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Declawing Windows: Impossible?
hyrdra writes: "This story on CNN seems to indicate the intentions of the nine remaining states in the ongoing anti-trust case against Microsoft: to produce a stripped down version of Windows that will allow 3rd party vendors to insert components such as browsers, media players, and IM clients. While this may not be news, Microsoft's defense is. Microsoft defends the solution by remarking Windows was not designed to be a modular system, and the current operating system is highly dependant on core technologies like IE and Windows Media Player. Removing them would result in a slower, much-less user friendly Windows that would be a support nightmare."
It really is. You can remove core parts of the OS and the OS has no problem. I remember playing around with Windows ME and removing media player, MSN stuff, and other things I had replacements for or didn't need. All MS has to do is add these things to the Remove Windows Components.
This is how it destroys other companies that are menacing them, why do you think they would abandon such power?
Even if this would become true, I would think that something fish would be hidden in this "striped down" version.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
You know, with IE; they said it couldn't be removed and it was proven trivial.
I understand (and appreciate) the use of HTML for windows help; however there isn't anything you can't do in the help by using [JA]Script and CSS, and aside from ActiveX, that isn't anything that any other browser couldn't provide. And as far as WMP is concerned I don't see the issue; MP3/WAV/whatever can be played by lots of things. Window Media files may need WMP, but that's not monopolistic.
I'm just graduating from Computing Science. I guess I do not know a lot about the "REAL WORLD".
Isn't it a mark of a good design when a system is modular? I mean, if one component needs to be replaced/rewritter you just rewrite that one component and be done with it. I can't even think that a project the size of Windows, IE, Media Plaer combined as a spaghetti code could even run.
Is it just me, or does it seem tha Microsoft is PROUD of the fact that they do not have a design?
Forcing Microsoft to produce a stripped-down version of the OS will not really benefit anyone, especially not the end-user. Having a choice of browsers and IM clients is one thing, forcing a company to strip down completely their OS is the wrong way of doing it.
It sounds to me that these states want to punish Microsoft for its practices (and I'm all for that), but they have no clue how to go about it.
Everyone says they want what's best for the end-user, yet I fail to see how a crippled OS will promote competition and benefit the end-user.
Wine by just emulating the win32 API, can now, (thanks to Codeweavers) run MS Office 2000, IE, QT, Photoshop and many major windows running software ! so has the Wine guys managed to do what MS with its Billion $ not managed to achieve ?
Yes, I know I pushed an old lady down the steps, but if you send me to jail I won't be able to drink beer, hang at the local bar, and work on my hot rod!
What kind of defense is that?
I guess the real issue is that 3rd party companies never get a chance to really show people that their stuff is better. I know a lot of Windows users use EVERYTHING that came on the computer and don't even know that you can use different browsers, email programs, IM programs, etc etc.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
The reason you can't remove those components from Windows is precisely because windows is so modular.
Windows is HIGHLY modular and componentised which is EXACTLY why you can't remove certain components. It's all the component REUSE that causes windows depend on stuff like IE. You guys all think you're great software engineers but can't seem to understand that!
Java is OO and very componentised. But that doesn't mean Java could exist without java.lang.String!
Sure, you could replace java.lang.String with an implementation that acts just like it. That's precisely what you can do in windows too. You can replace the IE component with the Mozilla component (it has already been done). The only problem is that you're now forcing MS to sell a product that is made up of 3rd party components they may not want to be associated with their products. (Imagine what a nightmare it would have been to have the bloat that is Netscape 4.6 included in windows 98).
Anyway. I just wanted to point out again, that something being componentised doesn't mean you can remove any components. (It only means you could REPLACE the component). You can't remove IE from windows, but you could replace it. Just like you can't expect the MOTOR component of a car to be removed and still have the car work.
Microsoft defends the solution by remarking Windows was not designed to be a modular system, and the current operating system is highly dependant on core technologies like IE and Windows Media Player.
Its an operating system, why on Earth is a Media Player a core technology? An OS is the layer that stands between the hardware and applications. If it does anything other than this, its fluff...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
But, your honor, going to jail for my crimes would mean that I couldn't keep going to my job, and that I couldn't go to baseball games, and gee, it would make my life really hard!
