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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 think Microsoft already knows what to do as a successor to Windows...
Just wait for Google to show us what a Google OS would look like... then do that.
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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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
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
Before Vista is even out of the gates, a Microsoft exec was talking Wednesday about Windows' replacement at a VC conference.
.. this dual core thing has got us stumped... we're figuring out how to slow things down with dual core.
Gates looked at Vista, and left, holding his nose! Before we let this beast loose on gullible folks, we want to pacify them, saying we're working on a better alternative...
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,"
Our policy has always been "Whatever Intel giveth (in speed), Microsoft taketh away!"
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.
Well... we've taken a long while to build some junk, we've thrown out all useful stuff we promised.. don't worry, we'll keep working harder and longer in similar fashion.
And it won't be built overnight: There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now.
WE WON'T MAKE THE MISTAKE OF ANNOUNCING TIME TABLES AGAIN... NEVER, EVER!!! The successor to Windows could come in the next centruy... we won't be there, we won't care, but there's nothing wrong living in hope... We'll announce this non-event, non-timetabled non-initiative in Slashdot though!
But early work on this effort has not yet been organized
We are proud to declare that we have NOT YET started this NON-INITIATIVE
With five or six small projects afoot in various places throughout the company, Barnett said.
Some five or six groups of disgruntled employees have given up on Vista.... and now, they're talking about joining Google to Build The Successor To Windows...
Actually, we should've posted this in Ask Slashdot... but we aren't part of the OSDL, and we have our pride.. so we announce it as News for Nerds... Thanks for your suggestions!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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
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.
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
Yes.
And no.
Barnett's quote of "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," is meant to obfuscate the fact that there are OS's that handle multiple processors very well (Linux and OS X, not to mention other unix variants).
Microsoft has a vested interest in not doing PR work for the 'nix community. And they certainly don't want to imply that Vista won't get the most out of the current crop of processors when other OS's will.
Mark my words folks, we're currently watching the Fall of the Roman Empire. Nero (Ballmer) is fiddling (throwing chairs during temper fits, screaming "Developers!" repeatedly, etc.) while the city of Rome (Redmond) is burning to the ground.
I guess the capitalists were right, leave the marketplace alone and eventually it will find a center and select a survivor. In the OS wars, my money is on unix (in any flavor, take your pick) as the eventual winner. I'm sure Bill Gates knows this, that's why he's bailing while he can, just as he bequeathed the empire to Ballmer years ago when the DOJ was breathing down MS's neck. Gates is a lot of things: Stupid isn't one of them.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.