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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."
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!
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Never happen. To personify the company, Microsoft's ego is too big; you ever notice how it routinely enters markets completely irrelevant to its then-current strategies, apparently only for the sake of proving to itself, once again, that it's capable of domination? Microsoft wants so badly to be the best that it can't stand the sight of another tech company being successful. This seems to stem from some sort of deep-seated insecurity.
So even if Microsoft were already licensing OS X today, you can bet it would be looking for ways to homebrew a solution of its own. Not to mention the fundamental differences in taste and approach to workplace environment between the target demographic of Windows vs. Mac OS X, but we'll not go there yet...
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Apple got where they are by copying other people as well. Microsoft would be largely naive to license OS X, because the development team for OS X had hardly anything to do, and they didn't have to license anything to do it. What microsoft has been trying to do from day one is to avoid the ideas and basics of Unix. It worked for the first 10 years or so, but it has been failing ever since. Microsoft, for all their faults tries projects that are much harder (and more impractical) than apple. The problem with Vista too much integration with .net and C#, code that is designed for small business oriented projects being used on a huge bloated project. Microsoft may see their failure in trying to use their own code too much, but they will not likely step so low as to license a competitors OS.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
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.
Apple had a pretty massive ego before Copland cratered, too.
.. Buying Solaris or OS X is only going to make the management problems worse, not better. They really just need to clean house of whomever is setting these development targets, and it looks like they've already started with the Chief Architect.
MS has just been through the biggest development project failure ever in the private sector
MS has two choices: cut a deal with SJ, or try to turn Solaris into a viable desktop system.
Copland was a technology failure -- the old MacOS just couldn't be "modernized" without breaking applications / using too much memory / etc. There was just no way to add SMP and memory protection to the thing.
Vista is a management failure. Rather than shorter release cycles with incremental improvments, MS put it on themselves to do it all in one big release. Nobody was asking them to do this -- it was just arrogance on their part. People want better security and search functionality in Windows, they don't want it rewritten in C# and they don't want shoot-the-moon features like WinFS. They don't even necessarily want transparent windows.
If there was an XP2004 and an XP2006 released, you wouldn't see the bitching. XP's biggest problem at this point is just that it's old and clunky.
So, different problems, different solutions. Apple had critical technical problems and had to buy a new OS to fix it. Microsoft has a project management problem
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.