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Fresh Air For Windows?
jmcbain writes "The NY Times has an opinion piece on how the next Windows could be designed (even through Microsoft has already laid plans for Windows 7). The author suggests 'A monolithic operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete design. We don't need to load up our machines with bloated layers we won't use.' He also brings up the example of Apple breaking ties with its legacy OS when OS X was built. Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
but I still wouldn't buy it.
Anonymous Cowards get no respect.
Now that Bill Gates is retired from Microsoft, the editors should get with the times and lose that dated, painfully unfunny logo they use for Microsoft.
Most people probably wouldn't get the Borg reference to begin with, and now Bill Gates era at MS is officially in the past.
Only MS gets this ridiculous logo..now its finally the time they get rid of it.
As someone who started developing applications for Windows in 1991 and stopped around 1999, I doubt it. Better let legacy applications (and the whole x86 mess too, BTW) fade away, they have gone far beyond their useful life.
Apple could do that because they were much smaller than Microsoft, and had a small but relatively loyal customer base, and their rewrite did pay off, as people are generally very happy with OS X and don't care about the incompatibility with OS 9 and older anymore.
Microsoft has a huge userbase with much less loyalty, and generally a huge existing investment in software.
We don't need a MS Windows rewrite, we've already got Ubuntu, because that's essentially what the article author wants: an operating system that Just Works[tm], even at the expense of compatibility. That's a pretty good description of any popular Linux distribution.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Oh, yeah, this is slashdot. /.ers everywhere. I mean, imagine if MS actually delivered a wonderful, light OS! That would certainly be the end of /. as we know it!
Microsoft already said they will build on Vista instead of going the microkernel way, and we have discussed that fact to death.
Windows 7 will not be "Fresh Air", to the delight of
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
"Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
Well, considering the fact that Vista's all but killed the chance of running any software made before the year 2000, I'd have to say "no".
It's pretty bad when old Windows software is much more likely to run under Wine than with the latest version of Windows.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
To me it's always been an excuse to keep windows bloated, and not actually any effort to keep old software functional.
He really doesn't know anything about the internals of the Windows kernel or the Mach kernel, he's just assuming that since the NT kernel is "monolithic" and the Mach kernel is a "microkernel" then the latter must be better, and the reason it's better is it is "smaller."
If you want to know where the real problems with Windows lie, they're in the API and the shell, not the kernel. The NT kernel is perfectly fine. See this Ars write-up by someone knowlegeable:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars
I'd like to point out that Microsoft employs one of the original authors of the Mach kernel, Rick Rashid. He runs Microsoft Research. Look it up.
The wise answer is "maybe". There are only two companies that have done something similar. Apple, tried doing it from scratch and basically killed itself in the process, had to adapt already written NeXT. Even that took forever and sucked for a couple of years before they got everything right. Microsoft did something similar with windows NT: a ground up modern rewrite that was mostly compatible with the existing windows, but there was a lot of time that passed between win NT 3.50 and win xp. So if they started right now from scratch, maybe in ten years they could have something that would be decent.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Precisely. Other OSes are designed to be used, while Windows is designed to be sold.
I think the author of the article doesn't realize the difference between the legacy code and kernel architecture. Kernel architecture of windows is fine - its a hybrid kernel, which in general similar to Linux, you're not able to run in HPC on it, but hey, it is better than DOS! It's the legacy code that creates so much bloat, and swapping out the kernel won't change anything if the same mountain of code still runs.
Of course Microsoft could create virtualization layer, but then Linux has Qemu, Xen and Wine, and OS X has Parallels and Wine, and of course there is VMware, so if Microsoft would ever support legacy code through virtualization, alternative implementation of it would be release pretty quickly, and everybody here knows how Microsoft likes competition.
My guess there will be dying for the next 10-15 agonizing years, dragging any progress in the industry with them.
Apple's policy is to provide approximately 100% transparent support ONE version back. They did an incredible job with classic (supporting OS 9 in OS X) and an even better job in the transition with rosetta. (supporting ppc on intel)
While it was fairly obvious you were running an OS 9 app in classic, almost no one notices a rosetta app running on an intel. Now notice, intels do NOT support classic. That's their "one hop" rule at work. And you can bet their next big one will drop support for powerpc.
So this can be done, but it's hard to get right. But when you get it right, nobody notices. And that's a good thing.
