Slashdot Mirror
Gartner Analysts Warn That Windows Is Collapsing
spacefiddle writes "Computerworld has an article about a presentation from Gartner analysts in Las Vegas claiming that Windows is 'collapsing', and that Microsoft 'must make radical changes to the operating system or risk becoming a has-been.' Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald provided an analysis of what went wrong with Vista, and what they feel Microsoft can and must do to correct its problems. Larry Dignan of ZDNet has his own take, and while he agrees, he suggests that the downfall of Windows will be slow and drawn-out. As an interesting tangent to this, there's also a story from a few days prior about Ubuntu replacing Windows for a school's library kiosks, getting good performance out of older hardware. '[Network administrator Daniel] Stefyn said he was "pleasantly surprised" to discover that the Kubuntu desktops ran some applications faster with Linux than when they ran on Windows. An additional benefit of Windows' departure from student library terminals saw the students cease 'hacking the setup to install and play games or trash the operating system.'"
Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista...
You mean the almost-constant nag screens?
or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP...
Making them smarter than the lying marketroids selling it...
to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.
Translation: People are smarter than they think, and an OS that takes twice the hardware to be twice as slow AND even more incompatible with previous software isn't worth my money.
Of course, they still get sales - from the same idiots at my work who want to be upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because it's a bigger number, and then complain that they are confused by Office 2007 and want the tech support guys to "fix" it.
Gartner owns Slashdot now?
Man, when did this happen?
You are right about one thing... the morons still equate "windows" with "computer". But thanks to the 'tubes, TV, and Apple's marketing, that _is_ changing.
Death knell? Windows will not die with a bang, but with a whimper... but what do I know... I'm posting on Gartner, er Slashdot.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
When a technology service becomes ubiquitous and homogenous and - importantly - ceases being innovative, it runs the risk of becoming a candidate for conversion into a public utility. To stave this off, either ongoing innovation is required or the illusion of innovation and change is required. Microsoft has done a bit of both with Windows. But it's a thin veneer. As a result, poopulist efforts to 'socialize' this technology into a public utility are surging; hence, Ubuntu et al.
A-Bomb
Unfortunately for MS, virtually the entire world's population now has Windows experience. It was not a great experience.
Some are cretins, and could not interface with a 4x2, but enjoy blaming windows
Some are experienced IT people who have seen Linux/Unix and know how it could be.
Most are now in a position to ask the professionals "Is this as good as it gets?" and being told - no, there IS another way.
Some are migrating to Vista, and realising that if it can get worse, sure as hell it could get better somehow. They know who to ask for advice, and its not the guy in PC world.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Your argument essentially boils down to, "they had a pretty good run so far so I'm assuming they are invincible".
.NET, or in interpreted environments like browsers).
Same how the Roman empire was invincible, really. And the British empire. And let's not even get started on the American empire, which is crumbling before our very eyes.
Where is IBM? Where is Word Perfect? Both ruled supreme in their days, but those days are long gone. And just like IBM, Microsoft will still be around - but not as the powerhouse it once was. It will just be another big player instead.
One day soon the stockholders will ask why Microsoft is sinking so much money into XBox 360 or any of those other loss-making projects that Microsoft enjoys so much. And once they pull the plug on such projects, they will start to wonder if profits wouldn't be higher if Office were in a separate company, not fettered to any particular operating system.
Windows will survive that, as will Microsoft. But it will gradually become a niche product, one of many choices available for the operating system. Hardware will be controlled more and more through hypervisors. Applications will more and more be in virtualized environments of their own (beit virtual machines like Java or
And one day, someone will ask "what operating system are you running that on?", and despite being a card-carrying geek with a 4-digit slashdot ID, you will be forced to admit "Uhm, I'm not actually sure." Because it won't matter anymore.
If anything, legacy code will be Microsofts downfall (as TFA stated). I saw this happen firsthand for a company I worked for over a decade ago. They had a pretty impressive application and a long list of Fortune 500 corporations as customers. Even IBM (we're talking back before the Windows 3.x days) was basically giving the company a few million dollars a year for the privilege of reselling the software themselves. Well rather than build new versions of the application from the ground up, or even introducing potential incompatibilities between major releases, the powers that be insisted on full backward compatibility.
