Slashdot Mirror
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."
Microsoft's monopoly is fighting against itself: newer versions of Windows are finding themselves to be in the "striving competition" position, trying to steal marketshare from older versions. This phenomenon can only amplify with Microsoft's inability to innovate. This is the end of the monopoly.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
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.
Let's assume that people buy new OEM PC's that have the newest Microsoft OS on them. If Vista provides new, "incompatible with old version" features, then the Windows install base becomes less self-compatible. If Microsoft fights to keep Vista compatible, there will be no real reason to upgrade. It's a catch-22 of being the monopoly OEM-installed OS.
stuff |
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.
Just to play devil's advocate here (so don't bite my head off); while Windows may be complex, its ubiquitous nature does reduce the need for applications to be particularly portable, and for programmers to be particularly knowledgable. That's an arguable benefit, but it maybe the drive for varied OSes has its drawbacks.
It would obviously be preferable to have a well-written universal OS, but that brings us around to the old saying: The best kind of government would be a benevolent dictator, but how many dictators stay benevolent?
Windows and M$ may be evil, are certainly a pain in the arse, but are they also just an inevitable consequence of the technological and economic environment we have created? If it weren't M$, would we just be having the same problem with someone else? If the devil didn't exist, would it have been necessary for us to have created him?
What do others think about this? (Again, I'm only playing devil's advocate - I want to see how others view this situation)
Meta will eat itself
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
I can already hear everyone saying, "But Apple came up with the UI idea" or even "But Xerox came up with the UI idea." Be that as it may, it was Microsoft who proliferated it throughout the world and ingrained the idea of the particular UI into our brains. Like it or not, admit it or not, Microsoft has done a bit of good for IT in general.
With that being said, they have done quite a bit of evil too. But there's so many negative posts about Microsoft, I had to comment on the one positive post that I saw that wasn't just a "microsoft rules you lunix users muhahahaha" troll.
Ok, Mods, do your job. Mod me down for saying something positive about evil evil bad bad Microsoft.
Insert offensive troll-style sig here. Please mod or respond appropriately.
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!
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.
So we'll be lured in by the next solid, stable, safe NT3.5(1), and then have the rug pulled out from under us when the followon version comes out and all those safteys are scrapped for marketability.
Fool me one, shame on you...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Really, I don't think it will be the end of a monopoly. Why would it? MS has every bit of steam possible in their engine. As a "Seasoned" (5 years or so) .NET developer, we cater to Windows. Therefore, we use windows. Furthermore, we use Office. Our clients use Windows (I guess we don't help things by not offering MAC IE/Safari or Firefox/Opera support, but thats another thread, honestly).
Another neat note is that MS's XNA framework and GAme Studio Express is just out in beta and quite a few people are liking what they see. Unfortunately, it'll take another beta release to get the Content Pipeline out the door, which means painful conversion of Mesh files, but thats ok for now, as people get to learn the IDE.
I've always been told that making money has nothing to do with having a decent base product. While that might not be the selling point, the fact that you have good accessories, or at least desirable accessories usually can push the fence-sitters onto your side.
*NIX will never die. Windows will never die. I don't think it matters how much each side tries, since the appeal (to the GP) of "Widely Used" vs "Better" have always offset.
By using your custom "XP Home / XP Pro" CD (I have never heard of a MS printed disc that does that), you are using a different disrtobution of XP than the one that came with the laptop. While not as drastic, it would be like trying to fix a Red Hat install with your Ubuntu disc.
Windows does just work if you treat it like a Mac. Only use signed drivers, use the OS disc that came from the factory, etc and it works. Try to take it outside of that protected area and you risk running into problems like this. Some people are very familar with XP and tweak it to do amazing things just as some take a Linux distro and customize it, although the latter has far more room to customize and far more places that you can screw up if you don't know what you are doing.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
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
So are you saying that their cathedral is bizzare?
MS outperformed, they got set up as the default and made their software good enough.
If we look only at PC hardware
People bought MS DOS, not PC DOS, not Dr DOS
There were a few windowing environments and task swapping/multitasking
Deskview (sp?) GEM, OS/2, GEOS
People still bought MSDOS (Dosshell swapping later and MS windows multitasking)
They also leveraged their default status, when they went QBasic and the default editor, did anyone notice it was very similar to the QuickBasic and QuickC environments? (I loved QuickC 2.5 at the time)
123-> Excel
Wordperfect -> Word
They simply make a good enough product, and work on the weak points till it's no longer clearly inferior to the competition.
It's a very effective way to compete.
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!
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.