This is a bit like Windows. The problem they've had is that there's a lot more transition from dos to 95 to 98 to 2000 to xp to vista. None of those was entirely pleasant, and none of them were very transparent. Only half of them provided major new features, but all of them clung to numerous existing problems. So in the same timeframe, Apple has made just two massive leaps, with less "transition shock" in their two bumps that windows has seen in their five. The interim transitions (os 8 to os 9, 10.1 all the way to 10.5 really) were almost completely transparent.
They've got a lesson to learn here. XP probably would have been a good time to do a "major bump" such as mac did with 9 to X, but they dropped the ball. They chose to break less, but to fix less as a consequence. Eventually they have to bite the bullet and fix as many of the underlying design problems as they possibly can in one fell swoop. It's going to break stuff. Maybe a lot of stuff. But if they could provide something like Apple did with classic support for OS 9, it wouldn't be so bad. Apple proved that it's not necessary to just totally break all your old software if you can provide decent emulated support for your previous OS inside the new one, invisibly.
Sadly I don't see this happening with Windows anytime soon. Microsoft has never had a knack for making those internal transparent emulators like classic and rosetta. Unless they can get something like this together, it's either going to continue to be a wreck, or it's going to be a disastrous pill to swallow. Continuing to try to make these "baby step" fixes is going to drive the world crazy.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
A kernel with:
-A file manager
-A web browser
-Multiple filesystem support
-Most extensive driver library in existence
-Office tools like Mail, WordPad, Calendar, Calculator, Contacts, Paint?
-Full command line environment (DOS)
-Complete media architecture in DirectX.. that's DirectSound DirectInput DirectDraw.. a LOT of big packages if it was Linux. Also Windows Media Player/Photo Gallery
-Graphics APIs and rendering engines
-Remote desktop
-Labyrinthe configuration utilities and applets
-Monster domain features.. detailed ACLs on every resource, complex user permissions, domain controls enforced on clients (integrated securely right into the interface)..
Especially on the last one you have to admit that Windows has done some things right, and anyway it's certainly not just a kernel image and a window server. People expect a complete environment for Getting Work Done.
I'm not sure how you were modded flamebite. I like your ideas.
The installation size probably isn't an issue given that the target customer, corporates who have invested heavily in Win2K/XP, will be largely using high end hardware (as opposed to the "new" low-end hardware a-la Asus EEE).
Memory requirements might matter; but since we're looking at release two years from now, then 2GB is a reasonable requirement. If they base the "compatibility" code on XP rather than Vista, then it might be viable.
The biggest problem I see is what to tell people right now. Saying, "oh yeah, the next version of Windows will be completely different" is not likely to go down well, and is unlikely to encourage anyone to "upgrade" to Vista prior to Windows 7. But saying "Windows 7 will be based on Vista" isn't particularly inspiring either!
The marketing solution will likely be to not really give any concrete answers for as long as possible whilst telling people Windows 7 will build on their existing investment. If they don't do this, people might start looking elsewhere!!
Windows NT was a re-write of OS/2 when Microsoft divorced IBM (or vice versa, depending on whom you believe). It started a new code branch, one that ran in 32-bit only (advanced at the time) and inter-version compatibility was often iffy at best-- NOT mostly compatible.
These two code branches merged at Windows 2000.
I smell a rat behind the entire thing. Windows 7 might be a hypervisor with plug-ins for whatever. I think Microsoft is floating trial ballons to see what might be marketable after the enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista. It's an actual, along with a PR nightmare for them and justifiably so. Were I a stockholder, I'd have their heads.
Don't mistake for a moment that Microsoft is still seeking solutions to the enormous problems they have in stagnation. Vista was supposed to be a monumental endeavor, and it's a monumental disaster for them. Now that BIll's gone, who knows what's going to happen.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
That you call DOS (or CMD, these days) a `full command line environment' really shows that you know very little about what you are talking about.
It may be dangerous to reason by historical analogy, because the hardware situation is qualitatively different now. CPUs are no longer showing the kind of Moore's-law growth in power that they used to. Meanwhile ram and hard disks are ridiculously cheap. For the typical user who just uses a computer for websurfing, email, and word-processing, it's kind of silly to spend any significant amount of money on a new system. They already have more ram and disk space than they need, and the CPU isn't going to be that much faster. We're seeing perfectly reasonable desktop hardware now for $200, and it won't be long until you can get that same hardware for $50.