Somehow, it seems to me that inconvenience to a party found guilty of violating the law should be laughed out of court as a defense against a penalty.
-Rob
As long as government offices take your money to buy Microsoft software, as long as government schools take your money to teach children to use Microsoft software and nothing else, and as long as government jobs that take your money require submitting a resume in Word DOC format, government will be helping Microsoft's "monopoly" as much as it hinders it. It makes me really suspicious that all "antitrust" actions are just attempts to increase the power of government.
grep -ri 'should work'
True, you can use an alternate browser or media player. The problem is that when you bought a copy of Windows, are paying for IE, WMP, and any other crap MS decides to throw in there.
A stripped down version of Windows would cost substantially less than a full version - and you could use those savings to buy additional 3rd party software or contribute to open source or just to buy beer.
That's the real abuse of it's monopoly position. If they have an underdog product, they just bundle it with the OS and raise the price. Now you've just forced all of the consumers to buy your IE. How likely are they to go out and buy another one?
You think they wouldn't do that with MS Office if some real competition arrived?
It's obvious that a lot of people have forgotten the good old days of Windows, when application developers routinely used the fact that Windows was modular to do things like, oh, I don't know, replace critical system .dll's with their own versions, or old versions, breaking everything else that was installed that heppened to rely on those functions. I hate to think what the effect would be if a vendor on a modular solution like Linux decided to, oh, replace glibc, or something.
Something to consider is this:
Windows has a big disadvantage when it comes to competing with every other operating system out there. It has to run on every imaginiable intel platform out there, from the homegrown stuff to the $19.95 corner store specials. Not only that, but it has to be done in such a way that even an idiot can make it work. There's not another operating system out there that has to live up to these expectations. MacOS? Apple owns the hardware, too. Same for Solaris. (Don't get me started on anti-competetive and monopoly when talking about those two. Remember the Apple clone debacle?) Linux/FreeBSD users are signifigantly more advanced than your average Joe off the streets...or even your average CEO. I'd hate to think of my father, for example, getting his new PC, and having to download and install Netscape...without any browser already on the computer. Have you ever tried walking a 54-year old computer illiterate who types with two fingers on the best of days through downloading a program with nothing more than a command line FTP client?
The point is this: Consumers want to be able to plug in their new PC, and get on the Internet. They don't want to spend days downloading applications, figure out how to set them up, and then have to learn how to use them. You're overlooking the basic fact that the average person only has an IQ of 100. Microsoft makes a product that people want. People are willing to pay for it despite the existance of free alternatives. We all loudly proclaim the importance of freedom and free-enterprise, until someone gains a monopoly (which Microsoft, by the strict legal definition, DOESN'T HAVE. See US v. Standard Oil of New Jersey. I can count 5 competing products right off the top of my head.), then we run yellingn and screaming for government intervention.
As to the support issue:
Microsoft should stop providing support as soon as a user or vendor installs a new application or a device driver not certified by Microsoft. The user or vendor has altered the product in a fashion beyond Microsoft's control; but they don't. How many times have you seen stickers that say "warranty void if removed"? I have yet to understand why Microsoft doesn't do the same; it would decrease their support costs significantly.
But, then, you'd all be complaining about how poor Microsoft Support is. (Oh, wait...) For the number of different platforms, configurations, additional software they have to support, etc. I think they do a reasonably decent job.
This is the penalty phase of the thing. The courts have decided that Microsoft is guilty. I personally don't care how costly it will be for them to do what is necessary. If you are a bank robber, extortionist or other such malafactor, it is not a concern of the court that it will be inconvenient or expensive for you to spend the next several years in the slammer.
There are a number of reasons why you have a penalty phase: First it is to deter folks from doing something similar in the future. Secondly, they must make restitution to society for their crime. Both usually involve extraction of a degree of pain from the convicted.
If Judge Jackson's penalty had remained in force (as it should have), you would be amazed how fast Microsoft would have done what they contend that they can't.
Last week, I read an article on slashdot about M$ beginning with a anti-unix campaign.
One of their arguments was (IIRC) that Unix was inflexible, not modular, needed an expert to handle it etc.