Over time more competitors showed up in the marketplace, and as the economy shifted IBM stopped tossing money in our laps. Our engineers (of which I was one) spent most of their time trying to figure out how to shoehorn new features and entire new parallel products on top of the existing legacy codebase. The inevitable result was that we struggled while our competitors came out with newer, more modern & more powerful software. I eventually left that company to go to a startup where 7 others from this company had already gone to. That company was acquired a couple years later, and the application pretty much no longer exists.
If the engineers, who had requested the ability to create a new product from the ground up, had been listened to, then perhaps that company would still be around and competitive. It was mainly because of the business decisions to retain backward compatibility, like MS has done with Windows, that they eventually disappeared. As long as MS maintains their own demand for backward compatibility they'll be waging a slow & prolonged war that they have no chance of winning.
Ordinarily, it might look like everybody is just decrying their favorite OS...but I think Bill's recent announcement that Win7 is coming next year lends some credence to the speculation.
Think about it--every self-respecting business decided to hold off on Vista until at least after SP1. Well, SP1 has only just arrived, but before those businesses even have a chance to think about migrating, M$ is talking about releasing a completely new OS. It's speculation, sure, but it looks like Redmond believes it too, if they're willing to make a move like this...
Well, in my opinion, the big difference is that when the Windows ME was released (2000), Apple was just coming out of their crisis, and Linux was too far behind in ease of use for the general public. Now, Apple is a real competitor, eating marketshare fast, and Linux is more than ready to be an option for anybody. So now there are real alternatives, and then there were none.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
Balmer is a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur of the past. He's still playing an aggressive dominance card of leadership, but his ship has started sinking very slowly a long time ago. His style of management is imperious and ignorant. This used to be the way to go, when Microsoft was a aggressive and flexible shop going for world domination - not by being better, but being faster, and by _setting_ standards instead of waiting for them to evolve. Those times are long gone. Microsoft is a moloch. Vista didn't set any standard for anything. Apple did on the desktop and Google and others did in the web. And still there we have yelling Balmer as commander in chief shouting at those who could know better instead of listening and comprehending what is really going on.
I don't know whether OSX on the desktop and OSX on an iPhone are the same, because I don't like Apple and have never written anything for either. However, I've written lots of software for BSD, including on embedded devices, and lots of software for Linux, including on phones; and I can verify that BSD on embedded devices is just the same as BSD on the desktop, and that Linux on phones is the same - the codebase with the same libraries and many of the same applications - on phones as it is on the desktop. So there's nothing 'absurd' about the idea that MacOS on an iPhone could be just the same as MacOS on a desktop.
And, again, having written software for it: Windows CE is not - not even remotely - the same as either Windows95/98/Me or Windows NT/XP/Vista. It's completely different.
Of course I knew Gartner's opinion was nonsense when they went down the ridiculous-yet-truthy-through-repeated-assertion "monolithic" line of argument (which they likely picked up on Slashdot, it should be mentioned). Vista is a failure not because of any sort of code maintenance problem, but rather that Microsoft aimed far too high with Vista, taking far too many risks for a big, big change.Vista's failure is down to poor engineering and poor management. Vista could have been brought out on time with all its features as promised by half a dozen of the companies out there - but not by Microsoft.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
We have kiosks at our university to check your class schedule, register your account and general account changes. Pretty much everything else is locked down when you are logged in as "guest". EXCEPT, you simply open windows media player, then open explorer.exe from inside media player, and you now have access to all the programs installed without you being authenticated to use them. I know this may be "easy" to lock down, but the fact remains, it really darn near impossible to block all the holes in Windows kiosks. If it's not in the Start Menu, and Run has been disabled, doesn't mean people cannot get to it.
That's bad. Really really bad. It's bad because they won't be able to afford to develop their way out of their problems if the cashflow into the OS division becomes a serious drag on the bottom line. The current Windows system is so large that it requires armies of programmers to develop it's many little pieces, and any sort of "global project" is simply impossible -- as Vista demonstrated.
The situation is extremely similar to Apple in the mid-90s with the Copland project (go read the wiki article). As the project grew it got to the point where they needed an infinite number of people to develop it (see "Mythical Man Month"). Combined with rapidly dwindling sales, and thus revenue, they couldn't even afford a finite number of developers, and the entire project imploded.
