Vista Issues Laid Bare, The What & Why
REGARDLESS OF WHAT Bill Gates might have claimed in interviews, a lot of the goodies in Vista have – I’ll be diplomatic – drawn inspiration from rival products, primarily Apple’s Mac OS X. The trouble is that Microsoft has prioritised the wrong bits, taken the wrong inspiration.
And the sad irony is that if it had made different choices, we’d have got a simpler, faster, safer Vista a lot sooner. So what sources and where has MS got its ideas from? And where should it have done so instead? You don’t have to look far. System-wide instant search and a query-driven, location-independent view of the filesystem are very useful things to have.
Microsoft spent years working on “Windows Future Storage”, a complex system that would store all your data in a SQL database. Instead, Apple came up with Spotlight. A minor tweak to the filesystem code means that every file saved to disk is indexed as it’s saved, making it simple to offer near-instant file searching.
Once you’ve got that, it’s relatively trivial to offer folders showing all image files or all files containing “Dear Mrs Jones” or all files of over 38.45Kb generated by used “alice” between 2:30 on 13 April 2004 and 5:15 on 26 September 2005. No need for a big heavy relational database or SQL or anything else.
Tags:apple, bill_gates, far_system, Microsoft, rival_products, sql_database, Windows, windows vista