And now M$ says, windblows isn't modular as well. It would even be unmanagable/unsupportable if they stripped IE and WMP off Windows...
They used to tell different faerie tales....
Only a few years ago, one of M$'s campaigns claimed WinNT to be a better Unix than Unix.
How better ? being less modular and managable than un*x ? So how should I interprete these conflicting stories ?
Oh well, it's just another piece of FUD. Have a nice day.
R.
Will anything really change?
No.
The fundamental mistake people are making is that people are still listening to Microsoft's complaints about how oppressed it is.
There's a lesson that everyone should have learned by now: Microsoft tells lies. Often. They also ignore the law, since they've learned that making the government curb their behavior is much better than behaving well on their own -- especially since the government's been completely ineffective in slowing the Microsoft juggernaut so far. Beat up kids on the playground for their lunch money today and you might get punished next year, if at all... so why bother holding back?
Microsoft isn't going to release a stripped-down version of Windows, not in the sense that you think of a stripped-down version of Linux. Remember two years ago when Microsoft showed that removing the DLL's with IE code in them cripped Windows? This was because Microsoft went to a whole lot of trouble to take the IE code and scatter it all over the operating system, sticking subroutines in DLL's which had nothing to do with IE. The Windows code is made as difficult as it has to be to foil the government's attempts to separate out the parts which violate the 1995 consent decree. (Never mind for now that the videotape they used to show the Windows slowdown was revealed to be fabricated. Never mind for now that Professor Felton successfully removed IE from Windows early in the court case, then when he tried it again later he found that Microsoft had scattered the code throughout the operating system to thwart him.)
In the Linux world, a stripped-down version of the operating system is easy to support, since it's much less complicated than integrating lots of modules and applications. But in the Windows world, Microsoft is going to make absolutely certain that a stripped-down version of Windows will not work well. They'll follow the letter of any judgement handed down to them, but they'll ignore the spirit and exploit any loopholes: they'll introduce as many bugs as they can in order to make sure that people won't want to use it, and when the government challenges them on this, they'll cry 'oppressed!' and another seven-year cycle of courtroom appearances will begin. Who knows, maybe they'll even consider the TCP/IP stack to be part of Internet Explorer, so their stripped-down Windows won't have networking support?
The real solution is to require Microsoft to bundle only bare-bones applications with Windows, and sell their high-end applications on store shelves. They bundle Microsoft Write and sell Microsoft Word at a premium; they can do this with IE and Media Player. This would go a long way towards restoring competition.
But Microsoft has learned that the government is completely ineffective against them. They've also learned that by misrepresenting the case to the American public ('freedom to innovate,' indeed), they can garner a whole lot of support and put a lot of pressure on state and federal government to settle the case against them. They're going to continue doing this while at the same time they continue underselling anyone in markets they want to own.
In a few years someone's going to have a great idea for the Next Big Thing, some simple yet powerful advance which will revolutionize computing as we know it. That person is going to follow the American dream and go into business for himself capitalizing on his idea. Then Microsoft is going to copy his ideas and bundle them into Windows, and the guy is going to go out of business, and this will spawn another seven years of the DOJ trying to curb Microsoft's power and Microsoft viciously defending its right to give its customers great things for free.
It happened with Netscape. It's going to happen again.
Most people want integration. They don't know how the computer works, they just want a friendly, familiar interface. That's what Microsoft provides. Note that doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished for abusive market practices like harangueing OEM's.
The problem is that there are all these computer people who remember what computing was like before it was super-popular, and therefore before it was susceptible to marketing flimflam that reduced power users' flexibility.
Call it a "fiat is utopia", but its never going away as long as there's money to be made. The market is for the generally unknowledgeable consumer, not you the slashdot reader. If you want a modular windows, work on the WINE project. It may never be able to keep up with microsoft and their changes, but that's the nature of competition. Besides, what does microsoft or their primary buyers care? You aren't making it for them anyway, and they're not using it.
By the way, having IE as a dll is REALLY useful, and has increased the usability and flexibility of windows IMMENSELY.
If this is flamebait, then I guess anything you don't agree with is flamebait. Cry me a river.
I'm sure this integration that M$ talks about, if it really is a full integration, is in the GUI, not the kernel.
