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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."
Yeah, you know what would be *funny*? If Microsoft licensed OS X.......
:-)
No, seriously..... OS X runs on Intel now, and Apple is working hard on compatibility layers for multiple OSs and it is the slickest, most stable, most beautiful mainstream OS out there right now. It would be especially funny as back some years under Gil Amelio, Apple actually looked at licensing Win NT for the new OS when Copeland was in horrible shape. Thank gawd that never happened or Apple would be where SGI is now (or worse).
Hey, you know that Microsoft has used Apple as their R&D arm for years now, right? Why not just formalize it?
In all fairness, I am not saying that Microsoft can't do it themselves, I'd just like to see a return to the good 'ol days when Microsoft made good, solid applications and were not trying to be all things to all people. They used to you know...... I am thinking of the early versions of Excel (Multiplan) and Word on the first Macintoshes along with Microsoft MacEnhancer, Chart and Basic.
Although one has to wonder what is going on when Microsoft's programmer team for Windows is in the several-thousands and Apple's development team for OS X is around 300.
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What I think is odd about this is that the NT architecture has never really even been fully utilized, at least on the consumer side of Windows. In a lot of respects, NT is a pretty clever system, including highly individualizable security for files, processes, etc. It also supports multiprocessing well, contrary to the implication of the article. Point being, I'm not so sure the solution for Microsoft is to throw out NT and move on to something else (Singularity, or whatever it may be). I would suggest they instead look at the features already in place with NT and look at ways to actually enable and present them in a reasonable way in their consumer OSes. I guess this is the plan in Vista, but we'll see. The other thing I'd like to see Microsoft do is separate out the kernel-level framework (NT system, drivers, etc) from the UI framework, so that it would then be possible to treat those two elements separately, in the same way that Linux has the kernel and X/Window Manager stuff totally separated out. But, I guess that would make it harder for them to make money, so it's unlikely.
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"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.
Maybe MS should pay attention to the fact that they have never taken full advantage of any processor's power. Most products they have put out these days just hog system resources, forcing systems to have more powerful processors, more RAM, etc. without ever really harnessing their power. The increase in power is just to make it seem like the bloat-ware is running better than it actually is.
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I actually find this really interesting. Not that Microsoft is talking about a new OS after Vista, but that they're talking about it being a successor to Windows, not a new version of Windows.
.Net runtime whatchamajigger, so new .Net apps will run seamlessly on either Windows XP, Windows Vista, or the new OS. Then they'll hack VirtualPC to make a stripped-down XP or Vista run transparently in the background, and run old applications inside of that (and new hardware will be fast enough that performance won't be a problem). It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago with Classic, the Mac OS 9 emulator that runs on Mac OS X. Chances are, just like Apple modified the Mac OS Toolbox, named it Carbon, implemented Carbon in the new OS and added the CarbonLib library to the old OS so Carbon apps could (sort of, in theory) run on both platforms with no modifications (it didn't actually work that well, but it did make it possible to port existing apps without rewriting the whole thing), Microsoft will probably come up with a derivative of Win32 that apps can be ported to that will run on the new OS. Meanwhile, they'll move as much as they can over to .Net.
.Net and emulate Windows, then they'll have the flexibility to move to a different processor architecture if they want, without the compatibility problems that Apple is going through with that.
Microsoft has been trying to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug themselves into for several years now, and they can't do it (i.e. fix Windows) without breaking backwards compatibility with old applications, and as long as they keep releasing new versions of Windows, they have to maintain that backwards compatibility, or word will spread quickly and people won't buy it. Besides, if you have to buy new applications when you buy your new PC with the new OS, why not buy the Mac version of those apps instead, and switch?
But then Microsoft bought VirtualPC, and a solution began to unfold. If they release a new OS, and don't call it Windows, then they don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with existing Win32 applications in the OS. They'll port the
And hey, if they move what they can to
Flame on!