If I was one of the people at the helm of Microsoft, I'd be really worried about this, because when the hardware is $50, there's not going to be much room left for profit on the OS. Most retailers have been reluctant to sell cheap hardware, because their own margins on it are thin, but it's just a matter of time until that changes. Fry's sold $200 Great-Quality-brand machines for years, and WalMart is now selling the gPC online for $200. Once people realize that they can get a computer for $100, or $50, the dam is going to have to break, and retailers are no longer going to be able to sell machines at prices of $500 or $1000. It's going to be like the transition from the radio as a big wooden box to the transistor radio that you could carry with you to the beach, and throw in a dumpster if it got sand and water in it.
In this new landscape, there's very little reason for MS to exist. One of the few reasons left for them to exist is that people have money invested in software, and they don't want to have to buy new software. The insane success of the eeePC -- and even at much higher prices than they originally thought they could get --- shows how vulnerable MS is. There are a lot of users out there who just use their computers for word-processing, email, and websurfing. Maybe first they buy a $50 Linux box for their kid to use to write her high school papers. That works out okay, and pretty soon the kid is like, "Mom, are you crazy? You're talking about spending $400 for a new computer? Just buy one like mine."
Find free books.
No, most people just want apps that do what they need to do. They don't care whether it's "Linux" or "Windows" or "both" or "neither". They don't even want an app, just to do what they need to do. Something that just runs Windows apps, because those do what people think they need to do, and does it without the crap that is Windows, but rather a simpler new paradigm, would be welcomed. Some of the extra Linux apps would probably be welcomed too, especially if they could be used side by side their familiar Windows apps. And they won't care whether it's running on top of "Linux", or "Winedows" or whatever, so long as it runs. Since Linux is a good basis to roll out a new PC OS on top of, especially with its existing developer and other community, which keeps any Linux-based OS compatible with most HW, it's a good means to that end. At an adequate degree of complexity, Wine doesn't "change", it just remains stable and the apps "just work". Which is a long way away still, but we're talking about a way to give people the "next generation" of PC environments. Without waiting for "Windows 8", or probably "Windows 9", or probably "Windows Never".
That's the point of new PC paradigms. Not to "do Windows" better, or to "do Linux" at all, but to make people's computers "do my job" better.
--
make install -not war
But... I can run the same thing on Linux in RAM with 512 MB (or less) of RAM and a 700 MB CD. When I install it it takes perhaps 2 GB of HD space for the exact same functionality.
-A file manager - There is Thunar in Xubuntu, Nautilus in Ubuntu and Konqueror in Kubuntu
-A web browser - Firefox
-Multiple filesystem support - Ubuntu can read/write more filesystems then Windows can
-Most extensive driver library in existence - Except for the fact that on 90% of hardware I can get Ubuntu to get everything to work out-of-the box except for proprietary drivers for ATI/nVidia cards and Ubuntu makes that easy, Windows is a pain to install without like 10 driver CDs or an OEM restore disk
-Office tools like Mail, WordPad, Calendar, Calculator, Contacts, Paint? - Thunderbird, OOo, a calendar program, a calculator program, various contacts programs and The GIMP
-Full command line environment (DOS) - Full UNIX shell (BASH) -Complete media architecture in DirectX.. that's DirectSound DirectInput -has Linux equivalents though I can't think of them off the top of my head -DirectDraw.. a LOT of big packages if it was Linux. Also Windows Media Player/Photo Gallery - Totem/Amarok for WMP
-Graphics APIs and rendering engines -Again, found on Linux
-Remote desktop - VNC/SSH
-Labyrinthe configuration utilities and applets -Don't really know what that is, a Wiki search returned nothing -Monster domain features.. detailed ACLs on every resource, complex user permissions, domain controls enforced on clients (integrated securely right into the interface). - UNIX-style permissions, secure by default
Just about everything you said is included on Linux on a *Buntu default install, or can be added without going over what Vista has installed. Sorry to say, but really Vista is just pure bloat. Lets see what is in a default * Buntu install that Windows doesn't have...
Full Office Suite - OOo
Photoshop Replacement - The GIMP
Various network services - Telnet, SSH, etc
(*real*)3-D Desktop - Compiz-Fusion
Multiple Desktops
PDF Reader
Various support for files that Windows doesn't have by default (Ogg, FLAC, etc)
As you can see, Windows just can't compete with Linux when it comes to programs per storage space. In 5 gigs of a Vista install you get just about only the default install, in 5 gigs of a Ubuntu install, you get the default install, plus some of your files, some development tools, some more games, a few more applications, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It is already beginning. I submit the EEpc, OLPC, and the sudden burst of real computers with real OS''s being shipped for under $400 right now Windows is holding back more development than anything else, especially with the intel atom processor. sorry you can't get a $100 OS onto a $400 device.
why do you think msft is still selling XP for only low powered devices that Vista couldn't run on if it went on a diet. Why do you think MSFT is intentionally trying to limit the specs of such devices when they are already as powerful as any computer of 6 years ago?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Microsoft is many, many times more developer friendly than Apple. For example,
http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/press.2007-06-19.6756913411/?searchterm=codebase
At least the windows API has been stable for a LONG time. You can get code that was running on Windows NT to continue to run, mostly. Or at least have a reasonable way of porting it. Stuff doesn't suddenly disappear in Windows.
