Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Microsoft's Longhorn Promises

Mary Jo Foley has posted an article stumping, I mean leaking, some performance promises from MS about Longhorn:
  • Launch Apps 15% Faster
  • Boot PCs 50% Faster and Resume from Stanby in 2 seconds
  • Patch with 50% fewer reboots
  • Migrate users [to Longhorn] 75% faster than with previous Windows releases
  • Clean install in 15 minutes
Hasn't this nearly exact list been touted for every Windows release in memory? Lets take the first one. If Firefox for example launces in 1 second (fairly typical for my pretty heavily loaded laptop right now) and you save 15%, Firefox now launches in .9775 seconds. I am gonna dance a jig with all the time I saved right there. Really, who is going to care about this? Other than that, you can't really complain if MS hits these targets, you have to patch, reboot, and clean install so much the world might get back a few hours of life with Longhorn :) You have to hand it to Ms. Foley for fulfilling the role of mouthpiece for MS beautifully. Will she take MS to task if under imperical review these claims are not met? Of course not, but she sure generated a lot of page views this morning with the article, nice.