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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."
Considering the strength of Windows comes from its backwards compatibility with a large field of Programs(before they were called Apps), it makes sense that Microsoft will want to leverage that over all available media.
It's a very good decision, which is surprising in it's own right.
The "Windows 8 will play XBox360 games" rumor is COMPLETELY FALSE. It's economically infeasible - emulating that system playably would require either a breakthrough in emulation, or a set of system requirements so high as to be unheard of (I'm talking "dual-socket server processors", something very, very few PC gamers have, let alone XBox gamers).
Now, maybe, just maybe, they'll be offering compatibility with the original XBox - that's completely feasible, although not very high-demand. Or, perhaps, they'll be offering a single programming environment for both, beyond the level XNA already provides, such that porting a game from the 360 to the PC requires just a recompile. Or maybe their next-gen console will be x86-based again, which would make emulation less performance-intensive. All of those rumors are plausible enough to believe, even though I doubt either would be true. But can we at least keep the physically-impossible rumors off /.?
What will likely happen is that it'll end up like recent Ubuntu releases. In case you haven't been following Ubuntu recently, they've apparently tried to support all sorts of devices, from netbooks to laptops to desktops to workstations to servers. The outcome hasn't been good, and many users have been very unhappy.
What works for one type of device often doesn't work very well for others. Take Unity, for instance. While it might be only slightly shitty on netbooks, it's not pleasant to use on laptops, it's hellish on desktops, and it's an absolute disaster if you're using a workstation. Sure, you can switch to some other desktop environment, but it's a pain in the ass that one shouldn't have to endure!
It's often good to specialize, and not be overly-generic. Being generic often means that you can't do anything well.
Just one small question...
How will these modules break up? I mean, if you build an app for Windows 8 on one UI paradigm, how does it suddenly translate to another (without a huge pile o' multi-anticipatory bloat at either the app or API side of the equation)? Or, err, is it all going to be lowest-common-denominator (e.g. the WP7 Metro UI) and called good? ...and how will legacy apps actually use that if a module critical to said app is missing? I'll just table the whole architecture thing for the moment, because I don;t think anyone is going to seriously entertain the idea of loading {existing application} onto a Windows 8 x86 desktop, then expect to do the very same thing with the exact same install binaries on a Windows 8 ARM tablet...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No in Linux they only work sometimes
One Ring to rule them all...
Hey, at least it will make the jobs of the virus, trojan, and rootkit writers easier -- cover multiple platforms with a single zero-day! That's progress!
One OS to rule them, One OS to bind them, One OS....to lead them all to perdition.
That sounds correct. Whenever there is profit to be had by sale of personal information that they will rename "anonymous", Microsoft is competitive with Google.
based on Linux, a set of modular OS components for different platforms that work together when need be. Since 1991.
Remember all the promises Microsoft has made before Vista about Longhorn, and modular OS with object FS, and all that cool stuff.
In never happened. Any of it. ANY of it.
Once upon a time, handheld and portable devices were extremely limited in power, necessitating a special-purpose cut-down OS.
But with the advent of gigahertz plus and dual core CPUs for portable and handheld devices, it's now possible to run the same core OS on virtually all devices, enabling that common code base that allows a truly modular operating system. Sure Linux has been doing that already for years, but it was designed that way -- Windows wasn't.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That's why it's modular. You wouldn't use netbook modules on a desktop.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A shared PC-tablet OS?
The submitter sees value in this, but I'm not sure why - apparently he wasn't paying attention for the past ten years. Microsoft did exactly this with Windows XP Tablet PC edition... and that fell flat on its face.
Seeing hints that Microsoft is still thinking the same way is not a surprise but a disappointment; and it shouldn't be construed in a positive manner by fans of the company.
#DeleteChrome
All those connected platforms running one OS. This kind of exacerbates the monoculture drawbacks.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Only read the summary, not TFA, but it sounds like they're finally switching to Linux.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This was Microsoft's previous failed strategy. Windows everywhere didn't work and they have failed to make any other compelling OS. So now it is back to Windows everywhere.
Microsoft is trapped by their own success. In order to make a truly modern, compelling OS, they have to dump the old stuff and break compatibility. It is that very compatibility that has been their success so far. The big risk to breaking it is that once people have to start with a new OS, they start looking at alternatives.
Take Unity, for instance. While it might be only slightly shitty on netbooks, it's not pleasant to use on laptops, it's hellish on desktops, and it's an absolute disaster if you're using a workstation
1. They were a bunch of ass-hats for releasing a too early buggy as fuck version of Unity (v0.2 or something) for netbooks back in October.
