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Windows Monoculture Myopia Revisited
round stic writes "eWeek magazine has an interesting look at the effects of the Windows monoculture on IT budgets, even as everyone agrees on the severity of the inherent security risks. The article contains interviews with Dan Geer and others who warned about the risks of the Windows monopoly three years ago. The article coincides with a piece in the Observer that suggests Vista is the end of the Microsoft monolith because of how complex the operating system has become."
From the article:
Why do people keep perpetuating this myth? It should be widely known by now that all the important Linux developers get paid by their respective employers to work on the kernel. That's possibly the most significant sign of widespread acceptance of the open-source development model -- that companies such as IBM would pay their own employees to do work on a public project that is not exclusively to their own benefit.
In the same sentence, the author managed to confuse "richest" with "smartest" as well. I'm not very impressed with this article.
I know, RTFA is a strange concept on /., but this time around it's really needed.
Why? Because the article is not about the downfall of MS as the headline seems to suggest, but about the way complex software is build. It suggest that building big, monolithic applications has reached an end as Vista shows that even a huge company like MS can't really write complex software in this way anymore.
Now agree or disagree with this, but please spare us the "OMG MS will never die" comments.
With new virtualization technologies coming through, I think it's about time for Microsoft to scrap backward compatability being built directly into Windows. It just leaves so many holes unplugged. Start Blackcomb with a clean slate, include a Win32 sandbox environment, and be done with it.
On a side-note: Windows monopoly also ensures you can go to inner Mongolia, switch on a local computer and with 90-odd percent chance make sense of whatever pops up on screen. It means everyone has a common UI that is known by many (most?) members of modern civilization. Easily, Windows is, barring the ill effects of monopoly on commercial businesses and security, the greatest single stab at standardizing computer UI so far in computer history. And quite sucessful at that.
Magna res est vocis et silentii temperamentum
Building large, complex software in a monolithic way has always been at an end. This is why monstrosities like MS Windows, MS Office, Mozilla, and Linux are so full of bugs and so difficult to extend.
Interestingly, they have also all found the solution to the extensibility problem: modularization. Indeed, MS Office macros, Mozilla plugins, and Linux kernel modules are all popular ways to add functionality, and they work reasonably well. Of course, you need the whole of MS Office, Mozilla, or Linux (at least the binary and the headers) for this to work, and new versions of the monolithic software often break the modules. And it still doesn't solve the complexity of maintaining the monolithic software; thus they are all still full of vulnerabilities, Windows still crashes, Mozilla still leaks memory, etc.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think that for the next release of Windows, they should just stop trying to support old hardware and software. Just write a small, compact kernel that is secure, and have turn everything else into independent modules that can be easily switched out, similar to Linux and Unix. If you don't like your filesystem, change it. If you don't want IE, take it out and put in Firefox.
... they would make their lives a lot easier. Plus, without all of the old legacy code in there it would probably be more secure. And maybe for that version we could have WinFS.
I think the UI is fine and they should keep it fairly consistent. But if they'd just lose having to support things that ran on 95, 98, 2000, ME,
And dump the registry, that was a really stupid idea.
But I think this could work. Most new copies of the OS are sold on computers built by Dell and other pc makers so they can control what goes in them. Hardware could be certified to work on the new version. Fairly new hardware could get new drivers that could be loaded on and it would work too. But older stuff would just get left behind.
Anyway, just a thought. On a random note, painting a two story house by yourself sucks!
I disagree strongly. Go to another (english) computer and the average computer user will not know what to do. The order and number of items changes and their all whacked out of place running around as a chicken without a head that the computer is broken.
...) is so loved among the real sysadmins because it lets them do stuff on all computers no matter what language the GUI is in. A GUI is for simple users and maybe some people that got privileges to change some settings, power users and sysadmins need the command line to get the computer to do stuff fast and reliable especially if you're in a multi-lingual and more important in a multi-charset environment.
Yes, we sysadmins can relate to certain icons in any language but it's not as strong as knowing command line scripting and making the computer do stuff through that. A script is in general not made to click on certain well-known places but instead executes some commands that have effect on the computer.
That is why *nix (Linux, BSD,
I am a Mac sysadmin for a large company and I can get the computers in Singapore to do the same things I let the local branches do but I have generally no idea what to do when I'm using Remote Desktop.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The end of the Microsoft monolith? I don't think so. OK, so Vista is bloaty, and a monoculture is risky. So what? Are the masses of IT directors going to think, "Gee, monoculture is bad, I think I'll replace all my Dell desktops with iMacs"?
