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Microsoft in 2008
r.jimenezz writes "Over at Wired there's an entertaining article written by Gary Wolf. It purports to be a memo written by a 2008-Microsoft-employed Linus Torvalds to Bill, arguing against Steve Ballmer's desire to go back to the untenable OS monopoly proposition instead of the 'new order': Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
MS just made $10 billion in a single quarter. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.
It's entertaining. I don't think I would mod the article 'Insightful' or 'Interesting', but I would mod it 'Funny'. A choice snippet (taken out of context no doubt, but still)
You never made me alter my goal, which was world domination for Linux. I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership." I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered. We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished.
Inflect the mothership? Just writing this makes me chuckle. Seems kind of creepy, and dare I say, 'borgish'. Oh well, I suppose getting co-opted by Mothership Microsoft had somehow warped the psuedo-Torvald's mind.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
form the article:
[...]But Firefox taught people that you could replace pieces of the Windows desktop with open source software. That was a crack in the seamless facade.
Well, you might have been trying to be funny but it was modded insightful which it isn't.
Creative writing is interesting and the thoughts behind the piece were definitly thought provoking.
Like any corporation that has survived and thrived due to a monopoly, it will never change and will take a very long time to die. See AT&T for a useful analogue.
All jokes asside, the idea of ripping out the underlying stuff while keeping the Windows UI standards for look and feel would be fine with me.
There are presently efforts to dump X11 in favor of a more hardware direct interface for graphics and such in order to provide more speed and flexibility. I don't know where those projects are now, but without a big backer of the idea, getting rid of X will never happen. As far as I can see, asside from some Microsoft-blessed system services, that's what I imagine WinX would be anyway. And to run proprietary code on top of a Linux kernel? I don't see any violations, legal or moral.
with as much work and progress that has been made over the years with KDE and GNOME projects, it would be far kinder to the users if there were a strong and unified user interface from which to run their applications. It freaks people out to change and learn new things. KDE and GNOME folks have done a lot of work to get their projects into the lime light but frankly, a large player like Microsoft could easily swoop in and make it all irrelevant. This may not be the case in a year or two but it feels like it is the case right now.
For the record, I'm very anti-microsoft. But it would be a mistake to fail to embrace them if they were to attempt something like WinX. (If they did, it'd probably be a BSD kernel though... worked for Apple didn't it?)
Anyone else notice the date on the memo? :)
I don't know about this. My youngest kid had no problems whatsoever with KDE. For the most part, it's pretty similar to Windows; point-and-click stuff.
As an old OS2 user, I find Windows in every incarnation to just be a stunted imitation of the WPS, which was a truly awesome GUI still light years ahead of XP. I don't see anything particularly innovative or easy about the Windows XP interface. I deal with a lot of plain users, and half of them panic a little when you ask them "Now please press the Start button".
Most of the time their more-knowledgeable son/daughter/brother/friend/neighbor puts icons to Internet Exploder and Outlook Distress, along with the photo software and Solitaire on the desktop and people never look one bit further.
The only place where Windows has something of an edge is in software installation, and the problem there is that there's a number of different systems depending on distro. I mainly use Slackware, but when I played with Mandrake, it's package GUI installation system was every bit as easy as Windows XP.
So I can't really understand what people mean when they say "Windows is easier to use". I mean, what parts of Windows does the average user plug into on anything approaching a regular basis that's more involved than double-clicking on the program.
I'll place a bet that if you put a Linux box running KDE with Firefox and Thunderbird on the desktop as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, many users will probably be just fine. It's the product recognition thing that gets most users.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... There's a standard of established mediocrity within [Microsoft's] internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
What makes you think that Linus would solve this problem? In all seriousness, look at the "stable" 2.6 kernel branch, and the attitude demonstrated by comments like "some kernels will be good, others will be bad... we'll find out which kernels are broken soon enough".
I'm not saying that Linus himself believes in such mediocrity; but it's a bit unreasonable to expect that he would improve things at Microsoft when Linux, under his "benevolent dictatoriship" is plagued by exactly the same problems.
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Alternatively, now that Oracle has bought Peoplesoft, Oracle is vulnerable. It hasn't the money left to resist an attack from Microsoft. With Microsoft wanting more of the server market, taking over companies dealing in high-end server software would be not only logical but consistant with Microsoft's tactics in the past.
A third possibility would be for Microsoft to buy part of the Internet backbone, or one of the suppliers of it. Juniper is growing in popularity but isn't so big as to be able to resist a buyout. Cisco's not been doing too great, recently, and may be vulnerable. Lucent would be easy pickings and may even welcome such a move.
Finally, Microsoft may opt for a "strategic partnership" with Boeing. Boeing is in the middle of a massive struggle with Airbus, and it's unlikely both can survive. If Boeing wants to win, it needs more money. Microsoft doubled its profits last quarter, even after allowing for the shareholder payout AND the record EU fine. Aircraft may soon have WIFI. If Microsoft can become the only vendor who can work with such WIFI points, they'd have absolute control of the business market.
Finally, Microsoft could buy a hard drive vendor. If the OS came pre-installed on the hard drive to OEMs, then fewer OEMs would be willing to install rival Operating Systems....
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The difference is Microsoft have a very good core operating system already, where as Apple repeatedly failed in their attempts to develop one from the ground up, and eventually concluded they'd have to buy one.
.NET) above Win32, which means the new layers also suffer to some extent from the deficiencies of Win32. With the death of Windows 9x, that could change, since Win32 was the common denominator between Windows 9x/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, but there's no sign of it yet.
The problem with Windows isn't the OS (i.e. the kernel-mode modules), it's the Win32 API, which was designed in a rush in the early 1990s, when Microsoft fell out with IBM and dumped the OS/2 API (which was pretty bad too). In addition to having been designed in a rush, Win32 was made similar to Win16, so that 16-bit Windows developers could easily port their software to NT. That meant its designers had to loosely follow an API designed in the 1980s, which was never a particularly good design, but had become very popular (for various reasons).
The strength of Win32 was in moving existing Windows developers from DOS/Win3.x/Win9x to NT, and in that respect it was a very good move by Microsoft. However, it's become something of a liability over time, since it limits Microsoft's flexibility to take advantange of all the advances since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Microsoft could replace Win32 with a new subsystem/API, which would sort of be following Apple's lead in replacing the classic Mac OS API with Cocoa (and Carbon for directly porting old applications). However, Microsoft would be crazy to replace the NT kernel with something else, since NT was designed from the beginning to support multiple OS personalities, is amongst the best production kernels around and has unparalleled device support.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's current efforts seem to be based on building new layers (e.g.