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How Microsoft Plans To Get Its Groove Back With Win7
shawnz tips a blog post up at thebetaguy that details Windows 7's huge departure from the past, and the bold strategy Microsoft will be employing to maintain backward compatibility. Hint: Apple did it seven years back. There are interesting anti-trust implications too. "Windows 7 takes a different approach to the componentization and backwards compatibility issues; in short, it doesn't think about them at all. Windows 7 will be a from-the-ground-up packaging of the Windows codebase; partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows."
Over ambitious as always. I say work on improving XP . Make it more efficient and add features. Perhaps get all those other features that were promised 10 years ago working. Like WinFS. Like a dozen other things. MS is just digging itself deeper.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
No really... we'll get it right next time. The last five years were a mistake, but give us a few more years and we'll be more Mac-like. Honest!
Wasn't this what Vista was supposed to do in the first place? It was supposed to be a dramatic departure from previous versions, but too much politics pressured developers into making backwards compatability a little too over-bearing on the system. This is clearly what they were trying to accomplish with Vista, but higher-ups were too afraid to do it, so they told them to half-ass everything to make it all work. After seeing what a disaster Vista has become, both on the development and user experience side of things, the Higher-ups have no choice but to listen to what their devs wanted in the first place; kill legacy. Not build it in and make it limp along half-working and hard to develop for, but just start with a clean slate and build a kickass base OS and worry about compatability with older applications and frameworks later. Basically, they tore a page out of OS X's plan of action.
...but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows Sure Vista does that now.I seem to remember Vista was supposed to be a huge departure from what was done before - and then reality hit.
The mistake they are making (will make) is that that they think their software is what is broken - when in fact the software is just a representation of the business model they have chosen. Their system design is market driven not engineering driven - and whatever they produce from this point on will be the same as all the others. Windows, OSX, Linux, Unix etc are all products of the ethos in the organizations in which they are created.
If the mould is defective, there's no point is making a second one in the hope that it will turn out differently.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Also, MS bought VirtualPC, and has been giving it away for free. Integration of the OS with VirtualPC would be pretty easy for MS to do. I've been waiting for it for a long time.
Customers win because they now have an OS that's not crap. Developers win because they just re-code the UI and sell a new version. And hopefully they have better UI libraries to do it with. MS wins because Windows7 isn't a joke.
Let's just hope that this doesn't get the same treatment that WinFS did. I'd rather they not under-promise and over-deliver, but that doesn't seem to be the microsoft way.
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Unfortunately, the article itself is a work of fiction. The guy has lots of bad reasoning, poor memory and is desperately lacking in technical understanding.
;-)
For once, I'd say just read the article summary
...releases lost the game long ago. It is useless to think in an OS as a package, much less something you put in a box. Given that the OS is the first software building block of a system and due to the sheer complexity of the thing, it has evolved into a continually updated and polished piece of engineering, where you take snapshots of the development and call them releases.
An operating system evolves and you don't sell it. You either provide it as a service, or provide it for free, so that you can hook people on some service you offer.
I'll tell you why Win 7 will be a huge flop: since it breaks almost all compatibility between itself and previous windows releases, it has to compete on the same grounds as Linux, *BSD and OSX. Which means, that without the massive inertia of the previous windows releases, those three will kick the living crap out of Win 7 in terms of maturity, usability and price.
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Transparent emulators (should they even be called that?) are very fast - ever run a VM? They just pass through code into the native processor and make sure functions get routed to the appropriate library. Not quite as fast as running natively, but if you are able to significantly increase your "native" speed, the tradeoff is usually worth it (at most it's about a 20% hit - real world is usually much less).
Where you DO run into problems is with I/O, meaning we get the driver headache again. I believe that is one reason Vista pushed a new driver model - an attempt at future-proofing for this new OS model.
The plus side of a VM is you get a layer of stability for free if you do it right (I don't count on MS to do anything right, especially the first time...) - crashing the VM doesn't necessarily crash the native OS (depends on what caused the crash - bad memory crashes everything).
No single link to source - where did they get this info, just unfounded speculations.
Windows 7 early builds was already demoed and there's no evidence that it will be backward-compatible.
Also WinSxS (side-by-side dlls) is what windows xp uses to maintain different versions of runtimes from the start and obviously it has little to do with OS speed.
While reading this article the only thought prevailed - wtf author is smoking. Complete rubbish.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
But there is one key aspect of the X story that has to be remembered: Apple was effectively a dead platform with a small user base. The vast majority of active Mac users today are new to the platform, or on a new-ish machine. There was little to no installed base to lose.
To think that Windows can pull off the same stunt strikes me as ridiculous. There is hope, surely, in the rapid rollout of ever-better virtualization systems, and API mappers (like WINE). But does anyone really think that the MASSIVE FREAKING installed base of Windows can afford a semi-solution like Classic while new versions of their software ships?
Case in point: I looked into the
Hey, maybe they'll pull off a miracle and make a compatibility layer that totally kicks ass. You know, like the new Office kicks ass.
Maury
From the article: On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit. ... In Windows 7, Microsoft will break from the Windows' norm by breaking previous API compatibility, offering new API frameworks as a native solution, and providing support for legacy frameworks (COM, ATL, .NET Framework, etc) through monolithic libraries designed to provide the functionality of all previous revisions of the modules in question.