There are approximately one grillion machines running XP and Windows 2000, and doing their jobs more or less successfully (if not securely), and being supported. Many (most?) will not be upgraded to Vista, given the high costs and dubious benefits. So they will stay the same.
How does this work out to the end of the monolith?
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
Parent poster definitely gets it right:
The Free Software Movement is not really driven by idealistic motives, but rather by a simple economic fact: because its marginal cost (i.e. the asymptotic cost of producing an extra copy) is null, free market forces and competition are bound to make all useful pieces of software freely available.
Note this is different from music or art in general: in art, the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.
Some more elaboration of the idea: Software is meant to be free
My father thinks computers are unnecessary, and he has never used one (except in case of life or dead )...
The amount of crap he doesn't have to deal with is even more astounding. Off course he knows that other people ( like me ) chose differently but he doesn't care and I also noted that he doesn't find other people reasons convincing.
But did MS add anything? MS didn't do anything to make GUIs popular, it was GUIs that made MS popular. If MS didn't exist GUIs would have still became popular, because that is what people want. If MS didn't exist we would still be using GUIs now, except we would be complaining about Apple computer's evil monopoly.
MS didn't really do anything significant other than being in the right place at the right time, with the right contract with IBM.
That convenience of one platform means less management expense. So far, companies are going with lower costs over susceptibility.
Alternatives to Windows are free. As in beer. As in licensing costs: $0. License management costs: $0. Time spent calling to re-license the operating system because you installed a sound card: $0. License audit exposure: $0. As in infinity% cheaper than Windows. As in incremental cost per unit = 0. The cost of alternative supporting application and utility software is $0. Alternative database application software is $0. Alternative firewall softare is $0. Alternative antivirus software (if and as applicable) is $0. Word processing software - $0. Systems/network management tools - wait for it - $0. Documentation,comprehensive howto resources, and technical support - all $0.
Turning away from solutions such as Linux because of cost is like being on fire and turning away from a bucket of water because the water might be too hot. Arguing against alternatives to Windows on the basis of cost is the very height of idiocy and is ultimately disingenuous. The real issue when considering alternatives is the fear of change and organizational inertia. How much of either can your company afford?
I think what that means is is that their OS has become progressively better and better to the point where people don't see the point of upgrading. Win95 was dramatically better than Win 3.11. NT4 was on another planet it was so much better than Win95, even if it couldn't run everybody's games. A lot of us remember how /. used to hammer NT4 for requiring reboots and the BSOD. Win2000 finally delivered on stability and made NT more compatibile. XP brought the Win9x and NT lines together, and somehow became even more stable (in my experience) than Windows 2000. Going from 2000 to XP wasn't as big a leap switching any other version before. XP does what its designed to do well. So what does Vista offer people?
Yesterday at work I crashed Word on one machine and had another not recognizing a working smb/cifs share. M$ has still a lot of work to do to come near my mac and desktop linux (unless i use betas) experience.
I think vista will pull it off eventually. But only because of the existence of Linux, if M$ fails with vista it's kaputt.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
So you mean
"They got set up as the default and made their software good enough."
Note I didn't just say good, nor did I say not bad.
They just made it good enough so people didn't really look for an alternative.
I can't really agree with this. The major problems came when Microsoft decided, after about two years in development since the start in ~2002, that they were to change the foundation of "Longhorn" from Windows XP SP2 to Windows Server 2003. This was also by the time Microsoft changed their goals of what their next OS should be. Yes, when it was in the middle of development! Development managers may start feeling dizzy now and consider leaving Microsoft.
I wouldn't even want to do it in a personal software project.
To see the problem, check out this build 5048 review (build 5000 was the kernel switch) with screenshots. It looks almost like "old Windows" again with mostly the same old features after a few years in development? Windows enthusiast Paul Thurrott is screaming blood. What happened to the progress they had made? Well, they had to strip a ton of features to get their stuff working again. Say hello to huge two year delays, feature cuts, and sweating.
So Vista seems to me to be more about a planning/design mistake than a complex beast that will take around 5 years to get out the door. Vista has actually only had around 2-2.5 years of uninterrupted development on the correct kernel and with the final goal of what it should even do!
