Mike Neil, a Microsoft general manager, made a post over at the TechNet blogs about what will and will not be going into the next version of Windows Server's virtualization. Among the things that are not being included this time around: live migration, resource hot-add functionality, and a support limit of 16 cores per physical machine. As he puts it earlier in the article: "Shipping is a feature, too." Better a good product now than a great one at some undefined time, and after who knows what kind of agony. (One feature that people will be thrilled to know is in there, however: full support for VSS, so a guest machine can be backed up while running. I'm wildly curious about how they implemented this: is a snapshot of the system state data also taken and backed up with the computer?)
The murderous gestation period for Vista was something many people pounced on as a sign that Microsoft's product lifecycle strategy was seriously out of hand. I still think part of it was that Microsoft wanted to talk badly about the things that were going into Vista -- but at the same time, they weren't sure how much of that could make the final cut, so they would up talking about things that simply couldn't show up as discussed. It's something of a trap: the way to build excitement about a product is to talk about it, but if you talk about it and then you don't ship what you talk about, you disappoint people.
Would Microsoft be better off if they adopted a more Apple-like approach, where new features are held so tightly under wraps that no one knows about them under mere weeks before launch? I doubt it -- probably because they're serving a radically different market than Apple. If they talk about something that's going into a future version of Exchange, for instance, they want to talk about it so that the people who make buying decisions about Exchange can weigh that against other factors (the cost of upgrading in terms of time and resources, and not just money, for one). Apple's still not a terribly business-oriented company in the sense that the way they develop products and put them out into the market is meant to appeal specifically to workplaces. This isn't to say that a company can't install a slew of Macs and do well (many do); it's just that Apple's products as a whole don't seem designed to cater as explicitly to business markets. This is changing, I'll admit, but right now there are still plenty of signs it's not like that yet -- the whole iPhone-vs.-Windows-Mobile-devices debate is a good example.
So, while I can't decry Microsoft for talking about what they'd like to do, I wish they would cast their language about upcoming products a little more explicitly in that regard. It would not make them seem any the less ambitious -- at least, not in my eyes.
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