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Windows Vista Beta 2 Review Part 1
Monday, May 22nd, 2006
My, we’ve come a long way. Microsoft began planning the successor to Windows XP in May 
2001, four months before it even shipped XP to the public. Then codenamed Longhorn, Windows Vista was revealed to the public in July 2001. Previously, we had been told that a major Windows release, dubbed Blackcomb, was to have succeeded XP. Longhorn, at the time, was viewed as a minor, or interim, Windows version.
Over time, Longhorn grew into a major Windows release. In April 2002, then-Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin admitted publicly that Longhorn would slip from its expected 2003 release to 2004 because of its storage engine requirements and advanced 3D user interface. This new user interface, Microsoft executives said, would utilize the GPU (graphical processing engine) found in 3D video cards and provide "smooth desktop animation and new rendering features and effects." And with great fanfare, in mid-2002, Microsoft started talking about "Palladium," the next-generation security architecture that would ship as part of Longhorn.
In the intervening years, Longhorn turned into Windows Vista, dropped numerous promised features, and was delayed several times, damaging Microsoft’s credibility. I’ve railed against the delays, dropped features, and lackluster progress of the Vista beta numerous times, but never as famously as in When Vista Fails, part 5 of a review of an interim Vista build from earlier this year. Some people misunderstood my complaints. To my mind, Microsoft has under-delivered on Vista in two ways: First, it made promises it will not keep. And second, there are specific problems in the beta versions of Windows Vista that need to be fixed before the product is finalized in late 2006. There’s little Microsoft can do about the former at this point, but I expect the company to spend a lot of time on the latter over the next several months. Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista Beta 2 Review: Part 1: The Big Picture
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