This is good news for developers. For some reason, users think that Apple was is better. I guess people only care about the latest-greatest app instead of having an inhouse or custom made application working for a decade or so, then Apple may look better.
Erm, when did CPUs stop showing exponential growth in performance? Was that a memo that nobody sent to Intel?
Although clockspeeds are stuck because it is no longer economical to raise them, performance and transistor density are still scaling at the same rate. If anything we are in a period of performance increases that is slightly above trend, because now that the horrific NetBurst ISA has been killed off the Core2 replacement is rather lovely. Clock-for-clock it runs twice as fast as the old ISA because of shorter pipeline stages that have reduced instruction latency, and so far Intel have doubled the number of cores every 18 months. Given that they are ready to scale up to new fabs that can handle 2B transistors I would assume that they can continue to do so for the near future.
It would be a seismic shift for the industry if processor performance flatlined but I don't see that happening for a long time. What we are seeing with the introduction of the Eee Pc et al is actually a trend that has been going on for decades. Roughly every ten years a new form factor is introduced at the bottom of the market, with the same performance, but with the price halving each time.
So although your analysis of what changes are happening is way off, your final paragraph is quite accurate about what it means. The amount of performance that people actually require for most day-to-day tasks was exceeded when processors passed the Ghz mark. Now we are seeing cheaper and cheaper devices that deliver that (roughly) constant power. The effect on Microsoft is likely to be as you predict.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I don't know about the "Eclipse plugin" part, but I do suspect Microsoft has a contingency plan of that sort.
.NET port; maybe fork wine, or just use some more dog-foody compatability layer.
Move to a nix-y kernel, release a full
I suspect they'd introduce/keep their own API, though. I wouldn't expect X Windows to be bundled with (let's say) "Windows X"; they likely would use the transition to more strongly push Windows Forms over the older system, though.
And of course, don't expect their addons to be Open Source, even if they do adopt the Linux kernel.
In short, see OS/X.
Eclipse? Fast?
Apple was dead, prior to the return of Jobs. There are many levels of dead, and life. Today's Apple isn't the same Apple. When you replace all of your computers internal components and reinstall a completely different OS, isn't it a completely different computer, even though it has the same case?
MY Posts may be correct, or may not be correct, but they are definitely not basically correct.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Let's see what's wrong with Vista:
1) lack of hardware drivers, rendering many machines obsolete
...which is a problem with the hardware and/or the hardware manufacturer who decided not to support their hardware in Vista. It is NOT a problem of Vista any more than some hardware without a working Linux driver is a problem of Linux.
2) lack of support for legacy apps (although arguably, some of those apps were badly written)
every single one of which was badly written. MS had been spending years and uncounted dollars telling people how to write their apps so that they will remain compatible with future versions of Windows. If people insist on circumventing the Windows API and writing their own little gizmos to implement some functionality then they shouldn't be surprised when this functionality ceases to function when the underlying OS structure changes.
This, too, is not a problem with Vista, but with retarded children who imagine they're "programmers" because they get one kind of function working in one version of one OS and fantasize that from there on all OS progress must be halted so as to not break their crummy little hack.
3) intensive hassling of the user because of inept prior version code that make user root/admin
And you're pointing out yourself that this is ALSO not a problem with Vista. It's a problem with lazy and inept 3rd-party programmers who insisted on making everybody root. Which is decidedly a BAD idea. Which MS correctly identified and put a halt on. MS did every single thing right here and you call it "buggy".
That's why you're a Troll.
4) truly piggish DRM
Yeah - let's round it out with a statement that's not measurable or quantifiable. "piggish". Hum.
You have failed to name one single of the "enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista" you claimed before. Not one. Because there are no particular mistakes in Vista. The usual slew of a little bug here and a minor annoyance there; but as I said, certainly no more of them than XP ever had.
