Court documents in the US have revealed what Microsoft says is not happening; a close to completed version of Microsoft’s next operating system Windows 7 has been coded and exposed to government officials in the USA. It has also been revealed that constant upgrades to the existing Vista OS is costing consumers and business hundreds of dollars in addition bandwidth costs.
Internally Microsoft executives have admitted to SmartHouse that the Company rushed the current Vista version of their OS into the market and during the past 18 months the Company has been forced to re write code on the fly in an effort to not only fix bugs but improve the speed and security of their current current OS offering.
There is also talk that Windows 7 could be rolled out earlier than planned in an effort to overcome problems with the current Viast OS which has seen over 1GB of updates since being launched.
18 months ago and prior to the launch of Vista SmartHouse revealed that Microsoft was starring down the barrel of having to re write vast amounts of the Vista code. Several Microsoft evangelists at the time said that this was not the case.
We now find out that Microsoft instead chose to launch Vista and then rewrite code for specific areas of the operating system on the fly in an effort to improve functionality and address security issues.
Some of this code writing was for functions that had been identified by engineers prior to the role out Vista as being in need of additional code and upgrading. Microsoft managemen concerned about revenue shortfalls apparently chose to go with what has been described by insiders as “defective code”.
During the past 18 months the Company has rolled out over 1 GB of Vista updates with the latest fix being over 700Mb. This consumers and business claim is costing them money due to Microsoft demanding that consumers switch on automatic updates which results in vast amounts of data being pushed to a consumers PC overnight.
One North Sydney business executive said ” We recently queried
In many cases it is pushing consumers past their broadband allocation resulting in additional costs per 100Mb of data downloaded. Now the Company is planning a role out of their new Windows 7 OS by late 2009 and late last week Microsoft confirmed the authenticity of a court filing with US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly whose job is to ensure the company’s compliance with its US antitrust settlement. The filing revealed that Microsoft is well down the track in developing the new OS however very few details of what is in the operating system have been revealed.
US officials have said “The technical committee has begun to review Windows 7. Microsoft recently supplied the committee with a build of Windows 7, and is discussing testing going forward,” said the report.
“The technical committee will conduct middleware-related tests on future builds of Windows 7.”
The committee dates back to the 2002 decree, which also required Microsoft to help rival parties integrate any new feature added to Windows that meets the definition of a “Microsoft middleware product”.