Solution - new GUI.
It would be interesting to see the nine states put forward a solution to port Xfree86 to windows and make win API compatable, or to have M$ utilize Wine to make Apps work.
I know this last bit is just a pipe dream. But the GUI is the problem. How does M$ fix it?
And that would then proceed to break compatibility with 90% of the software I use. All my professional AV software relies on DirectX, ActiveMovie (a part of DirectX if you really get down to it) and such. My games need DirectX as well. Removing ICM profiles kills the functionality of the colour synch stuff I have, and I'm fairly sure Visio needs data access components to run. Finally I have a few peices of software that rely on the HTML rendering provided by IE in one form or another.
I mean if you're pulling apart all teh things that maek Windows useful, why stop there? Start doing this with Windows 2000, you can totally take out the Win32 subsystem if you were creative. You'd loose compatiblity with just about every app and the GUI too, but hell, you don't technically NEED those.
I just fail to see what all the whining is about. So MS wants to include lots of things in their OS. Great, I say, makes life easier for me. You don't HAVE to use the components they provide. You don't like DirectX? Fine, use OpenGl for graphics and ASIO for sound, my sound and graphics card support both. Or make your own API like 3dfx did with Glide. Don't like IE? Download Mozilla, it runs great on Windows (better than Netscape does, that's for sure).
The bundled components just make life easier on developers and users. If I am writing software for Windows 2000/XP and I need to render HTML in it, I can just setup calls to IE instead of writing my own engine since I know it is present in all copies. Saves me lots of time and effort. That doesn't mean you as a user have to use IE, Mozilla, Opera or whatever else you liek run perfectly happily, it just means that if you run software that makes use of HTML rendering (Napster is a good example), you have the engine available.
Not only is modular structure required for design by a large development staff, but it is also required in order to facilitate future patching and upgrades.
Also, consider for a moment, the wording used my microsoft atourneys:The question is not the design intent. The question is Is It In Fact Modular? I maintain that it could not have been written in a way that is not modular. While it might be possible to intentionally obfuscate it's mosularity, from a software design and loadbuild perspective, there is no way it could possibly function if it were not modular.
This does not preclude the possibility that from a consumer perspective the system does not appear modular. In order to meet the demands of the ramaining states in the antitrust case, Microsoft may have to replace vertain functions with stubs to facilitate the consumer-side modularity. This should be a trivial matter for a software development organization capable of producing such a vast system.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I think /.'ers are missing the point here. Nowhere in the article did Microsoft say that Windows was not designed to be modular, in fact, it was an analyst who said that:
"The product was not designed to be modular," said Rob Enderle, an analyst with Giga Information Group.
The Microsoft quote is:
"From an engineering standpoint, No. 1, we cannot remove software code for multiple functionalities without degrading other functionalities of the operating system," Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said. "You just can't yank Internet Explorer out."
"The proposal would require "a complete redesign" that would cost millions of hours to build and test, Desler said.
Which is significantly different. Microsoft is saying that, while it could be technically possible to remove certain components from the operating system, doing so would break other areas that depend on that component. For example, ripping out IE is going to break HTML Help.
Even more importantly is the second sentance is the second sentance, it "would cost millions of hours to build and test." So it should be possible to replace IE with Netscape, or Opera, and HTML Help could use it. Now you go and make is possible to replace all sorts of other components: IE, Messenger, Media Player, Data Access Components, System Information, DirectX, Scandisk, MS Cryptography, MS Help Files. Each time you replace a component there are tons of different replacements to choose from so the eventual number of configurations you have to test becomes astronomical.
As if that weren't enough, you still have versions of Windows with all of the Microsoft components in them. What if a user chooses to upgrade their fully ripped apart and replaced version of Windows 2000 with Windows XP, but gets the version of Windows XP with everything in it. How do you choose what to replace and what not to replace? Does the user want everything replaced with Microsoft programs because they were fed up with the ripped apart version? Or did they just not know any better and got the wrong version? If you upgrade a component, like MS Help, does it still have to be backwards compatible with whatever version of Opera the user is using as a web browser? Again, the amount of testing on this new setup would be completely unfeasable and impossible. This is Microsoft's argument.
