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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."
The three states of matter are solid, liquid, and this announcement ;-)
But seriously, does anybody think this announcement was intended to dissuade businesses and government agencies from trying the alternatives to Microsoft Windows that exist now? And will it work?
"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.
Operating systems are suppose to use all our processing power?
Part of me feels like that even at this early stage the idea at MS is to add even more whiz bang bloat to Windows Next by "taking advantage of dual-core chips." Let the applications take advantage of them and the OS be a translator.
No sig for you!!
Vista won't fail, it doesn't really matter if it's far better than XP or not. Will Vista be more stable or secure than XP? Probably not. Will that matter? Probably not. It will look different and all the PC manufactures will preinstall it on their machines, everyone that buys a new PC will get and use it, and within several years after it's release it will be used by the majority of PC users (since the majority will have bought a new PC by then). Meanwhile the Mac lovers will call it a cheap ripoff of Mac OS X (which it probably is) and the Linux users will say you can get that stuff for free (watch the demo of Novell Linux 10 with xgl, it demonstrates all the cool windows effects MS is saying will be in Vista, and then some). But the majority of PC users won't know or care. To them it's a new feature when it shows up in MS Windows. The only thing that will break the cycle of everyone adapting MS's newest OS is the ability to effortlessly run Windows apps on Linux, or Mac. It's sad but true.
I think the key point to keep in mind here is not that Microsoft is looking for a successor to Windows, but that these statements came from "a program manager for external research programs in the Microsoft Research group". This is what Mirosoft Research does. They come up with blue-sky ideas like replacing Windows entirely, and then the product groups integrate those ideas into real, shippable products. As an example, the "Drivatar" AI used by Forza Motorsport came directly out of MSR. The researchers had grand plans for the technology (get real motorsport "legends" to generate drivatars based on their driving style, learn from the player as he's playing, etc), while the implementation in Forza was more practical (the main AI was based on pre-release training and didn't learn from watching the player, there were no "professional" drivatars, the player had to actively train his drivatar in specific sessions rather than having it learn while he plays, etc). That's not a bad thing, and it's still a damn sight better than most other racing game AI out there (Gran Turismo, I'm looking at you. Damn retarded bumper car AI ...). Researchers are good at coming up with crazy ideas and sample implementations that don't take into account the rest of the system (back to Forza, there's only so much processing available in an Xbox to handle all of the physics and AI, which means that real-time drivatar training wouldn't be feasible). If you know what to look for, you can see many Microsoft Research contributions in shipping products (speech, grammar checking, natural language processing, etc in Office; anti-phishing in the MSN/Windows Live Toolbar and IE7; pretty much the entire backend for MSN/Windows Live Search; and so on), but it's only bits and pieces. Go poke around, look at the many areas of research going on at MSR. Take a look at their sample code. And then remember that when you see a similar but less-grandiose feature 5-10 years from now in a real, shipping product.
Note: I'm neither a Microsoft researcher nor a Forza developer, so all of the information above is what anyone can deduce from the sources I cited.
Microsoft has already done this to a fair extent with Terminal Server. The main thing to keep in mind is that the main bits in kernel space really are drivers, not the UI framework (and even that's changing with Vista). Terminal Server is very much Microsoft's X. Do you remember the "Fast User Switching" feature in Windows XP? Yeah, that's Terminal Server, and what it really means is that every time you use the Windows UI (in XP and 2K3) you're actually interfacing through a local Terminal Server session (just like X!). Of course, TS will have its little differences when running over a network, like not supporting video overlays or 3D acceleration, but in most case
Not exactly sure how you arrive at XP as "MS-DOS"-like. Your analogy holds through Millennium (ME). But XP hath no gory, icky DOS underbelly. Ironically, Mac OS X (or Linux with your favorite WM) more closely aligns to the classic DOS "tacked on GUI" model. The Mac just hides it better than anyone else. The average user doesn't need to see the crap that flies by when Linux (or even XP before the kernel) loads. Windows (and Linux) could improve quite a bit by smoothing the rough edges between the software and hardware. But of course few organizations in this world can do that better than Apple (since it's their entire platform to do with as they wish).
um... how 'bout Linux. Worked for me at least.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Was I the only one having the eery deja vu feeling when beta-testing Vista? Feeling like it's 2000, and you are beta-testing Apple's OS X. Fast hardware suddenly feeling unresponsive? Simple apps taking up 100 MBs of RAM? Each window stored uncompressed in VRAM? Crap paging system? Cut corners on POSIX compliance? Connected to a network share with less than 20,000 time-lapse tiffs, and the Vista freezes, crashes to 'classic' shell (complete with NT4-style 'Start' button!), then reboots :(
I just couldn't stop asking myself: they spent 5 years building THIS?
