You'll recall that a fortnight ago Microsoft released Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista, a document that seemed - though it was never explicitly stated - to be aimed at those pesky enterprise managers who weren't wrapping their arms around the new OS and humming happily.
Well, we all had a bit of a laugh. So Microsoft, perhaps wounded, yanked it from its servers.
And now it's come back. Revised. Sharper. Cleaner.
But what's really changed? Unfortunately they're both PDFs, so it's not easy to compare them directly. Steven Poole has done a good job. I've been busy with opendiff (the picture is a sample page comparing the differences), and found a few interesting things too. There's small changes - lots of capitalisation (so "standard user" in the previous version becomes "Standard User", which suggest the proofreading wasn't so hot first time).
The most significant change comes on p5, where the phrase in the earlier version - "A complaint often lodged at Windows Vista is that it seems to run a bit slower than Windows XP. We'll get to that in a minute, but Windows Vista is doing a lot more than any previous operating system." - is missing completely.
And where the previous one said "Windows Search does require that the processor continually index file locations so they can be quickly retrieved at will." it now says "Search does require that the system index file locations so they can be quickly retrieved at will, though the approach taken by Windows Vista should not interfere with system performance while in use."
As Poole points out, that "should not" is genius. Well, it shouldn't interfere. Yeah, but it does. But, Microsoft says, it shouldn't. Both right. Move on.
First version: "Indexing for near instantaneous search results for desktop files, even embedded in email messages, is a resource-intensive task— requiring the PC to continually scan the hard drive for changes. On Windows Vista, the search engine is set up as a service rather than an application. As a service, Windows Search takes a bit more time to accommodate these one-off events, but there is far less impact on available computing resources. "
That's gone, apart from the "service instead of an application" bit. Instead we have an addendum to the following paragraph, saying "With Windows Vista, the indexing function doesn't crawl the disk constantly. Instead, after indexing the content for the first time, it waits for changes in the file system and then only indexes the updated files. Beyond that, indexing goes idle when a user or the system opens a document or performs a task, so the actual impact on performance is minimal."
So I'm confused. Is it resource-intensive, like it used to be, or not?
And further on, noting that "Applications written with undocumented APIs may fail at runtime," the writer originally added: "However, in this case time has been healing most wounds".
Yeah, well, strike that one. Vista, wounds? Don't even think about it.
And there's more that Vista is doing: where before it was "indexing for near instantaneous search results for desktop files, even embedded in email messages", now it's doing this: "for example, indexing for near instantaneous search results for desktop files, even those embedded in e-mail messages; preventing malware with Windows Defender; and dynamically delivering rich content to the desktop with Windows Sidebar."
Nice ice to find they've discovered something more.
Overall, what do we find? No new revelations about Vista, but still that nagging feeling that Microsoft is uncomfortable with the way that people react to it. And that's surely the real problem here.
Still, it's always entertaining to see large organisations revising their spin in public.
Update Fri 2230: via Tim Anderson via a comment on Steven Poole's post, a comment from Brandon Paddock of Microsoft:
Those changes were made because the original article was written without the involvement of the engineering teams and so it contained a great deal of inaccuracy.
He also adds (to Poole - hey, come on Brandon, come over and tell us too):
Search does NOT have a noticeable impact on Windows Vista's performance characteristics.
Search does NOT "continuously" scan your hard disk, and consumes NO CPU time or other resources except when processing notifications of item changes.
I'm rather confused about why you [Poole] seem to prefer the technically inaccurate version, versus the accurate version of the document. It seems this is because the truth does not match up with your [Poole's] pre-conceived notions about Windows. That seems awfully childish, though.
Over here, we're wondering how a technically inaccurate version of a document could be published on a part of the site that calls itself "Springboard series" which is "The On-ramp for IT pros". Someone's bound to explain it.
(Note: I've corrected the more obvious errors in this post. I guess that makes me and Microsoft level, except it has slightly more money.)
