, and functionable. Of course, it was missing a lot of other things that would make it better; a built in 'nortons ghost' for example, but the stability from Win98, was a *pleasure*. I switched back to Win2k, after XP started the activation, and now refuse to go into Vista.

Win2k, the last great Windows.

- Kc

You are definately taking the optimist approach by saying "windows fiji/vienna WILL HAVE" (with the caps emphesis by me). Vista was supposed to have a lot of nice things to - pointing to the whole WinFS tebacle. From my experience in the tech world, concerning Windows, so much of Vista has been promises not fullfilled. Vista itself is a horendous release, where aside from a nicer GUI and some added security, its the same as XP (memory hungry, 'DLL-hell', and still uses the Registry). With all the years-and delays-that Vista had for development, which you must take into account, I am sorely dissappointed at Vista. Its all fine and dandy to read "when Vienna comes..." scenarios, but taking the realist view with Microsoft, either they shape up as a company or Vienna will be a bigger bomb than Vista, as Vista to me is XP SP3, not a whole new thing, which is what Vienna is said to be when it comes out.

Secondly, Fiji should never had to be planned the way it currently is (according to your post). Microsoft had plenty of time to make Vista great, and it failed. Fiji SHOULD be Vista, and more. WinFS (though I doubt that will happen for an 'add-on'), better security, and far less annoyances, a better dashboard...erm...I mean "sidebar"... all of these things should have been in Vista. Vista is such a slighty improvement to me (though an improvement on XP at least) that it seems like Microsoft can't get anything done.

Microsoft seems to be going in the direction of the old Apple of the mid nineties, lacking direction and vision - Microsoft needs their own Steve Jobs to push the company in the right direction. Look at Apple - they are growing by leaps and bounds. I myself made the switch to the Mac platform in 2005, being so dissappointed with a lackluster Windows OS, and sub-satisfactory hardware quality from any PC that wasn't built by my hands. Apple's computers and OS X are sleek, and they simply work well - they way computers should be. Under the hood, the current OS X "Tiger" its far more advanced than Windows is, and OS X 10.5 "Leopard" is going to far stretch that position even more when it comes out by Spring 2007 (and I can hold Apple to those dates without worry of delays - Apple gets things done).

The future of Windows after Vista isn't going to simply be about patches and improvements, but instead a determination whether or not Microsoft will remain a dominant force in the tech world and a marketshare leader in the OS world. If all Microsoft does is copy other companies innovation while doing none of their own, while at the same time being unable to make timely releases of the "next-generation-of-whatever", they will fail misserably and die out.

Speech Recognition will never be terribly useful beyond specialized environments, like an automobile. It's just so much easier to click Word, and start typing than to say "Open application: Microsoft Word. Begin dictation: blah blah blah." Suffice it to say Windows "Vienna" will not be largely stripped of useful input method and left with complex and slower methods of input and control.

-bZj

In other words, Vista SP2, Lets hope they don't try to charge for this upgrade.

Yeah, it's a comin' reeeel soon now.

Bla, bla, bla, this sound like: Don´t go to Mac OS X or Linux, pay for Vista and wait 5 years to some candy eye(that you´ll have to pay, and a lot). Vaporware is what you are talking about. This is a old strategy from Microsoft. Site and wait, don´t go after better technology products, we will fill you with what is the best... I don´t buy this kind of crap. Sorry for you...

Ho hum. What's in a code name? That which we call Fiji by any other vaporware moniker would smell as fishy.

Exciting stuff. But do you really think Vienna will be all that Microsoft promises or do you think we will again be disappointed?

Speech Recognition as a major input device would be great.

It would be nice if we could get basic things like copying files, burning discs, displaying the correct headers in folder (my World of Warcraft directory doesn't have artists, genres, and titles), and things like that working correctly first.

Windows is still full of UI bugs that have existed since Windows 95.

I find myself both disgusted and strangely excited at the thought of Microsoft's next moves.

I'm one of the 'children of the 80's' who began with the old Kaypro luggable and Apple IIe's and moved on from there. Heck, I've still got working computers around my house with every OS, including OS/2, AmigaOS, not to mention the 'glowing' Windows line.
Since about 2000, I've been running three computers simultaneously, an Apple tower, which I have chopped, hacked, and finally placed the board into a tweaked PC case. A linux computer with four separate distro's of linux. And a Windows computer dual booting XP Pro and 98se.

I will say this, I'm getting Vista for one reason only: to crack the blasted thing and find out how to make it play by my rules.

I like the challenge that Microsoft keeps giving me, but I hate the egocentric ways that everyone seems to worship the ground on which Microsoft has built its crumbling empire.

Perhaps I'll skip vista and use the money to buy M$ a semitruck of duct tape to hold their crummy ideas together with.

Stabilize Windows XP First. PLEASE! Make an XP SP3, SP4, ETC. Until you get it right.