2. They should be careful not to frighten their not so nerdy users by doing random not quite thought-through shit, since they are after all the only Linux-based alternative to M$/Snapple for normal users who don't want to make sweet love to their terminals.
3. That being said, I do think it is a good idea that they actually try to challenge the desktop environment conventions by trying to make something that doesn't look like Windows or OS/X, for the sake of avoiding walls of text I will not go into details with the interesting aspects of Unity.
I'm no big fan of the Kinect, but it was a great move by MS. It's boosted sales for the 360 up to Wii levels. The PS3 Move turned out to be the abject failure of last year's E3.
Actually, that Grub2 shit pisses me off more. Tried 11.04 on 4 PCs, Grub2 by itself made it fail on alf of them. On one, a very vanilla mb+CPU/IGP+RAM.HD (no fancy dual-booting stuff, mind you), Grub2 just hung. On the other one, a Nettop with too many partitions for its own good, Grub2 just listed at least one entry for each partition, including the data ones, the restore ones, in a random order. Talk about user-repulsing wall of text as a first impresison of Linux... and don't even dream about firing gedit and editing that menu into shape: it's the new, better grub ! You can't do that anymore !
It ain't broke... Let's fix it !
Then, and only then, do you get to that Unity other shit, where the dock just HAS to be smack in the middle of my dual-screen setup, 'coz letting put it on the side would just be.. .would just be... would just BE ! Next version will put the dock across the middle of the screen, 'coz it's so nice, people need to see it more ! And don't try and put folders on there, 'coz no one needs shortcuts to folders !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
and it's just silly to say they should have been doing this. It's only recently that a chipset that powered phones was beefy enough to run what people expect out of a desktop. Kudos to Microsoft for picking up on this as soon as they have. Android is a real threat. People love the idea of taking their phone, plugging it into a doc and having the same UI look & feel. Android + HTML5 apps + cloud is a credible threat to Microsoft. The cool thing is, they're moving on converging all the platforms as a result. Real innovation from competition.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This Windows 7 tablet is on sale at this very moment for 549 dollars. Less than a comparable iPad. Yet, it collects dust on the retailers' shelves.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Yeah, all those modular accounting programs... totally useless. It's much better to use one program for your GL, another program for AR and hope like fuck your AP and job costing software somehow manage to integrate.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes, I am sure that all modern operating systems where there's a kernel made up of many subsystems, a whole lot of drivers for tens of thousands of equipment types, a lot of standard libraries and utilities on top of that, a windowing system, a graphical shell, et cerea, are written by know-nothing manager types and unenlightened professors. They're a pain in the ass to use and generally idiotic. They'd better rewrite everything as a big, integrated, clean, streamlined, blob. Maybe make each application run on the bare silicon -- "Hey! It's my silicon, and I'll run whatever I damn please on it!"
As the other poster said, that's why it's supposed to be "modular".
KDE is already like this. Underneath, the components are mainly common to all platforms, but it has different UIs for different devices. The one for regular desktop computers is basically the same as it's always been, with start button, task tray, pager for multiple workspaces, etc. But then there's a stripped-down version aimed at netbooks that you can switch to.
This is totally different from Unity and Gnome3, whose developers believe that the exact same UI should be used on all devices, to "reduce confusion" or whatever.
If MS follows KDE's lead, then it's a smart move. I, however, hope they follow Canonical's lead with Unity, so that they crash and burn.
With webOS on their phones, Touchpad tablet, and soon (as announced) on their PCs - isn't HP already moving in that direction?
One OS to rule them, One OS to bind them, One OS....to lead them all and in a patent bind them.
The TabletPC platform failed because of the lack of promotion. Microsoft and the OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Gateway, etc) have never -- to this day -- to advertise Tablet PCs. I have never seen a Tablet PC ad anywhere. Ever! Not even in brochures mailed by the aforementioned companies! They don't even appear on the Home Page of those OEMs. They've bastardized the technology from the start. Then they waited for someone with more vision and interest in it to fully capitalize on the idea. This someone turned out to be Apple, who, since Day-1, has made enormous fanfare about the platform. Let's face it, Apple's remarkable marketing machine could convince an eskimo to buy an iFridge. Kudos to them.
:-D
Shame on Microsoft and friends for their utter incompetence at showing people that they have had tablets for a decade and what such machines were like. And before someone starts bitching about the Tablet PC's initial reliance on a stylus (pen), know that Apple is currently working on a stylus for a future iPad. Once it comes out, people will think that Apple invented the tablet....and the stylus! Brilliant!
- Proudly owner of TabletPCs (TC1100 and TM2) for 5 years.
Exactly. These modern folks have it easy!
Using code other people write is just lazy and shows your inability to code.