That's why I call you a troll. Because you make an assertion of "enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista" and yet you are completely incapable when it comes to naming some of them.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
SLOW! Jebus H. Tap dancin' Christ that thing is slooooow! Have they never heard of optimizing their code? Networking? Ugh,I don't know even where to begin on the evil that was my experience with Vista networking. I swear I had less hassles when I was networking Win9X boxes through a discarded WinNT 3 server. Vista would just lose the connections,or they would just die,or Vista would just go blind to the entire network while the other three kept working just fine. And the only way I found to fix was through a reboot,which I hated because of the first reason.
Then add to that the constant thrashing of my HDD,which got so bad it actually killed the Maxtor that it was installed on,even though I had swap files on all the HDDs. I can only guess its load balancing sucked. I had even turned off indexing to no avail. Then just to add a little evil flavor they changed a bunch of stuff around for no particular reason,and things that would take one or two clicks in XP seemed to take five or six. Just for spite make sure there isn't a "classic" mode,so those of us that were happy with the way things worked since WinNT 3 would have to take it,like it or not, then add the constant CPU drag,making my apps run like they were running on a 486Dx with WinME on top. I mean,I know that a 3GHz Celeron with 2Gb of DDR3200 and a 256Mb Geforce 6200 isn't going to win any gaming contests,but on XP it flies. Could you leave a little CPU for me,please? I'm not even going to talk about the stupidity that is UAC,because most folks are probably going to turn that irritant off in less than five minutes.
And that folks,is my experience in Vista land. I have spent over a month trying to like it,searching forums for the magic "make it not be slow" button, and reinstalled when RTM came out followed by reinstalling again when SP1 came around,hoping against hope they had fixed it. I finally gave up and went back to XP. When you have fanbois tell you with a straight face that you need a dual core with 3Gb of RAM and a 8xxx series graphics card to get the full Vista "experience" that's when you know it's a turkey. I mean,I have had XP run well on a P3 733Mhz with 384Mb of PC100 RAM,and we go from that to needing a freaking dual core and 3Gb and a 8xxx card just to get it to run decent?
But on the bright side I am making more money off of MSFT than I even had before,because so many folks are coming in to have a brand new PC built with XP. I even had a guy that doesn't even use the Internet and has been happy all these years with his WinME(shudder) machine,ask me point blank "Can you build me a machine that is affordable now,but can be upgraded a lot down the road,so I don't have to get stuck with Vista?". So MSFT better work hard at making Win7 a lot more like XP,and a lot less like Vista,or I have a feeling I'm going to be building WinXP machines for a LONG time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
One of the few reasons left for them to exist is that people have money invested in software, and they don't want to have to buy new software
I'd restate it as "One of the few reasons left for them to exist is that people have money invested in data locked up in proprietary Microsoft filetypes". I don't care that I have lots of .xls files on my hard disk - I care that I have tax returns and invoices on my hard disk. If Excel ever goes away, so does easy access to my data.
Let's see what's wrong with Vista: 1) lack of hardware drivers, rendering many machines obsolete
...which is a problem with the hardware and/or the hardware manufacturer who decided not to support their hardware in Vista. It is NOT a problem of Vista any more than some hardware without a working Linux driver is a problem of Linux.
Why is this a problem with the hardware manufacturers? Microsoft made major changes to the driver model, partly to implement their DRM, so writing new drivers is time consuming and expensive. So Microsoft gets to make a fortune selling Vista; but the hardware manufacturers are supposed to spend a fortune writing new drivers for old equipment they sold years ago, so everyone upgrades to Vista and Microsoft can make even more money. Microsoft should pay the hardware manufacturers to write new drivers.
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I'm not sure what you're trying to point out with your link. Existing Qt 32-bit applications continue to work, and either Apple will provide 64-bit Carbon in an update or they'll fix the HIView dependent Qt libraries when they transition away from Carbon. This issue has a negligible impact, and has nothing to do with "stuff suddenly disappearing" as you imply.
I've been developing, publishing, supporting, and updating my Mac shareware program for 12 years - since Mac OS 7.5. Originally written to the Mac OS classic toolbox, I adapted it to CarbonLib in 1999 with some effort, to get ready for Mac OS 9, and I ported it to Carbon OS X in 2001, making it much better in the process. And I'll be porting it to Cocoa later this year, and taking it an entirely new level through the use of the latest Mac OS X APIs for compositing and animation.
All along the way Apple has been great, and always getting better, especially since they released XCode. The tools are free, very usable, and every bit of API documentation is right there in XCode. And now they've released Cocoa 2, which is just a clear and wonderful programming API.