As Copeland demonstrated, the solution is to start over with a new plan. Let's not forget that Apple has switched platforms _four_times_ (68k -> PPC -> OS X -> Intel). If they can do it, so can MS. But if MS is going to do it, they are going to have to pull the trigger, and every release of the existing code base makes that decision harder and harder.
Working against MS is the fact that they are *not* near death. Apple's brush with extinction meant there was very few people to piss off when the inevitable happened and the old systems were semi-abandoned into the "penalty box" (Blue Box). MS has hundreds of millions of users, it's going to make their life extremely difficult. VMs may indeed work, given recent advances, and if they can isolate applications in different VMs then they might make the system more secure as a free offshoot.
Maury
And really, there are a lot of people who don't have a clue, who need "analysts" to help them form opinions: they're called "customers" or in some circles "clients".
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Just curious, how much did you pay for your 2.8 GHz P4 in 2000? Seeing as though that processor wasn't released until August 2002, you must have spent a load of cash!
8 years ago was still P3 time. The original P4 wasn't released until late 2000.
These three computers now run beautifully and I thoroughly enjoy noticing that after upgrades sometimes things run faster not slower.
One thing that bothers me, both as a consumer and as someone who tries to be environmentally conscious, is that the continual trend towards more bloat in Windows results in the premature obsolescence of perfectly good hardware. I can foresee getting a total of 8-10 years of good use out of these computers (even more if I do things like reuse them as NAS devices or routers). I save money, do a bit to reduce waste in landfills, and don't have to deal with the frustration of working with an operating system that prevents me from fully utilizing the potential of hardware I bought.
Frankly, I'm seeing less and less valid reasons for the continued use of Windows other than 'it works' or 'that's what I'm familiar with.' And even those arguments are becoming less and less valid themselves.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
OSU (Oregon State University, a bastion of open source) has Ubuntu terminals. Now, I'm pretty good at what I do, and that used to include breaking Windows for fun, so I tried to break their terminals. My goal: root.
Not easy. First, they use Idesk for their desktop (on Windowmaker), so all you can open is Firefox. I used the local browser code execution trick to get a shell, and took the home directory back for myself, but had no root. I eventually had to look up an old, old, old overflow in ping, compile it on another box (since there's no local compiler), and copy it to the terminal, and then I had a root shell. Total time: 5 hours. That's roughly 60 times what it took for me to break an XP kiosk.
The moral is either "don't admit to fucking with kiosks online," or "Ubuntu is, despite its friendliness, surprisingly more secure than Windows."
~ C.
You can trim a 600M Windows XP image down to about 120M if you know for sure you won't be using a lot of functionality, or 150M to keep all the functionality that 99% of users use (e.g. taking out the ATM networking and Trident drivers). This keeps a LOT of functionality that you don't need on mobile devices (mostly user space apps), and includes things like SP3, Windows Update updates, NVidia drivers, and so on.
Such installs, when automated, tend to take, in my experience, around ten minutes off a disk image in a VM, compared to an hour and a half for installation (not counting the time wasted when you don't know it's asking you a question because you're off being productive elsewhere), plus the hours and hours of installing drivers for networking and video, rebooting, updating Windows Update, rebooting, running Windows Update, rebooting, running Windows Update again, rebooting, and so on.
You can trim a Windows Vista installation (between 2GB-4GB, according to TPB) down to around 600M, trimming out all the crap that I personally couldn't afford to lose. The result was so absurd that I just wiped it out without bothering to test it.
So, if Windows Vista is really just 'XP with prettyness and UAC' why is it an extra 450M? It's not drivers (I wiped out everything that Vista comes with). It's not useful apps or productivity tools (everything Windows comes with, I replace). So where's it all going?
I know there are a lot of under-the-hood changes, but certainly for the loss of performance, ballooning of requirements, complexity and frustration, certainly it can't be justified... can it?
You'd think they would clean up their code so it runs efficiently on normal computers but obviously its so bad that they cant. :P
DirectX 9.0c is 218MB.
Does that explain why you cannot have it on a embedded device?
OpenGL is tiny for reference. The core of it is 0.7MB on my computer.
And locking the iPhone in that manner isnt difficult.
But its impossible with Windows. Need to be Admin to install stuff.