Skip Vista, try modular Windows!

Former WVW-editor John has a great view on the future of Vista. On his weblog he writes that all these delays could be a perfect opportunity to call the end of Vista. Ray Ozzie’s vision of step updates to Windows rather than the earthquake of a totally new version once or twice a decade is surely the way to go now.

Step updates of a modular Windows — the OS without a name — would be a great relief to many, not least the long-suffering OEMs, who must wonder what strange fantasy world they inhabit… Microsoft should look to Google, with its method of constantly adding bits to a cluster of products. If one doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. Scrap it and move on. If Vista didn’t work — and it clearly doesn’t yet — disaster. Even the current rollout of service packs is getting too big for its boot (pun intended). Remember the problems with the 80MB SP2? And SP3 is due this year. Oh, my! Why not aim at quarterly improvements to parts of the code and maybe a new module or two? So we’d have Windows 2006-Q1, then Q2 …

I really do agree on this! MS are you listening?