1. NO MORE (as humanly possible) Crashes!
2. NO MORE device driver problems.
3. NO MORE Memory Leaks.
4. NO MORE Windows Registry.
5. Make each process and memory its own machine where memory leaks, and other problems will not be an issue.
6. NO MORE having to rewrite code every several years. This is really bad for medium to large business with Hundreds of thousands of lines of code or more.
7. If you want to copy someone please look at the IBM Mainframe way of doing things! I have been a Mainframe programmer for 25 years plus and never have I crashed an IBM Mainframe!

Just some thoughts.

Sounds like a well known Microsoft tactics. Just before or during the release of a new version of Windows that does not live up to the hype they are already hyping the next version. "Yes, this new version does not contain everything we promised, but look at what we have in the pipeline, and only two years to wait!". Heard that story when NT 3.5 was released and when XP was released.

The sad part is that people are still falling for this tactic!

Remember, this revolutionary filesystem with metadata stored in SQL server and with instant search and a genuine miracle every single day was already promised for NT 5 (Windows 2000) in 1995.

Hmm... completely revised, eh?
That sounds like the same thing they have said since... NT? And then when w2k was released it said "built on NT technology".

"Built on new technology technology"?

and it's been the same story since. I doubt it will change any time soon - but then, the actual release date is probably not what I classify soon, anyway.

WinFS? How many filesystems does an OS need? and they can't make a new one, can they... have to put it on top of NTFS. Sounds like the same thing they did when putting windows on top of DOS, the biggest mistake in computing history.

Patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches, patches!

Microsoft is aiming in a new technology direction.
It's no suprice that Exchange 2007 uses a SIP gateway to connect phones to mailboxes.

Language is more and more understood while CPU power increases also on the small devices. So have a PDA/Phone/wallet plan a meeting leave a voicemail, or buy or sell using voice.
The future would look a bit like this:

Instruct you PDA (+car navigation) by spoken command hey i want to drive to paris and overthere book me the Ritz hotel for 3 nights and cancel all my meetings. There you take some nightlife videos with your PDA and broadcst them to your friends, who you let notify by phone.
You go to a shop who notifies you they got jewely by RFID, as your PDA had an oustanding task to buy something for your girlfriend. Because you dont speak a word of franche your PDA translates for you.

And if you've worked for some companies you might have allready seen some parts of this story....

Matt E.
By Dashboard I take it you mean Start Taskbar/Toolbar?
Otherwise I agree. The amount of things that MS took out of Vista.... it may as well just be an XP upgrade rather than a whole new OS.

Corby, the new "Command Prompt" has been released for a while:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx

It is just not included with Vista.

why does everyone moan i like all the windows os lets face it if it wasn't for Bill Gates we would all be working in Dos. i love gadgets and new sidebars and if i have to pay then so be it but if i havn't the money than i won't. what i am saying is put up or shut up. buy it or don't buy it. upgrade or don't upgrade. just shut up whinging.

So what are going to talk into? The mouse?

Jon: Don't be silly. If there hadn't been a Windows then we'd still be using a GUI on PCs - it'd just be a GUI developed from GEM or NeXTStep or Suntools or BeOS or MacOS...

And if it wasn't for Bill Gates we certainly wouldn't all be working in DOS. Who do you think got DOS onto every PC in the first place?

we do have choices, i get fed up with these people moaning about microsoft. you don't have to upgrade. and if you want to you can, so as i said before buy or don't the choice is yours but stop the bloody whinging

Cool!

@elrohir: you should have said "patches" 38 times, not 37!!

@Exodus27: no, I said "dashboard" in reference to one of the many OS X features/aspects Microsoft copies and rebrands into Vista (though still not getting it right). Though I suppose you could say Konfabulator and such came even before Dashboard, but I'm just using it as an example. I don't think it can be argued that Microsoft didn't copy tons from Apple. It's plainly obvious.

@ Jon: Some computer history for you - The first personal computer to use a Graphical User Interface (GUI) was the Apple Lisa, back in 1983 - Windows was still a text/command based DOS system. The GUI was then popularized on the origional Macintosh in 1984. Windows didn't play catch-up until later, and they are still behind. And Bill Gates did not get a dos-like system onto every PC. Those type of OSes came before any Windows/MS DOS system. CP/M, AmigaOS, etc.

ok you guys i may not know the full history of Os systems but for me i am just happy to be able to use the things. i am 42 and at my secondary school we had no access to computors and so when the commadors and ZX81 and ZX spectrams came out i found it real hard to operate. then i gave up. in 1998 my father passed away and i decided that my dad's wish of getting a pc and using it would also be mine...i learnt quick and so computors to me are fantastic. i write about family history and play games and i am real happy with my life. lets face it guys most of you people moaning about the new OS probably get bootleg copies anyway so why moan about the continuing updates. Guys Be Happy with what you have got or get the updates...either is fine. you all will get it anyway so don't complain. Jon the guy who knows a bit but all.