Apple may have made a lot of changes over the last 12 years, but the changes have been constant improvements, and have had minimal impact on legacy applications. I am grateful for the quality of the work they do to save me time and make the work easier. And as a guy who started programming as a young hobbyist, I'm especially happy to see Apple giving away their development tools for free. It means kids can stumble into programming just like I did way back in 1977.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Though you are generally correct, it is important to note that doubling the number of cores doesn't improve performance as much as doubling the clock speed (or improving the number of cycles the average instructions take) because of troubles running serialized software software in parallel. Doubling is great, quadrupling is pretty good, but eventually you just don't get much bang. (Or, at least you won't without serious software improvement.) It's a serious problem the industry will soon face.
But as you say, it is questionable if most people actually need more performance.
The cake is a pie
The fact that all we are hearing on sites like Microsoft watch is how much isn't going to be changed from Vista doesn't fill me with much hope for Win7. Maybe if they stripped down the CPU hogging DRM and made it more like XP there would be hope,but I personally get the sinking feeling that it is going to be an even more piggy,more flashy,and more newbie centric Vista SP2. From what little I have seen and heard it looks to be another turkey. It is almost like them saying after the disaster that was WinME,"Hey I know! We'll just keep putting more junk on top of WinME until they like it!". Maybe with the head of the Office division in charge things will change. But I get the feeling that marketing is in charge and they want more and more DRM so they can try to become "The Apple of home entertainment". But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are you serious? I've seen Vista running like a dog on hardware that's still got bits of polystyrene packaging hanging off it. Swapping the same machine to Ubuntu produced a shocking increase in performance, even with as many visual effects as I could find turned on.
And no, I didn't 'stick with windows 98SE' because I was on Windows 2K when XP came out, like most professional users. Now I am on OS X and Debian and couldn't be happier as a non-windows user.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
remember that MS has just embraced .NET and with it the mantra "memory is cheap". So even though the world is moving towards lower-resource systems (especially power), Vista is stuck in last years attitude of "use more for more features (that no-one really wants)".
I am a MS developer for years, since NT came along and blew the hideously expensive Unix workstations away. I've been in love with their dev tools and documentation, but not any more. I feel the lock-in of C# now (yes, and I remember MS's "interoperability" programmes for years back, none of which were designed to do anything but act as marketing for non-crippled "do it on windows instead").
I think the passing of Gates will be seen as a turning point for MS. Media analysts are asking "where now for MS", the world is asking for the opposite of Vista, the DoJ is making sure all the dots are slashed at MS now, Linux is making inroads (slowly) everywhere you look.
MS only hope is developer lock-in with .NET, to ensure that Windows has a future because of all the 3rd party software that is written for it means businesses cannot live without it, or cannot get the same software on Linux.
That's the way things go - the world moves on no matter how big you used to be.
Modern OS's do sandboxing already, ie running everything in its own memory space with copy-on-write shared libs, and no write access to the kernel space or other apps. It helps stability a lot compared to the older OS's with a flat memory space, but it hinders performance too. AmigaOS ran in a flat memory space, and was very fast, but one program could easily crash the whole system. On the other hand, the inherent instability forced app developers to write decent code instead of relying on the OS to bail them out.
As for wine, it's not so much further abstracted, as abstracted in a different way. Your not running windows game on top of windows on top of linux (ala vmware) as the quote suggests, your running windows game on top of wine on top of linux... Which is really no different than running the game on top of win32 on top of NTKRNL. If the code implementing wine is more efficient than the code implementing win32 on top of NT, or if the linux kernel does things more efficiently than NT, or if your drivers do their work more efficiently, then the linux/wine combination can be faster.
If you look just at the kernel level, windows has far more complexity relative to linux, all that added complexity comes at a performance price.
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And the risk of that happening is a very good reason for you to move anything of importance away from proprietary formats as quickly as possible.
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Today's Apple isn't the same Apple. When you replace all of your computers internal components and reinstall a completely different OS, isn't it a completely different computer, even though it has the same case?
"Fakes?" said Vimes. "They were all fakes?"
Suddenly the King was holding his mining axe again. "This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good. Will you tell me this is a fake too?"
Ignore this signature. By order.
I can't see Microsoft doing this, a BSD core maybe, but the only way they'd go GPL with the core is if they'd found a way to de-claw the GPL.
Even if they did 'start over' they'd likely use it as an excuse to lock everything down to an even greater degree. Windows users might end up with something like the iPhone.