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Skip Navigation LinksPC Authority > Features > Vista and Office 2007 - Microsoft's big hitters
Vista and Office 2007 - Microsoft's big hitters
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FEATURE

Vista and Office 2007 - Microsoft's big hitters

by Jon Honeyball  on Oct 10, 2006
Tags: Vista | and | Office | Beta | 2
Driver signing
I also sat down with members of the Kernel team at WinHEC and bashed out the issues concerned with driver signing, and they’re finally going to take the plunge into mandatory signing of all 64-bit drivers.
I can’t exaggerate how important such a step is going to be. I asked whether it was possible to get around this unsigned lockout, maybe by using some Registry or Active Directory tweak, and I received the very firm answer that it was not possible. There are only two ways to make an X64 Windows computer accept unsigned drivers – there’s a switch you can apply in boot.ini, or you can install a debugging facility into the core of the OS. I specifically asked whether a vendor would be able to get around this, and was told no, although I wouldn’t be amused to see a major vendor using the boot.ini switch in the future on a production machine.

Why does this matter? Because too many vendors have been relying on customers to do their beta-testing for them, and in an unstructured fashion – whenever you go to a driver website, it’s easiest to download the ‘latest’ driver even if it’s a beta. The fact is, though, an end user has neither the debugging tools nor the skill set to do anything other than send a Dr Watson report to Microsoft, so Microsoft has been on the receiving end of a lot of driver crash information and has now decided that enough’s enough. I applaud this move and only wish it had been done sooner.

At least with the 64-bit platform, vendors can’t claim there’s a user and hardware migration issue, since jumping from 32-bit up to 64-bit means a clean install across the board, of course.

Allchin retires
Microsoft hosted a Vista reviewers’ workshop on the day before WinHEC started, and at the end of the day, Jim Allchin came along to take part in a Q&A session. His full title now is ‘Co-President, platforms and services division’, and so he covers almost anything that isn’t development tools, Office or the games stuff. A few months ago he announced he would be leaving Microsoft at the end of the year and handing over the reins for this huge chunk of Microsoft to others. He’s been at Microsoft since 1990, when he came from being the chief architect at Banyan Vines (an operating system and directory system that was years ahead of its time). Back in 1992, he became responsible for putting together a computing architecture for the future that was presented first at the 1992 Professional Developers Conference. Called Cairo, it was a vision of an object store, distributed networking system, object desktop and so forth.

I’ve covered what happened to Cairo over the years in this very column (one advantage of being a columnist hereabouts is that I can point you to issue numbers years ago where this stuff was microscopically described). Suffice to say, Cairo as a project went off the rails in the cold hard light of day, as the reality of bringing such a solution to market sank in. However, the thinking behind it has underpinned a great deal of the Microsoft’s effort ever since.

I took the opportunity to ask Allchin how well he thought he’d delivered on his vision over the last 15 years, taking into account the practical realities of the times in between. He said he was proud to have delivered most if not all of it - document storage, integrated email, object-based desktop, strong networking and directory services and so forth. He admitted that he’d been rocked to the core by how badly the XP Home experience has gone, and recalls Steve Ballmer dropping a friend’s computer on his desk that was riddled with spyware and other nasties. He said it had come as a major shock to Microsoft just how bad things were out there, and that this shock had driven the work done for SP 2, and now for OneCare.

Did he strike me as feeling the job was accomplished? Well, yes and no. Back then, the vision had exceptional clarity, while today’s reality is still too reliant on bolting bits together and pretending they work. Is that good enough? It depends on your perspective: if they’d gone headlong into development of the Cairo model, then they’d have been even further out of step with the Internet revolution and it might have killed the whole company. Pragmatism rules at the end of the day. It will be interesting to see how the division changes over the next year or two. Will Allchin’s heirs do a better job of bringing Longhorn and WinFS to market? Only time will tell.
Jim Allchin hands oer the reigns at Microsoft.
Jim Allchin hands oer the reigns at Microsoft.
Copyright © 2009 Dennis Publishing
This article appeared in the October, 2006 issue of PC Authority.
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