I'd like to object to the article and actually claim I'm impressed by how quickly Microsoft put together something that looks to even end up as stable during that short time with this many features, given the stupidity that went on in planning. Or rather in-development-planning.
Of course, WinFS and other technologies had to go due to this wild change of focus in mid-development, but that's not surprising or a lack of efficiency due to having think of backwards compatibility, like this article claims.
But it's at the same time very visible how Microsoft is struggling, and I'm doubting we will see a clean release of this one when it "goes gold".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
i think the article raises an interesting point. virtualization technology.
if you think about it, this could mean that ms ships as a host operating system and one preinstalled 'guest' operating system.
from this point on, anyone can run his sw in windows, older versions of windows (with which it is competing) and most of all: any linux distro or other OS.
this further on means, that non-technical people will run linux on their boxes, like any other application. for them, there is no big difference whether it's an application or a complete operating system. this means also, that ms has found it's niche, where it always was. the end user. i doubt that there will be many non-technicals, that will later change to have another OS as their host operating system.
this also solves the 64bit problem, the old 32 bit apps can still be run.
So you're assuming that at least 50% of the people using Windows are going to get new machines in less than 6 months? Ha! I'd say at least 50% of Windows machines in existence are enterprise/corporate desktops/workstations, and many of those are finally upgrading to XP. Maybe in 6 years Vista will be the most widely deployed Windows OS, but in the meantime, XP and 2000 will continue to dominate.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
It's interesting the unstated assumption in the arguments against heterogenity: that any given company must support multiple platforms for heterogenity to work. I don't think that's true, though. If any given company uses a single platform, but different companies choose different single platforms, the end result is much the same overall: exploits have a much smaller target they'll work on.
And further, I don't think the arguments about the cost of supporting multiple platforms hold up. There's more than enough research supporting the contention that it takes fewer people to support Unix-based desktops than Windows-based ones, and that makes sense given the remote-admin capabilities built into desktop Unix that come from it's server roots. So suppose a company switches to a 50/50 mix of Windows and Linux desktops, and a Linux tech can support twice as many desktops as a Windows tech could. Yes, supporting two platforms costs more than supporting one. But at the same time you've just halved the number of Windows support people you need because you've got half the number of Windows desktops (assuming you've got more than 1 or 2 people could support). You need to replace them with Linux support people, but you only need 1 Linux guy added for every 2 Windows guys you're dropping. If you started with 4 Windows techs, you'd drop 2 Windows techs and add 1 Linux tech for a total of 3 techs now. That's a 25% drop in personnel costs. When figuring costs, you have to add in the reduction in personnel costs as well. Plus there's the reduction in licensing costs that offset any increase from having multiple platforms.
And finally, there's the BSA. We've all read the reports about their audits and the havoc they create. If your company's already supporting non-proprietary platforms, you're in a much better position to do an Ernie Ball if the BSA gives you grief.
Thanks for the information.
It doesn't change my mind, though. From the Wikipedia article, I get the idea that Microsoft looked at Stacker, liked what it saw, and wrote its own implementation. I see nothing wrong with that. There is no mention of Microsoft using any of Stac's code. Yes, they infringed on Stac's patents, but it's not clear that this is because they copied ideas about how to do things or that they did a clean room implementation of disk compression, and that infringed on Stac's patents (that's what I have against patents).
Eventually, Stac couldn't survive by selling disk compression software, but that was a dying business anyway. As the article mentions, hard drives became cheaper and larger. I know nobody who uses Doublespace now, and few who did back in the day (I was one of them, though).
I think, if you want a more evil example, you should look at, e.g. Netscape vs. MSIE, where Microsoft bundled MSIE with the OS and played the embrace and extend game to lock people into MSIE, all but completely killing off competing browsers. Or Java, where MS shipped their own, incompatible VM, which I think is largely responsible for the failure of Java applets, and then they launched their own technology to compete with Java. Or WMA vs. Vorbis, where MS is pushing their own, proprietary, audio format, including it with the OS, and conveniently omitting Ogg Vorbis.
Still, I think, all in all, what Microsoft is doing is mostly good business sense, not intentional cruelty. They aren't stealing anything, nor are they killing people. No-one is forced to use their products, except perhaps when they willingly sign contracts to that effect. Microsoft aren't angels, but to call them evil, to me, seems like a dilution of the meaning of that word.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.