Furthermore, the company said customer support could be prohibitively expensive because experts would have to be knowledgeable about as many as 4,000 different Windows configurations.
Modularity in Windows would fix about ten million issues. It would be the best thing that happened to consumers (Windows ones, that is). Does the start bar suck? Use one that someone else has written. Same for explorer, the command line shell, any anything else you like.
Modularity always helps consumers, barring other factors. Integration and bundling helps one entity -- Microsoft.
I don't disagree that MS could make a modular version of Windows that would suck, but if done properly, they'd actually have something that UNIX would have a tough time competing with for most users because it'd be so good.
One thing that would be really cool is a goverment review board that would prevent any for-a-fee new versions of Windows from shipping until it passes review. No pass, no ship. Oh, MS would blow zillions on PR, but they'd be free to release service patches, so it'd hardly hurt anyone much. Plus, if the thing got rejected a few times, engineers would have time to actually test and debug those early copies of Windows that everyone always wants to avoid.
May we never see th
Viewers are modular. Windose 95 came with a subset of INSO's QuickView file viewers. I purchased INSO's QuickView Plus and it installed adjacent to the OEM stuff. OnTrack's PowerDesk also has ~215 QuickViewers.
NT5/2000 Windows Explorer shows thumbnails of files. This trivial functionality is provided by the viewers in InternetExploder. Choosing the "Traditional View" option would lose that viewing route. So does 98Lite yanking IE.
A much more versatile approach is PowerDesk + QuickView. They will display non graphics too: .xls, .124, aimipro, .wav, as well as psp, gif, tiff, pict & spiffy stuff!
Eschew obfuscatory argot!
How convenient that MS loads internet explorer on startup. Of course it's faster! When you 'explore' your drives, you already have the bulk of MSIE running.
Finally, Apple packages Quicktime, iMovie, iTunes, Appleworks (a full office suite), and more with their OS
Check your facts, they are optional components. Easy to deinstall, or you can opt to NOT install them. Try removing MSIE from your WinXP or Win2k SP2+ system. You'll have a hard time.
I think that it is the OS makers right to include value added software, and the consumer benefits from it. I can go and buy a new iMac, plug it in, and have a full home video editing studio without having to do a thing (all on UNIX neverthless)!
The difference is choice. If you don't want something on your Mac, you just throw it away, and you'll never be bothered by it again. Or, if you like the default software, you can just leave it like it is. The difference is that it isn't forced down your throat.
Now, because MS has a monoploy on the desktop, our solution is to force them to make a less-valued OS with less features and bundled software? How is this better for the consumer.
No, nobody is telling them to oblitterate MSIE, Media Player and all that other crap. They just have to make it optional for the user to install or not. Right now, everyone that uses windows for the first time on a new box get confronted with MSIE. And MSIE is probably the only browser they'll ever know because that's that one that got installed with their new system. Thought experiment: What would have happened if MS bought Netscape and integrated Netscape in the OS? Then Netscape would be the dominant browser now.
The problem that most people have with Microsoft is how they throw their weight around with the Windows OS, pushing competitors out of the nest before they can get the chance to be real competitors. It's practices like these that send us off our collective trolleys. The quality of MSIE is irrelevant
Right, back to driver coding...
Martin Reynolds, a Garner fellow who researches the market for personal computers, said a modular Windows would have made sense years ago to help avert Microsoft's domination over Netscape in the market for Web browsers.
"We can't go back and fix the mistakes of the past," Reynolds said.
The courts tried to fix this problem years ago but Microsoft just ignored them and bundled IE anyway. When does Microsoft get punished for that?Microsoft has made a big push towards component architectures. Everywhere you look in the Microsoft world they are pushing components of some kind. Talking with some Windows fans at work, they have convinced me that components (if done right) are an excellent idea.
Fine. Then why not make Windows a component/modular system? If it's not possible to remove IE from the base system, then it's not modular. Making Windows into a truly modular system would be a very good thing for the quality of the OS, as well as injecting some bits of competition back into the equation.
Unix is already a very modular system, particularly the Free unices. Use a different file system. Use a different desktop. Use a different MTA. Etc. At the risk of sounding like I support Microsoft, I think a true componentized Windows would be a good thing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Any DLL's which are part of Windows should be usable by any Windows applications I write.
