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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!"
and yet somehow totally unrealistic. I can't see Linus fitting in that kind of a work environment. Not that I know that much about Microsoft work environments.
Also surely this isn't a first post?
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
MS just made $10 billion in a single quarter. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.
Can it get any more horny than this?
I've heard of some sick fetishes (I do have access to the Internet, after all), but you take the cake, my friend!
I think he's been hanging out with John Titor a bit too much lately. ;)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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
"...infect the mothership..."
That's poking fun at the movie "Independence Day". The PowerBook that manages to establish an authenticated PPP session, get an IP address, transfer a virus to the alien host (pun intended), then REMOTELY EXECUTE IT.
Okay, yes, I'm a unix admin, mac user, network engineer, and the mere concept has my dying on the floor laughing as I watch the Classic environment do that.
Anyway, point is....I'm betting the author has watched that movie recently.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
"Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
Wow, so in the future they'll keep copying Apple. That's big news.
~Philly
They finally ship Longhorn.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
I wonder what silicon they smoke
;-)
It's called "free time". Envious?
From TFA:
You told me that if I ever hit a wall with Steve or his people, I should let you know.
Somehow, the image of Linus Torvalds grabbing Steve Ballmer and swinging him like a bat at a brick wall, Neo-vs.-Smith style.... It's a good thing I didn't have any soda in my mouth when I read that.
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.
I mean, the old NT codebase has some interesting capabilities. What about building a Debian/NT on top of it?
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.
but something I've been thinking and asserting for a few years is that Microsoft, if they wanted to, could easily be the world's largest Open Source company.
;) However, as an entrenched company with experts in all levels of the software world (from marketing and PR to theoretical next-century noodling that one day will be genuine workable technology), this is a not-crazy idea.
... dust to dust).
Now, with their cash, they could probably also quickly be the world's largest X company for nearly any X
Microsoft has adopted to market changes before, and they will in the future. (And then, of course, one day they won't exist any more
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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?)
From the office of: Jesus Christ
Date: 10.31.2008
To: Allah
From: Big J
Re: Will Mohammed kill Islam++?
Read my blog.
Nah, this isn't anything like Asimov. No attempt to tie it in to the Robots/Foundation/Empire universe.
We've built a Windows desktop and application framework around a Linux operating system, and both sides of this equation - open source and proprietary - are needed for our plan to continue to work.
In other news, RMS announces the imminent release of HURD. "I can feel it, any day now, " says RMS.
When asked about the new Winux, RMS suddenly issued blue smoke and sparks, muttering "Freedom, freedom, where is the freedom," before crashing to the floor.
Anyone else notice the date on the memo? :)
This sounds an awful lot like Apple and OS X, complete with humor about pronounciation (OS X or OS TEN).
As sad as I am to say it, Cringley already fielded this one sometime in 2002 or 2003 I believe. He had a slightly insane theory that a proprietary Windows interface on top of a Linux kernel would be the best of both worlds.
I doubt it would ever happen but it would be definately interesting. Just think if Windows made the shift, there would no longer be ANY operating systems in active development that weren't based on UNIX in some way.
Is that a far-fetch dream or a reality slowly taking shape?
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I just lost 5 minutes of my life that my employer will never get back...
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.
I was assimulated by Microsoft..
Not completely, it seems. They forgot to install the spellchecker.
True. But the ass-emulator seems to be working fine!
... 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.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
This is Bob!
...which brought him back into public view.
...which brought him sales beyond the 3-digit range.
...which brought him world-wide respect.
...which, by 2008, placed him on over 90% of desktops in the world.
He took Enzyte, which gave him the courage to show his face on store shelves again.
Coincidence? You decide! Try Enzyte today!
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.
Post Scriptum
Bill, please, remember to feed Richard and let him out at least once a week! Last time I visited him in your dungeon, he had hardly enough strength to curse me for my betrayal. I know having him dead and all would make things much easier, you not getting bitten, me not being spit at, but for God's sake, RMS is the real father of the OS. I understand it's better like this, but it's sad to see him there. He IS a human being and deserves at least some respect, even if he doesn't behave like one. Keep your side of the contract and I'll keep bullshitting the EFF thugs that he keeps mailing me from central Australia on regular basis.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
There are apparently many current/former Microsofties fuming at the parent post, but I guess everyone wants to post anonymously or not at all. I'm gone and have nothing to lose, so here goes.
The parent post is a superficial and completely unrepresentative perspective of Microsoft. The author seemed to be pandering to Slashdot preconceptions more than anything. In reality, Microsoft is an amazing company full of ridiculously intelligent CS folks i.e. top students from top CS programs. Whereas at many companies I've been exposed to, there are a couple smart people here and there and everyone else is just sleepwalking, Microsoft is almost entirely composed of smartest-guy-in-the-room types.
Some notes:
* This guy is a contractor. Contractors are generally not very well-respected at Microsoft. The quality people are full-time almost without exception.
* Almost no one at Microsoft works in a cubicle. Full-time employees have real offices with real doors that close so that you can concentrate.
* There is no "acceptance of mediocrity" at Microsoft. In fact, it is entirely the opposite. There is a culture of self-criticism and self-castigation throughout the company, especially in divisions like Office.
* The only times I observed the internal network to be "slow" was when the company was dogfooding an early release. If the network were really as slow as the author describes, people would not be able to get their work done.
* What internal tools are you referring to? RAID (the bug-tracking system) is pretty great overall and all of the business process management stuff was the best I've seen at any company.
I'll leave it at that.