David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…The funny thing is they actually did that this year with all the AI features. All of those are coming soon over the next year, which I’m not saying that’s a bad strategy in the current environment, but it is a different strategy for Apple. Anyway, Longhorn is teased for five years. All the David Rosenthals out there are like, what the heck, Microsoft? I’ve been excited for all this crazy stuff you’re showing me. What’s going on? Well, what happened behind the scenes? David, what was the initial technical spark that was supposed to be the cornerstone of Longhorn? There were three pillars of (I think) it was all originally supposed to be Blackcomb. Then they were like, no, no, we’re going to pare it down to Longhorn. But it all ended up getting added back into Longhorn. The first of which was called Avalon. It was a new graphics engine that used direct hardware acceleration. I think the vision for this was like, hey, we’re going to take DirectX, bake it into the operating system, and allow the operating system to use GPU hardware acceleration. That’s more or less it. All these code names ended up referring to multiple things because it was emblematic of the organizational disarray inside the Windows development team. But anyway, it sounds great. We can render all these really great graphics as a part of the operating system. because It’s GPU-accelerated.…

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