If Internet Explorer is nothing than a 64K file which uses all the underlying Windows technology, then I should be allowed to make my own 64K application which is just as effective at surfing the web. Maybe I'll call it Brian's Browser. Since the bookmarks editor it uses is built into Windows, as is the web page 'subscription' service and the Auction Manager, it'll have basically the same feature set as IE and look/work very much the same, too.
I can then add on a few more features (maybe tabbed browsing or something) and sell it for $5 per copy, and make a little money off it, because Windows is so nice as to provide all the advanced web browsing funcionality as part of the base operating system.
Or, more to the point: Compaq should be able to bundle 'The Compaq Web Browser' with every PC it sells. The application would be only 64K large; it would use all the same built-in Windows code that IE uses for all its advanced functionality, except that the Compaq browser would have the Compaq logo at the top and default to a set of bookmarks which led to Compaq web pages. And the icon for this would be preinstalled on the Windows desktop, instead of the IE icon.
This would be fine with me. How nice of Microsoft to put all the time and effort into developing a state-of-the-art web browser, then making it part of Windows so that third-party applications can mix-and-match its technology at will!
the whole point of business regulation is to fight for the consumer, not fight against the corporation.
Right. If you look at it in terms of motivation it becomes clear why Apple is fine and Microsoft is not.
Apple's motivation to to get new customers. They add in things that the consumers want, and do not include things that they don't want. Quicktime, iMovie, iTunes, Appleworks are included for the customer's benefit. They are easy to remove. I have never heard of any issues of nasty mis-features in them.
Microsoft has no motivation to get new customers. Being a monopoly, they already have virtally all of them. Their motivation is to earn more proffits off of their existing customers. They included Internet Explorer so they could make money being the "gateway to the internet". They included Media Player so they could could make money by controlling your DRM. They abuse their OS monopoly to force these things onto consumers. They try to make them impossible to remove, they make them incompatible to kill competition, they include nasty mis-features like spying on you and tagging you with an ID number for Microsoft's benefit - at the consumer's expense. They commited extortion to prevent computer manufacturers from providing competing Operating Systems, Web Browsers, or Audio/Video viewers.
Microsoft broke the law. Repeatedly. They were convicted. They continued to break the law. Repeatedly. They were convicted. Again.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The problem is the difference between removing IE and removing the IE components.
When most people say "remove the browser" they're talking about removing the icon, the IEXPLORER.exe, and the intergration with the file Explorer. This is trivial, and has been proven trivial.
Netscape wants Microsoft to remove ALL TRACES of Microsoft's HTML technology. They see it as a barrier to entry for other HTML renderers, and therefore should be removed. This is difficult. Even IEradicator leaves the MS HTML components because removing them would break too many things.
Again: removing all traces of IE is NOT TRIVIAL.
When Microsoft talks about removing IE, they're talking about Netscape's definition. Which would be very difficult, especially for Windows XP, which has half of its dialog boxes (even ones that look fairly normal), all the "task panes", help, and a whole bunch of other stuff based on MSHTML. It would break a whole bunch of things.
But no one says clearly what they mean when they say "remove IE". And Microsoft, of course, exagerates and adds to the confusion by grouping everything together. There's absolutely no reason why the whole Windows Media Player UI (just like the IE UI) is required.
Although, if I was writing a media player application for Windows, I'd expect the Media Player components to be there, so I wouldn't have to write my own MP3 decoder - the same way I wouldn't want to write my own HTML renderer. Of course, that's exactly what Netscape is protesting against - the fact that developers can count on these features being there. Netscape would, essentially, like to make life difficult for developers by making them develop and test with multiple HTML renderers/browser components, or make them package and install renderers whenever they distribute their software, on the hope that developers would use Netscape rather crappy browser components instead of Microsoft's, which have been clearly superior (and componentized, unlike Netscape's) since IE4.
Maybe Netscape is catching up now with Mozilla, but anyone who thinks Netscape had software in any way competitive with Microsoft's for the last five years is wrong. Monopoly or no monopoly.
Because Windows is an adjudicated monopoly. Legally, there is a different set of rules for MS now.