That's why I wrote the web browser I'm using in C, a C compiler in assembler, an assembler assembler in machine code, and my microcode I wrote in ones and zeros that I entered manually onto my CPU with a paper-clip, a voltage divider, and some double-A batteries.
(I have High Dexterity and Int. Very low Wisdom.)
PS - modularity has advantages and disadvantages. Use it when it's the right tool for the job. Sounds like you just had a bad experience with a professor or a project where the granularity of the modules created transaction costs that outweighed the benefits.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
We don't really need diversity in computers we should just learn to run Microsoft on everything from watches to mainframes because windows is the best operating systems ever. If it wasn't for Microsoft there would be no innovation anywhere so basically we should have a formal Microsoft tax and just pay Microsoft to own everything.
It's a good thing that Microsoft use their patent portfolio to stop anyone else in the industry from trying to make anything new because Microsoft would do it better anyway so why even try. Case in point, Google, they should just give up on android and give that market to Microsoft because android is owned by microsoft anyway.
All those dumb nerd who write that crappy open source software (that never works properly on anything) should be donating their time to Microsoft anyway, actually they should be paying Microsoft to be volunteers to write more software for windows. It's been proven in the past with IE6, the most successful and best web browser ever just how innovative Microsoft can be. Apple and Linux should just give up because everything Microsoft everywhere for everyone for ever will be good for all of us.
It's a world I look forward to every day.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Win95 was so bad it drove me to linux. Win98SE was usable, but I challenge you to put bare first release Win95 on anything and see how crappy it was. For example, the drivers and the core behaviour of the thing were so bad it crashed me me every time I tried to close it down, simply because it decided to play an exit sound in a different way to all the other sounds it played.
You're so full of shit.
You say that there's a reason that MS has dominated the desktop, that's true, but it's not because of merit, it's because of freakin IBM handed them the keys to the kingdom and then they leveraged their position with extremely evil monopolistic practices (how many companies did they destroy?)
You're insane to assert that Win95 was superior to Linux at the time. One of the main reasons that I switched to a Linux desktop, in late 1995, was so I could burn a CD and use my modem at the same time. I don't think you're old enough to talk about ANYTHING in 1995.
The reality of trying similar computers in 1995 is that Linux would kick the shit out of Win95: Linux has always made maximum use of minimum resources while Windows has always made minimum use of maximum resources. I put my first Linux web server online in 1994 ... on a machine that wouldn't have run Win95. It had no problem with 100s of hits an hour, which was still better than MS could manage back them.
Oh, Office you say? I don't suppose you actually remember WordPerfect and it's total dominance of the market, before Microsoft leveraged its OS to conquer the word processing market. Word's not better, it just came for "free".
You're right, Microsoft is very away or *nix, they even stole our socket code. Go look up the controversy if you're still deluded about MS "doing it better than *nix cuz we already looked at that!"
You're obviously qualified to comment on the topic ... or not, since you don't have the first clue about either operating systems or history.
Ah yes, there's nothing like revisionist history coming from MSFT trolls.
It's not the mobile phone hardware that is catching up with desktop PCs. It's the expectations of the consumer that have been getting comfortable with a watered-down computing experience, one that feels like a reasonable trade of lower complexity for lower capability.
God DAMN Crapdot 2.5 ... or whatever the fuck you assholes are calling this latest piece of shit. Now I can't even submit a story (Las Vegas Web site VegasInc reports that on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Hunt fined copyright troll Righthaven $5,000 for failure to disclose Stephens Media, Inc.'s financial interest in Righthaven's suits against Web sites it accuses of plaigarizing Las Vegas Review-Journal's copyrighted content. Hunt also ordered Righthaven to disclose the full text of its original contract with Stephens Media to prosecute alleged infringers on Stephens' behalf. Hunt's orders are in response to Righthaven's suit against Web site Democratic Underground, a case the judge dismissed on June 14th on grounds that Righthaven lacked "standing" to sue for violations of copyright that Righthaven itself didn't own. In fining righthaven, Hunt also commented, “In the court’s view, the arrangement between Righthaven and Stephens Media is nothing more, nor less, than a law firm — which incidentally I don’t think is licensed to practice law in this state — with a contingent fee agreement masquerading as a company,” which could be an indicator of still larger legal problems for the copyright troll down the road.), because your Javurscript is so fucking broken that the "submit story" button on the popup window is now hidden below the browser window AND THERE'S NO WAY TO REPOSITION THE POPUP WINDOW.
I give the fuck up. Screw you pinheads.
Check out my novel.