Given the availability of user-friendly Linux distros (SuSe, RedHat, Ubuntu), and given that Apple's OS X.5 runs flawlessly on x86, I am drawn to conclusion that MS is fatally late.
X2 4400+ getting 1.2 'performance' rating, I didn't know whether to cry or to laugh. Maybe I just got sucked in by all that talk about 3D interface, aux.display support during sleep, new printing subsystem, and revolutionary user security framework?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Likewise. Nice to have a grown up discussion on ./ for once. :-)
1. There are files everywhere in a root drive called C:\.
Windows has tried forever to make the drive structure opaque (or at least translucent) to the user... Witness the obnoxious "are you sure" dialogs when you go into C:, C:\Windows\ or C:\Windows\System32... pathetic at best, obnoxious at worst. But short of revamping the entire drive structure to make "the bad bits invisible" it'll be awhile before Windows makes it look as seamless as the Mac.
2. When my computer boots I see all these grey characters, bios, IDE info, etc. etc.
Yup. There's that issue of the hardware and software separation. OEM's don't seem to want to make the process less nasty-looking. I commend Apple on their move to the Intel platform (albeit EFI, not BIOS-based) without making it look crappy like a PC. If only a Wintel BIOS-based PC could look as good.
3. Some applications, when installed, seem to be "everywhere"... they aren't just single little entities.
That's the Windows "state problem". Little turds of system state, user state, and application state, all scatter-gunned around the system. Bits in the registry. Bits in leftover ini files. Bits in inf files. Bits in other random-ass config files. Without a rewrite of Windows that completely throws out compatibility, that will never get better.
4. There are thousands upon thousands of files, where you don't know what they do.
See 3. There are other OS's with the same problem - but at least they usually store state better (more logically or more hygienically separated) than Windows.
As far as your final comment... agreed.
The only thing that will break the cycle of everyone adapting MS's newest OS is the ability to effortlessly run Windows apps on Linux, or Mac.
I agree with everything you said except for that last one. Trying to adapt to run Windows programs is what killed OS/2, which at the time was a much better OS than Win3.1 (what wasn't?). A true object oriented, multi-tasking, 32-bit operating system that ran circles around Windows, except of course in running Windows apps. Why should anyone even bother to develop for another OS if any new one will just try to run Windows apps as well as Windows? If that's what you want well, then just get Windows!
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Never happen. To personify the company, Microsoft's ego is too big;
Apple had a pretty massive ego before Copland cratered, too.
MS has just been through the biggest development project failure ever in the private sector. Their current management is on the way out before the shareholders lynch them. Think the new guy is going to commit to another six-year train wreck?
MS has two choices: cut a deal with SJ, or try to turn Solaris into a viable desktop system. The first option would cost more but ship sooner. What they really can't afford, is another Longhorn.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In 1983, Apple's latest and greatest was the Apple IIe. Although Lisa/Lisa II tanked, Apple did OK with a new machine it rolled out in 1984.
As numerous books and articles have detailed, the Macintosh development unit was given preferential treatment, many resources, and an impossible mandate. The result was a computer that radically altered the personal computer industry. The hardware was new, the OS was new, the applications were new - everything about it was new. Nothing like the Mac had been seen in the computer market.
Microsoft already has competitors, in the form of Apple, Linux, Google, and web app vendors who want to kill the desktop altogether. One more competitor, loaded with cash, unencumbered by a requirement to maintain backward compatibility with Windows, and given a well-articulated mission might be able to come up with something radically new and better than anything currently available.
