Hard to believe as it is, it has been already almost 20 years since the days when Apple plastered the halls of its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) with huge posters proclaiming “Redmond, start your photocopiers” or “Mac OS X Leopard: Hasta la vista, Vista”. The decade of the 2000s, coinciding with Steve Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, is widely perceived as a lost one for Microsoft, and one of the most visible signs of that decline was, without a doubt, the “Longhorn” saga.
Enter David William Plummer. He is a retired Microsoft engineer who worked in MS-DOS and Windows 95, and now runs the “Dave’s Garage” channel on YouTube. Precisely, this month’s Vidéothèque movie is a recent entry he published last March, where he dives into the nitty-gritty details of how, after the release of Windows XP, the company dived into a huge pool of hubris and mismanagement, collectively forgetting in the process how to release working software almost overnight.
Dave starts by pointing out that Longhorn is not exactly the same thing as Windows Vista, but it is one of the key milestones to understand one of the least well-received versions of Windows of all time. The core issue of Longhorn was, as it is the case for so many major software projects, the unbounded growth of its feature scope, or as it is commonly known, “scope creep”.
Among other examples, Dave explains how the new “WinFS” flagship feature was going to provide a database system to search for files on the file system; something that, ironically enough, Apple quickly bundled into Mac OS X “Tiger” in 2005 as a feature called “Spotlight”, built with SQLite as its backend, and providing an incredible file search feature in the process. (Kids: before Spotlight, finding a particular file on a hard disk was almost impossible. I know, I know.)
At Redmond, however, to add insult to injury, the initial builds of WinFS were so buggy and ate so much RAM, that they would end up crashing machines… and beta users would end up disabling the feature altogether to be able to use Windows at all.
Ouch.
Longhorn would also be at the origin of the much touted “Aero” user interface style, which… well, was also mocked as a cheap rip-off of Mac OS X’s “Aqua” design idiom of the early 2000s. You see the “photocopier” pattern at play here.
Finally, according to Dave, one of the biggest roadblocks in the lifecycle of Longhorn was, of course, security. We have already mentioned Bill Gates’ “Trustworthy Computing” initiative and memo quite a few times in the pages of this magazine; needless to say, the pressure of fixing security bugs on Windows lengthened the development process quite a bit, and understandably so. And once Vista shipped… those same security features, involving checks and prompting the user for endless confirmations, made the first releases of the system strictly unusable, triggering an unprecedented backlash from press and users alike.
You get the idea. These were the days of the “Mini-Microsoft” blog, written by a (still) anonymous author. The days of Steven Sinofsky’s famous albeit scathing memo about the state of Microsoft. The days of Ray Ozzie sending the “Doomsday” warning about the inevitability of the cloud. A troubled time for Microsoft until the arrival of Satya Nadella and the reorientation of the company away from the idea of Windows being a major cash cow for the organization.
Check this month’s Vidéothèque movie, “Windows Longhorn Explained by Dave Plummer”, on YouTube. His channel has other gems, like an interview of Dave Cutler, the original chief architect of Windows NT, and also an explanation of the current monetization strategies used by Windows 11. Dave is also the author of the 2021 book “Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire”, a well-received work where he discussed his life with autism, ASD and Asperger’s, and how knowing what he knows now would have helped him in his younger years.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.