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Bleh I'm gonna get modded down for this but oh well. If they want to do long term work, work on the stability and security of an operating system. Let's face it. Microsoft is here. Linux coming to a desktop may happen but as of now it's in pre-natal care. Microsoft does need to take some hints from *nix. Be secure. Be quick. Be able to be to customized. They need to work with the community (by that I mean other software companies like gaming companies) and make strict guidelines how it should be written to work with Windows correctly. But they also need to take input. Software companies well say, "well hey we need to do this because..." and instead of MS saying "nope" they should say "well we built the OS and know it so this won't work becasue.....but if you do this...". I started my experience using MS, I'm a linux user looking for a linux job, but at least in linux developer comminicate and things are implimated correctly. Windows is easy to use, windows is easy to fuck up, windows is hard to repair. Usually the best repair is a re-install. This need not be. Eye candy is great, but we need stability and security.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
The next generation of windows, I think, will erase some of our antiquated notions about what an operating system "must" have (a boot sequence, a file system, etc.) To me, and I'm sure many other slashdotters who can remember MS-DOS, Windows XP seems like a very souped-up version of MS DOS. OS X (while it has a boot sequence, file system, etc.) just some how does not seem like MS-DOS. Every iteration of Windows so far seems to pile on more and more disguises for an elaborately dressed MS DOS. This pattern needs to stop.
There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now.
:D :D :D
:))
This is the best joke I've heard in a long while
They kept pushing and postponing Vista's dates and continuously dropping features for how long now ? Right. Now what can you read above: no timetable for the one following Vista. Ok.
I can of course understand that for a company it is very important to show that they have long term plans. And they need to tell that convincingly. Right now, I'm not convinced about neither.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
You know, I remember testing "Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2", and the desktop could barely draw itself, there were loads of icons missing, you couldn't run MS Office, the admin tools would bluescreen the box, and it took about 30 seconds to open the start menu. And I was thinking "They spent 4 years building THIS?" And that turned out to be Windows 2000, widely considered to be the least crap version of Windows ever.
There's the real possiblity that Vista might turn out to be a unusable crap heap, but its way to early to make that call. I'm kinda suprised that they had a public beta with 6 months (plus 3 more once it gets pushed again) to go.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It also has the goal of being a fully managed operating system, so it should be possible to host it on a variety of devices.
When it comes to a point where they have to abandon the windows code-base or sink under the weight of it, I wonder if they will turn to Singularity?
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
At the OS level, a decent scheduler and not using giant locking will get you most of the way.
= 13736089
To get the most out of it though, the applications need to be multi-threaded and multi-threaded programming in (standard) C/C++ is not straight forward, in fact it can be almost downright impossible to debug.
Other programming languages are much more suited to multi threaded programming, particularly those that use the CSP model.
Construction of Concurrent Systems Software
http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/lec1.pdf
http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/lec3.pdf
http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/lec5.pdf
My favourite, of course, is Limbo but I only know of one environment where that is implemented : Inferno
here's another discussion on a similar theme
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164547&cid
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Driver issues are most likely to blame for your poor Vista experience.
I have a AMD64 3500, 960MB of RAM (integrated 64MB graphics) and can just about scrape a 'performance rating' of 3. I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB of RAM YESTERDAY and the difference it made to Vista is like comparing apples to goats.
Out of the box Vista surps up 300-400MB of RAM on a fresh boot (I haven't taken an exact measurement).
My Gnome/Linux desktop uses about 115-140MB and XP x64 is about 165MB (Gnome starts lower than XP x64 but generally increases with a little use of the UI, I think it loads more stuff into RAM on demand than Windows Explorer). I would hope this huge memory requirement is reduced when Redmond cannabalise Vista Ultimate into it's various flavours but I doubt it. There seems to be alot of processes and services running out of the box in Beta 2, but I haven't had time to see what they are all about.
I noticed my boot time in Vista is very slow, but the performance control panel applet reports this is due to a bad driver.
Interestingly the full Aero interface is more responsive than Windows Classic! It's a shame it's so damn ugly...
My experience with Vista is therefore best summarised as: It's just as responsive as XP but guzzles more RAM, it's ugly and has alot of bugs and driver issues to work out before it goes RTM, personally haven't seen enough yet to turn me back from Linux but I think Vista will be a success.
I've got to say, it seems that a lot of people still haven't grasped the fact that this is Beta software. There have been changes since the public beta went live already that have increased performance / fixed reported issues. Does anyone remember the first few builds of Longhorn? You could barely get it to install. I honestly don't think that MS should have put out a public beta, not yet at least, too many people are acting as if it's the final code and condemning it.
By the way, the rating issue is something that has already been addressed and MS is working on changing it to make it more reflective of the systems that exist today. I have a x64 3500+ and it's showing a 5 for performance rating.
Just keep an open mind that Betas historically are released with the intent of getting feedback and fixing it before the Release Candidates (where MS should have started the public releases) are out.
Ha ha! I thought it was just me!
Now imagine, OSX didn't get primetime ready until 10.3 (released 2004 I think, or was it 2003?), so there's realistically a chance that Vista won't come into its own for another 3-4 years. As you say, they are too late, and I agree, it's possibly fatal.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"