Rolandes Ramblings

This story is rife with irony. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…

ITworld.com - Even the Builders of Windows Find Tech Support a Challenge

Joel Shore, ITworld.com

I’m just back from Seattle, where I attended the Microsoft Windows Vista Reviewer’s Workshop. An enormous amount of information was presented, and now that the non-disclose embargo has been lifted, you’ll be reading a great deal about Vista here and in other places in the coming months.

But what intrigued me most was the last scheduled item of the day, a simple Q&A#038; session with Jim Allchin, the brilliant mind behind Windows Vista, Windows XP, and, years before that, the Banyan VINES network operating system.

Jim, as down to earth as ever as he nears the release of Vista and then sails off into retirement from Microsoft, was amazingly candid in answering questions. He talked about how Microsoft vastly underestimated the security needs of its products and how enormously painful it was to bring XP’s SP2 to market.

He discussed in detail the decision to delay the retail launch of Vista until January 2007, missing the critical holiday season for PC makers. Though some anger exists, Allchin acknowledged that some — he declined to identify who — actually thanked him for this delay. Their belief is that the revenue lost in the initial delay will be more than made up for in reduced support calls.

Speaking of support, Jim, a master storyteller, related an experience that demonstrates how clueless Microsoft can be and how it learns from the trenches. If only it didn’t have to come this.

Once upon a time not that very long ago, Microsoft CEO and chief cheerleader Steve Ballmer was attending a friend’s child’s wedding. One of the parents (I’m not sure if was the groom’s or bride’s) complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and was performing miserably. Would Steve mind having a look?

According to Allchin, Ballmer spent the better part of the next two days trying to rid this PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware, severe fragmentation, and well, you name it. Picture it: the world’s 24th wealthiest person, a man worth $13.6 billion according to Forbes magazine, sitting at a table for two days, playing tech support. It was, Allchin says, a humbling experience.

Allchin says Ballmer eventually gave up and instead lugged the machine back to Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash. campus. There, several engineers spent several days, burrowing deep into the system to figure out the problem. Imagine, CSI: Redmond.

It turns out there were more than a hundred pieces of malware of various types. Things that these engineers using Microsoft’s own private tools could not ferret out and fix. Some of these threats hooked themselves deeply into the core operating system and essentially lied about their existence. Other malware scoured the hard drive for anything containing the string “virus,” and, in Allchin’s words, would “shoot them dead.” The result was disabling any installed antivirus software.

It took a team of engineers to restore this system to health. And it was a real wake-up call.

“This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world,” says Allchin.

As a result of this event and others like it, Microsoft got religion about system health. At least that’s what we’re told.

Windows Vista is much smarter at sniffing out many system health issues proactively. And it contains troubleshooters that are far smarter and more powerful than anything previously included with Windows.

Even so, it’s my belief that Windows is still a long way from being a safe, protective, self-healing, impenetrable environment that assures top-level performance at all times. A look at Task Manager on my XP system reveals 83 processes running at the moment. There’s no way to tell what they are, where they came from, what they do, or how to get rid of them. Vista, at least, with a right click on a listed process item shows you the folder where that process resides, saving you from the chore of doing a hard-drive search. But you still don’t know what it is, how it got there, what impact it is having on performance, or how to get rid of it. And you still can’t tell what each instance of svchost.exe is doing (currently six instances running on my system).

In response to my own question — well, more of an angry rant, I admit, Microsoft acknowledged that Vista would do little to prevent even a virgin new PC from eventually having the same 83 processes installed and running. Did I hit a nerve on this issue? You tell me: during the ensuing break, seven, count ‘em, seven Microsofties approached me to discuss the issue further.

My point was simple: The new stuff is great. But you still haven’t fixed the old stuff that has been broken for a decade.

Forget the pretty Aero transparent glass user experience (apparently the phrase “user interface” is being retired). There is real power in Windows Vista. It lies unseen, deep under the hood. But even after running the beta 2 for several days, I’m not yet convinced that for the average user Windows Vista will be any healthier, safer, and efficient.

Side note: A Microsoft official close to Allchin has promised me a transcript of the aforementioned Q&A session. I’ll pass that info along in a future column; it is a must read.