How an unexpected setback brought about a new era for your PC – and for Microsoft.
The road to the final release of Windows Vista has not always been a smooth one. The lowest point came when the head of Windows development, Jim Allchin – probably Bill Gates’ most trusted senior lieutenant at Microsoft – told him that development on the successor to Windows XP had effectively ground to a halt. Gates didn’t know whether to be furious or just traumatised. In a later interview published in the Wall Street Journal, Allchin says he told Gates, “It’s not going to work”. Even coming from the man who’s seen by many as the guiding father of Windows, Gates found the news hard to believe.
The weather matched the fevered behind-the-scenes activity. In Microsoft’s normally-temperate home city of Seattle, throughout July and August 2004 heatwaves followed muggy spells as Gates argued that the project just needed more time. Behind closed doors, he also held conversations with senior software architects, but in the end Gates agreed on the need to start building the new operating system from scratch. It was the most traumatic point in the development of Longhorn, the codename for the program that was eventually to become Windows Vista, and it changed the way that Microsoft operates. In short, software development became a team game rather than a somewhat chaotic competition between programmers.
Behind the scenes
Visitors to the company’s Redmond Campus generally come away with a feeling of almost unnatural order. Even the grass between the buildings seems controlled to the point where it maintains a uniform height without a lawnmower in sight. But underneath the apparently regimented academic exterior was often barely organised chaos. The celebration of this culture peaked in an internal Microsoft documentary, which portrayed software engineers as heroes as they battled to beat seemingly impossible odds to get Windows XP out on time.
By the time Windows XP did make it out of the door in October 2001, Allchin’s mind was on other things – in May of that year work had started on Longhorn. This was expected to follow the trajectory that had worked so successfully for Microsoft, to the point where its operating systems run well over 90 per cent of the world’s personal computers. The basis of Microsoft’s popularity is ‘bundling’. Without it an operating system is a vital, but not hugely interesting, piece of software, which manages the hardware and software resources of a computer, such as controlling input and output devices, allocating memory and managing files. There’s never been a firm definition that puts a boundary on what can be included, but before Windows came along you couldn’t have much fun with an operating system on its own. Now it’s taken for granted that the operating system will be bundled with a host of functions and programs, such as games, a web browser, a media player, security software and rudimentary word processing.
Making old work with new
Another reason for Microsoft’s continuing success is the way it always makes a huge effort to ensure that any piece of software or hardware that worked with an old operating system will still function with a new one. Not every company does this. For instance, when Apple launched OS X, it ditched much of its so-called ‘legacy’. Many original programs simply wouldn’t work any more. So in 2001 the Microsoft developers who were starting to look at the projected Longhorn operating system had to somehow incorporate the 40 million lines of code that made up Windows XP, or at least include the functions that the code performed. In software engineering, that often means sticking to the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. That’s partly why programs tend to get more and more bloated. But, along with the Windows XP code, there was a whole lot more “cool stuff”, as Microsoft likes to call it, that also needed to be added to its new operating system. Combining the demands of the old and new makes each version of Windows more advanced than the last, and Longhorn was no exception.
At first, it was developed fairly quietly and out of sight. But with thousands of engineers working for Microsoft, and many more interested people on the internet, nothing in the company stays secret for long. This is particularly true when an operating system is being developed. In order to test the components, they’re all put together in a ‘build’. Some builds are only intended for internal use, while others are handed out at developers’ conferences and so on. The latter usually turn up on the internet within hours of their appearance in delegates’ packs, and even the frequently flaky and unstable internal builds tend to show up online as well.
So it was that the first relatively public sighting of the new operating system came in September 2002, when it appeared on the internet under the name Longhorn XP Professional. Indeed, to the untrained eye it looked very similar to Windows XP. It was, however, the first time that the Windows Sidebar had been seen. Designed to be shown on the right-hand side of the screen, but dockable elsewhere, the original idea was that it should replace the System Tray area, but that was later dropped.
This build also included an implementation of one of Bill Gates’ pet projects, WinFS or Windows Future Storage. Intended to reduce the need for the proliferation of proprietary file types while speeding up file retrieval, it had been conceived in the 1990s, but never made it into a finished product. It was a trend that was to continue; WinFS was removed from Windows Vista in late 2006.
Faster, better graphics
Probably the most important development in this early version of Longhorn could be seen in the Display Properties Control Panel. This made use of a new graphical display system codenamed Avalon – which we now know as Windows Presentation Foundation. It increases the range of graphics that can be displayed and speeds them up. By November 2002, the new graphical user interface (GUI) Aero had made its first appearance. Nobody now seems sure whether this is an acronym or a ‘backronym’. In other words, they can’t remember which came first: Aero or the words that give the initial letters to the name. Either way, Microsoft now says it stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open.
The development of Aero has continued for at least the last four years, although it has sometimes disappeared from the builds to be temporarily replaced by the Windows XP interface. Microsoft has always insisted that Aero is more than cosmetic eye candy, pointing to the fact that it’s the first complete graphical revision since Windows 95, covering buttons, task dialogues, wizards, common dialogues, control panels, icons, fonts, user notifications and even the tone of text used.
Throughout 2003 and into 2004, groups of Microsoft engineers added functions to the new operating system. There were dramatic changes in appearance: the sidebar developed slowly before being unceremoniously dropped, new parental controls were included, along with integration of a new secure-computing environment formerly known as Palladium. And there was a growing focus on security; Microsoft was seeing a steadily growing increase in attacks on its software, and in 2002 Bill Gates announced a new focus on ‘Trustworthy Computing’ – henceforth, in any choice between adding new features and securing what was there, security would win. It had a knock-on delay on Longhorn: a big chunk of the staff got pulled off to work on the high-security Service Pack 2 for Windows XP.