Microsoft Ponders Windows Successor

InfoWorldMike writes "Before Vista is even out of the gates, a Microsoft exec was talking Wednesday about Windows' replacement at a VC conference. Speaking at The Venture Forum conference, Microsoft's Bryan Barnett, a program manager for external research programs in the Microsoft Research group, said multicore architectures are of particular interest when weighing what to put in future operating systems at the company. "Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today," Barnett said. Well, with Vista in the pipeline as long as it has been, you must admit it is not surprising Microsoft is taking the long-term view. And it won't be built overnight: There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now. But early work on this effort has not yet been organized, with five or six small projects afoot in various places throughout the company, Barnett said."

Comments

A successor

[dacarr]

There already is a successor. You know that Linux thing that everybody's been talking about? I hear that's a pretty good operating system.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[Pink Tinkletini]

I doubt Mac users are much bothered by its low marketshare. We've been a minority for decades, and the past few years have shown that the platform can do just fine with single-digit adoption. If we cared about marketshare, why would we be using Macs?

Similarly, I agree that Macs (if they ever become popular enough) will have to deal with many of the same security issues that plague Windows, but again this argument is largely irrelevant. Security has never been the major selling point of the Mac, at least among its core demographic. What attracts certain people to the Mac is its friendly interface and a philosophy of design finely tuned towards whimsy and artistic expression. Apple is in good shape as long as these people are around to buy Macs, just as Microsoft will probably always dominate the desktop as long as beancounters and linear thinkers dominate the business world.

Re:A successor to Windows

[Phroggy]

Sorry, but you just described OS X! Take OS X, run XP in VirtualPC, and add Mono, and you'll have exactly what you asked for -- it's not even called Windows!

What part of "It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago" did you miss?

Clearly people aren't abandoning Windows in droves to go to OS X, so it's obviously not a very good strategy.

Yet clearly people are abandoning Windows 98 in droves to go to Windows XP, and Microsoft expects people to abandon Windows XP to go to Windows Vista, so people abandoning Windows Vista to go to whatever new OS Dell and HP are shipping is really not such an unreasonable idea.

Making an OS that only runs new apps well is like making a car that only runs well on new roads.

Which is why I mentioned using VirtualPC, which should be able to run the old apps just as well as they ran on old hardware.

Believe it or not, people don't just use an OS because MS makes it. If that were the case, MS would have been able to sell OS/2 in 1987 or Windows NT in 1993. OS/2 was not sufficiently better than Windows to get people to switch, and it took NT 10 years for widespread adoption.

Uhh, if Microsoft had sold OS/2, people would have bought it. IBM couldn't sell OS/2 precisely because Microsoft convinced people to wait for NT instead.

BTW, Windows NT/XP has at times run on the following architectures in the order of when it was ported: i860, MIPS, i386, Alpha, PPC, Itanium, and x86-64.

Yes, but the applications haven't. I've seen one or two apps that had NT/Alpha support; I think NCSA Mosaic might have been one of them. Microsoft can port the OS to whatever they want, it's the apps that are a pain in the ass.