Of course, all this is little surprise. Ever since Amazon let the cat out of the bag last summer, pre-listing Vista for January 30 availability, the GA date has been an open secret. In the past few months, Microsoft has been making general statements about the phased year-end releases.
And with Microsoft holding a major developer conference in Las Vegas this week, most observers expected the announcement.
On the first day of general release, Vista will be available in five languages, including English, French, Spanish, Japanese, and German. That’s up from three languages on the day XCCP was released. Within the first hundred days following the release, Microsoft promised availability in 32 languages, and up to a hundred at some time after that.
Microsoft has designed Vista more modularly, developing a single system image that is configured for multiple editions. All editions will be on the same DVD, with the appropriate edition turned on by software key.
The press conference was kind of a last hurrah or valedictory for James Allchin, the co-president of the platforms and services group, who will retire from Microsoft once Vista goes GA. And so the superlatives were piled on.
Vista, Allchin claimed, would become the most robust, secure, and best performing OS that Microsoft has ever put out. And by characterizing the Vista development process as the most thorough that Microsoft has ever done, Allchin unintentionally was giving it a this time we got it right spin.
Among the numbers: Vista received double the number of stress tests as XP; it was the first Microsoft OS that underwent through the formal Security Development Lifecycle methodology from the start; that Vista received more external testing than any other Microsoft product, and so on.
He spoke of how using the Internet sped the development cycle, especially when it came to reporting and patching bugs, and deploying new builds.
Originally codenamed Longhorn, Vista contains a huge laundry list of new features, ranging from the new Aero look and feel, multimedia creation tools like a new DVD maker, and support of new peer-to-peer networking. And it also sports WinFX, the new programming model that unifies development of visual design, application logic, workflow, and communications in a common model.
But the big issue is security. Beyond improvements to the code, and all the testing that went into it, Allchin considered the biggest accomplishment as the new multi-layered security. Even if there were a vulnerability [in the code], it’s much harder than ever to get to. We’ve put up one barrier after another.
Vista also contains controversial digital rights management features that could disable a machine to just running a web browser for an hour (long enough to log onto Microsoft’s aside and buy a real license) if the user hasn’t formally completed the software activation process.
Among the most prominent pieces that didn’t make it were WinFS, a.k.a., the next generation Windows file system. It’s remained an elusive goal ever since Microsoft announced Cairo (the platform that eventually became XP) a dozen years ago.
Missed milestones aside, Allchin obviously accentuated the positive, pointing out how Vista’s architecture made it possible to make security more robust. Mentioning address space randomization, a feature that obfuscates machine addresses making it more difficult for malware to replicate and spread, Allchin said that they originally wanted to package the feature with the SP2 security upgrade of XP. But XP’s architecture wouldn’t support it. In Vista, they cracked the problem.
