M$ kills off FSX, ESP and Train Sim in one fell swoop

[DaddyHoggy]

I've got a friend who works for CAE in Canada - his CEO was sent this by a senior executive in M$

Below is an excerpt from an email our President received yesterday direct from a Microsoft Senior Director:



As a result of Thursday’s larger Microsoft announcement, our organization known as ACES Studio – producers of Microsoft ESP™, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Microsoft Train Simulator – is immediately closed! The decision to close ACES Studio was a strategic decision by senior Microsoft executives in light of the challenging economic climate and a sharpening of the company’s strategic focus.



Microsoft will cease further development of Microsoft ESP™ effective immediately. We are currently exploring options for the future of ESP and will announce details at the appropriate time.



Microsoft remains committed to the Flight Simulator franchise which has proven to be a successful PC-based game for many years. While development of Flight Sim v11.0 has been suspended for now, Microsoft will continue to sell Microsoft Flight Simulator X and still considers Flight Sim to be an important title for Microsoft.



Development of Train Sim v2.0 is being postponed for an indefinite period so that we can focus our resources on other strategic priorities.

The UK MOD has just signed a strategic partnership with M$ to develop models and training in ESP2.0 - which clearly isn't going to happen now!

[JensAyton]

…so that we can focus our resources on other strategic priorities.

I.e., trying to find a way to make “web platforms” a real money-maker so they have somewhere to go other than media centres and game consoles when Windows 6.1 flops. The next few years will be interesting on the desktop…

[Screet]

I.e., trying to find a way to make “web platforms” a real money-maker so they have somewhere to go other than media centres and game consoles when Windows 6.1 flops. The next few years will be interesting on the desktop…

Definitely. With XP they made Windows pretty well usable...and then came Vista. With their ServicePack they practically disabled quite some software, including Software of M$ origin. It doesn't work nearly as good as XP in some concerns (it's pretty stable, though).

I imagine that Vista was the best thing that could happen for Apple. Frustrated people will begin considering switching now, even when they never imagined to ever do that in the past.

That M$ attempts to sell a new OS instead of upgrading Vista to be at least as good as XP won't help them either. The version problems with so many operating systems will also dramatically increase.

As it seems, M$ is reducing their market power on their own free will.

Screet

[Rxke]

OTOH, reviews of Windows 7 all but compare it to the second coming...

[DaddyHoggy]

We're playing with Windows 7 at work at the moment - mainly just to see if our homegrown apps will work on it - and, as we're a very computer graphics driven environment, checking out the nvidia drivers for W7 for our collection of 6600, 7600, 7950, 8600 and 8800 graphic cards (depending mainly on age and task assigned to the particular PC)

[JensAyton]

Definitely. With XP they made Windows pretty well usable...and then came Vista.

It’s amazing how people forget that when XP came along, it was as widely derided as Vista, and probably for better reasons. (Having a name that looks like a smiley vomiting couldn’t help, of course.) They managed to recover that time, but not with Vista.

I suspect that Windows 7 will see mostly positive reviews until it comes out, which will suddenly turn bad and focus on how it mostly addresses Vista problems and doesn’t add anything new except the task bar redesign, as well as disproportionate focus on a relatively small number of compatibility problems.

Looking in from outside, it seems to me that Microsoft has actually been mostly doing the right things from an engineering perspective, modernising the OS design and cutting out waste (despite the occasional idiocy like crippling the video pipeline for DRM). However, by encouraging people to expect backwards-compatibility even with buggy software and ancient accessories, MS has dug its own grave. They can either try to push forward despite this, which is costing them corporate and home users, or they can go back to XP and release an endless stream of service packs for an outdated system, in which case the remaining Windows-friendly alpha geeks will jump ship and the platform will very gradually die off along with its users.

[DaddyHoggy]

It's funny, I've always been so far behind the curve - I used W95 (and still do on my old HP 800CT lappy) until about 2001 and then I got Win98SE which by then was patched to the hilt and working just fine. I didn't get XP until SP2 came out (my disks came pre-patched to SP2) and again I was very happy. Now I use both Ubuntu and XPSP2 I'm quite happy with my lot - although I suspect I will miss Vista out completely - and will probably not join Win7 until Win8 is in the pipeline or lack off anything new happening in XP drives me in that direction.

I think while games continue to be DX9 and DX10 compatible - most gamers unless they want to upgrade gfx card and OS (and thefore possibly mobo, cpu and memory) will stick to XP for quite a while - when the gamers give up on XP then it will slip away quietly...

[Cmdr Wyvern]

OTOH, reviews of Windows 7 all but compare it to the second coming...

I've read a number of negative reviews on the Win 7 beta, which I'll consider to be more honest. MS has been caught resorting to bribery to get good reviews of a shoddy product.

Since 7 includes all the features that made vista a royal train wreck - and MS admitted it's still vista at the core, complete with the DRM rubbish - I don't hold hope of 7 being much better.