You can not do this. Every device has it's own use case. Does it have a keyboard or not. Can you rotate it. How many pixels. What is the screen width. Where is it used. This can completely change what you can do with the device. What Microsoft is stuggeling with is that it does not have de design knowledge and does not really try to understand on a deep level what a device and user experience is about. Although article seems rubbish. Not very well put together and has stupid line spacing.
With this and GNU Hurd possible in Debian 7, are we finally going to see mainstream OSes with microkernel architecture?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It ain't broke... Let's fix it !
Yeah, grub2 appears in Debian Squeeze too. Not Impressed.
The biggest benefit of grub over LILO was "you don't need to rerun lilo when you change the config file" - that's gone now. Oh yes, and instead of one fairly small, self-contained, relatively easy to understand config file you now have several and the config files aren't config files at all, they're scripts which are run in order to create config files. You're explicitly NOT meant to hand-edit the config file. What is this, sendmail? It's a bootloader, FFS, it only needs to kick off an operating system.
Bit of a shame I've already commented, or I'd be modding you insightful. On more than one occasion I've seen management buy Windows smartphones and I'm quite sure they chose them based on exactly the logic you described. Without exception, those phones were replaced with something else (usually Android or Blackberry) as soon as possible.
It amazes me that a company like Microsoft should spend years turning Windows into a well-known brand then completely screw up their entry into the handheld sector by taking that brand and applying it to a totally different product. You don't see Sprite being marketed as "Coca-Cola (Lemon & Lime Flavour)" and there's a damn good reason for that.
Microsoft has a long history of saying they are doing this and that and then never delivering.
Not holding my breath, and would of course, wait for service pack 1 on any new OS before using.
And we ain't playing no Xbox 360 games on Windows 8. Ain't happening.
And how many times has MS said they were going to go all gungho with gaming on windows? what, 5, 6 times now? Every OS they release?
I'm a big stoner, and yet my memory seems way better then most of you.
MS ain't doing shit, but talking. That's pretty much all they have been good at, that and being bullies.
Be seeing you...
The only ugly duck in the family was Windows CE, and it's dead. Let's move on, shall we!
Really? Windows Phone 7 has Windows CE at its core, and it's live and kicking. It's also used for lots of embedded systems (what it's designed for, as opposed to crappy netbooks).
Oh they modded me down for daring to point out reality, can't ever please a fanboy you know. But that won't change black into white nor will it change the fact that when people see the word "Windows" the will expect their win32 programs to run and when they don't? They'll be shitcanned as fast as those WinCE ARM netbooks all over Craigslist.
I actually ran into one of those at a store. it had a VERY WinXP desktop GUI and had WINDOWS in big letters and "Compact Edition" in small letters beside it. Now how many people do you think knew that "Compact edition" wasn't just a different flavor of XP? i'll tell you ZERO which is why those that made the netbook did it!
Mark my words, just as you saw at your job with the Windows phones so to will this completely blow up in MSFT's faces if they try this shit. geeks here have got to realize the common man doesn't know ARM from a 72 Pinto. All they know is "Windows means my stuff runs" where stuff equals their games, or QuickBooks, or their EasyShare camera software, or any of the millions of other little Win32 programs people use every single day. if they buy a "New Windows 8" device and bring it home only to find it doesn't actually run "Real" Windows? I have a feeling geeks will have a field day because the returns are gonna be so high retailers won't be able to give the damned things away, and rightly so.
This is yet another fuckup by Ballmer whose tenure has been a long list of fuckups, Zune,Kin, killing PlaysForSure for the ZunePass flop, I still say the only good thing that might come out of this is Steve Ballmer will "leave to pursue other interests" and they can bring in real leadership (Maybe Ozzie?) for Windows 9.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Oblig. XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/378/
The Xbox OS is like the 640k for everyone remark, it's been variously admitted and denied that it's impossible to find a solid citation any more. But the Xbox already runs an OS derived from Windows 2000, and the 360 already runs an OS derived from the Xbox OS; further; it likely borrows code back from the Windows code base anyway, because the same code runs on both Xbox and Windows with nary but a recompile (though it may not work satisfactorily for one or the other if it's not designed to run there, e.g. GTA4 on a PC with only 3 cores... the same number as the 360. You need another core to handle the OS.)
Will it surprise anyone when the next Xbox also runs a Windows variant?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All your apps will become legacy and have to be recoded or entirely rewritten in their new Windows Tiered Foundation (WTF) framework to run on the new system, because God forbid that Microsoft should provide a decent upgrade path from .net.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You laugh, but I've worked at a company that operated that way.
[citation needed]
Yeah, where is the citation for that $500 million amount? You're probably confusing the marketing budget for Windows Phone, which was indeed that much.
Kinect is a success ... get over it.