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Microsoft's Looming 'Single Windows Ecosystem'
jfruhlinger writes "Xbox on Windows 8? A shared PC-tablet OS? Hints have been coming fast and furious from Microsoft about what their next-generation OS strategy will look like. It may be that at its heart, Microsoft is doing what it should have been doing for the last 5 years: building a set of modular OS components for different platforms that work together when need be, rather than a group of competing and incompatible OSes with superficially similar branding. In other words, the company may be getting out of its own way, at last."
Well, it is true. Windows NT was designed to be a true microkernel with user-mode application subsystems under which multiple platforms could execute and be managed concurrently and independently from one another. Linux was designed to be a monolithic kernel to run the GNU toolkit as a temporary solution while waiting on HURD. Both have come a long way from their origins.
Microsoft didn't intentionally design the mess that is Windows. NT was intended to run OS/2 as the primary subsystem, which it continued to support up through Windows 2000. The Win16/32/64 API was a mistake, something slapped together to fulfill an immediate need. MS didn't anticipate the success of Windows 3.x, but as NT could support additional subsystems they just formalized and packaged up the API and included it. That success translated into the Win16/32 becoming the predominant API on NT