What a name can do? (Windows Vista)

Microsoft officially named the next version of its operating system which was code named longhorn. The name Windows Vista currently shows some interesting results on google. There are various Windows products that have the name vista. There is a stats package, some thing else so specialized I couldn’t figure it out, and there is a company that actually installs glass windows for your home called Vista Windows.

I find it interesting how much these google results are bound to change in the next few days as blogs everywhere mention this, in the next few weeks as the conventional media catches up, and in the next few months as Microsoft and its huge bohemoth community start putting out marketing material, documentation and programmer resources.

Doesn’t the entire Longhorn release process remind you of the Cairo release process? When Windows NT 4.0 was being developed there was press on it years before its release, just like Longhorn. No one knew that Cairo would eventually be named NT 4.0. No one knew that its release would really just be perceived as 95 without the game ability, but more stable so you can run office without the system crashing. Cairo was even supposed to have a new filesystem that was the greatest thing since the internet. Except many of the Cairo articles were written in 1994 and early 1995, months before the internet really made a huge splash in the media. Everyone was still asking, “What is the internet?”

Does this sound familiar? It does to me. The parallels are astounding. Longhorns WinFS, IE7, new drawing methods. There are so many parallels to the time of windows 95 and NT4.0. The largest difference is the time between releases. Windows XP came out in spring or summer of 2001. We can expect Vista sometime within a year, or maybe two. That is 5-6 years between releases. Windows 95 was summer of 95. NT4 was spring or summer of 96. Why the difference?

Microsoft learned from its mistakes. At the time, 95 was still somewhat based on an underlying DOS. Microsoft was maintaining two distinct operating systems and making them compatible. NT4 was for “servers and workstations” and 95 was for “homes and desktops”? It wasn’t clear for what each was. But ultimately, consumers wanted it all. Windows 95 was unacceptable in terms of stability. Windows NT4 was unacceptable for gaming and audio applications (there wasn’t much desktop video at the time). Microsoft converged their two offerings and here we are. 6 years is an awefully long time between releases. The Ubuntu Linux distribution puts out 12 releases in that amount of time. Of course they have only been around for about two years, so time will tell where they are in 2012 when Microsoft releases its successor to Windows Vista.

My only question is will this version of Windows slice my home baked bread?

Update:
Searching bloglines for Vista or Windows Vista shows nothing MS related in the first page of results.

Searching BlogPulse yeilds a funny story.

Slashdot has a story.

Amazingly the next thing I ran across came from my RSS Bandit feeds. I subscribe to the blogs.msdn… and the weblogs.asp.net blogrolls. Paschal covered the same thing that I did regarding Google results for Windows Vista. He included the google results.

Technocrati yeilds many results of people saying just “Microsoft did this…” with no real comments, but this ugly page did make me chuckle. Also from Technocrati is someone who has something positive to say about the name.

Is this a pretty big news story, or is it just something that blogger (ugh myself included) like to latch onto?