And so, the answer is to put everything in one bloated DLL?
It apparently hasn't yet penetrated to the Windows 7 group that computers aren't going to get much more powerful for years to come. That stopped once laptops started outselling desktops. In laptops, what matters is size, weight, and battery life. The future is the OLPC and the Asus Eee. In a few years, laptops in bubble-packs for $89.95 will be hanging on racks at the drugstore. Microsoft isn't ready for that.
Progress now will come from reducing software bloat. Microsoft has, in desperation, extended the life of Windows XP for little machines. That's only a stopgap measure. Now they need to de-bloat their whole product line and get their costs down.
No numbers. No estimations. Just some hand waving of "they are doing something different". The article doesn't change that fact at all.
Because OS X and Linux aren't de facto monopolies with 80%+ of the market.
Yes, because loading 1 MB of code as part of one executable is vastly faster than loading it as 1 MB of library. This is especially true when loading 10+ different executables that have the same code statically linked in. That is way faster than loading it once. More efficient too.
No, wait...
Besides, that code (such as MSHTML.DLL) was already an external library. Just about every operating system tends to get new libraries with major upgrades. Windows was not one monolithic executable before. Heck, it wasn't way back in the 3.11 days.
That has not always been the lure. The lure was it was pretty and not a DOS prompt. Then the lure was simply that there were more programs for it when it became dominant. But then again, Leopard runs programs designed for Tiger and before. OS 9 ran programs designed for OS 7. Just about every OS does that, including many UNIXes.
You've GOT to be kidding. "Proven" for OS 9? It didn't have memory protection. It didn't have preemptive multitasking. Heck, you still had to pre-allocate memory to programs at launch, didn't you? It was a fine OS design for 1992. It didn't work so well in 2000. It was a weight around Apple's neck and would have killed them if they didn't try to escape. It needed to updated, and previous projects had failed. A clean break was a very smart decision.
This is somewhat true, (quite on the laptop side later in life with the G4s), but it's also highly troll. "...in order to obtain the hardware-locked user experience of their new flagship operating system"? That's unnecessary.
It's not like anyone had ever thought of that before. If only Windows had a virtual environment in it. Maybe since 95. It could have run old DOS programs. Oh, wait, it did. Then there was WoW, Windows on Windows, that let 95 and up run old Win16 programs. Emulating older stuff is a common way of handling it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
As my father is fond of saying: "Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas."
I think that the big problem is that Microsoft is calling this new operating system "Windows".
Yeah, Windows sounds too easily breakable. They should call it something like MS Bricks.
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With this announcement of total backwards break, Microsoft has declared complete defeat for their business model.
I don't think that announcing breaking backwards compatibility is declaring defeat for a business model. It is more a cleansing process. And I welcome that. A lot of the hardware and software we use could be a lot more efficient and, quite possibly faster, if backwards compatibility were dropped.We're to the point now where processors are fast enough now to handle VM's. Let VM's handle the backwards compatibility, translating old code for newer uP/uC code.
I, too, would like to see Microsoft's practices of messing with their user base to satisfy their customer base stopped. But for the sake of competition, I don't think Microsoft sinking is a good option, either.
(I would also like to say it's the year of the penguin, and signs are showing that people are fleeing MS Windows... they just also happen to be fleeing the WIntel world, too, towards Macintosh.
Absolutely, that article was ridiculous.
Any article that uses "loading excessive library files forced on us by the DOJ" as the first (and presumably therefore most significant) reason for Vista slowness should be laughed out of town.
You're right, let them sink!
Let them perish in that huge heap of cash they're bringing in. Look how their utterly failing business model is killing them. St00pid ancient business model. They're just bringing in 16 billion dollars per quarter. Muahahaha! S00 sp00pid. Linux FTW, etc, etc.
The Linux vs Windows flame war was fun back in 1995. Can we move along?
Well, maybe there's your answer - MS wants to drop backwards compatibility specifically BECAUSE of things like ReactOS.
If Apps manufacturers are forced to follow suit, all new apps will have no (or poor) XP compatibility and thus will not run on the likes of ReactOS - in other words, end-users MUST use Win7 in order to run the latest apps.
AT&ROFLMAO
No, just no. It's a mystery to me why MS hasn't done this sooner. There's a lot to be gained for end users by throwing out the old code and starting from scratch with a set up which is designed for modern processors.
It's hardly a credit to MS that they've stuck with what is a bog of broken code and APIs for this long. ReactOS and wine just aren't large enough competitors to warrant this sort of radical "fix."
One can throw around a lot of paranoid speculation, but the reality is that a lot of the flakiness of Windows has been a byproduct of having all that stale code and 3rd party software interaction. Doing a redesign now with VM processor extensions and an awareness that right now things are moving to a multi-core 64bit environment makes this a good thing. Many of the design decisions would have been handled differently had the engineers known where things were going even 3 or 4 years down the road.
In terms of threat, the biggest threat here is that win 7 will not only not suck, but will do a genuinely amazing job at providing the end users and support staff with what they really want.