If MS doesn't recognize that their golden goose is fast becoming a lead albatross, they're going to continue to lose their ability to shape the market. Getting by on marketing and control of PC OEMs isn't going to cut it any more. They need to put some of that massive stockpile of money into something truly bold. The question is, are they organizationally equipped to do so? Is it in their DNA, or have they become too atrophied?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The next Microsoft OS is quite likely to be based entirely on interpreted/dynamically compiled languages, obviously the CLR. The actions over the last 2 or so years seem to indicate that Microsoft wishes to deprecate native code. They would probably run existing x86 Windows programs in a sandbox so that untrusted code (aka all native code) cannot damage the system. The OS would deny even the computer owner the right to run native code with any authority unless it's signed by Microsoft. We can already see this coming with Vista: unsigned code cannot run in the kernel at all in x64, and in all versions unsigned code cannot request that dialog box to ask the user permission for admin access. (This last one was never announced by Microsoft and was slipped into a build. Developers filed it as a bug; Microsoft declared "as design" with no comment whatsoever.)
.NET programs could run unsigned. (They'd probably require signing to do anything interesting like write files to disk.)
It works great for DRM, because sandboxed code cannot manipulate other code. If implemented correctly, something that Microsoft has shown to be possible with the 360 (though with native code), it would be unbreakable other than at the hardware level. Microsoft would make it so that only Microsoft-signed programs are allowed to run natively, whereas
This is terrible and I hope Microsoft meets a lot of resistance.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I think you nailed a big part of Microsoft's problem there. It's software written by a creative bureaucracy. IBM is like that, except their aim is functionality and reliability not the nebulous "user experience". The former is a collection of software "artists" and the latter is a more scientific and testable approach. When a few artists collaborate, the result can be something dramatic (OS X), but if you have too many you generate little visionary fiefdoms where their goal is a smaller portion of the whole. Thus, feature FOO may be quite clever in it's methods and interface, but breaks completely when feature BAR (built by another fiefdom) is enabled. You also get wars between the fiefdoms that change the direction of the end product (interface versus security). Worse still, MS has grown to behemoth proportions in such a way that even the fiefdoms themselves are bloated and approaching the same state as the whole.
MS can't revitalize itself (or windows for that matter) without downsizing, IMHO. They won't do it though. They are probably afraid that it will be perceived as weakness by the public and the stock market.US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Vista may not end up being the best thing since sliced bread, but let's act as introduced geeks on the subject and not compare Vista to xgl.
xgl is a layer for the window manager, Vista is an operating system. Graphics subsystem. Operating system. Apples. Oranges.
I mean, does xgl come with the BitLocker technology? Does it let Linux make use of USB memory sticks as virtual RAM? See also its new features. I know, many features are already shared by Linux distros, but that still doesn't make an xgl <-> Vista comparison any less idiotic. Compare with Aero as you like, but not Vista. You don't compare KDE with e.g a full distro often, now do you?
I don't understand how such major flaws in an argument can give a +5 Insightful.
No wait, it was defending Linux.
Nevermind.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Backward compatibility is a perfectly reasonable requirement, a successor OS would fail without it.
... they didn't need Steve Jobs to tell them about it.
Apple was using virtualization with A/UX
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Didn't Vista start out pretty much the same way? "Total rewrite from the ground up", everything shiny and new, new paradigms for file system handling and coffee making?
Look what we ended up with.
History repeats itself, repeats itself, itself...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The only thing that will break the cycle of everyone adapting MS's newest OS
is what you yourself wrote a few sentences before: Breaking MS stranglehold on the OEMs. If windos were something that you had to buy extra, people would start looking for alternatives.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Which is sad, really, since the rest of the world let VMS die long ago.
Help us build a better map!
Indeed.
People haven't made full use of a computer's abilities since the 8 bits.
(in those days, the programmers would often use every trick in the book to squeeze every last ounce of capability from a machine)
And when will microsoft realise that "Taking full advantage of a processor's power" is *NOT* something you want an operating system to DO?
An OS is supposed to sit unobtrusively in the background handling context switches, I/O and memory management. It's not supposed to use massive chunks of processor power that should be available to the apps themselves!
Supposedly, Longhorn is named for a pub between Whistler (XP) and Blackcomb (Windows 2009?). It was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to The Next Big Thing.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.