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."

Comments

It's no surprise

[Flyerman]

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.

Re:It's no surprise

[rbrausse]

not bad, but you're missing at least 100 lines of text to be a realistical substitute of the one and only apk

Re:It's no surprise

[Elbereth]

Yeah, for a true apk post, it needs to be ten paragraphs of rambling, stream-of-consciousness ranting. Don't forget the attacks on Drinkypoo, Countertrolling, and gmhowell. Also, it never hurts to have some kind of bizarre, self-congratulatory "I WIN, BECAUSE YOU FAIL LOL ROFL" series of statements at the end, proclaiming victory and the ritual pwning of noobs. On the whole, it was a good first attempt, but the real apk is near irreplaceable. He may be an arrogant, pseudo-intellectual kook, but he's our arrogant, pseudo-intellectual kook.

All funded by Android

[phonewebcam]

based on Linux, a set of modular OS components for different platforms that work together when need be. Since 1991.

Re:All funded by Android

[MarcQuadra]

Or based on Apple's success with iOS, which derives directly from OS X/Darwin.

There are really big advantages to keeping one solid, portable 'core' OS and building libraries that can be 'scaled down' for mobile devices. Just look at how Apple's small team of OS developers have things set up:

Darwin becomes OS X and iOS...
Webkit is the browser and JavaScript app runtime on both platforms.
The CoreAnimation API that accelerates OS X eye candy is used in iOS to do the screen drawing (ala DirectX on Xbox and WIndows).

A mobile developer can easily graduate to application development on the main platform, code can be re-used, and security and performance improvements correlate on both platforms. I'd say that there are 'monoculture' security issues, and I'm sure there are, but I don't think that most 'buffer overflows' can be cross-platform by their very nature, and these portable devices are running on ARM, while the desktops are amd64.

Re:All funded by Android

[bonch]

It's cute how Slashdotters think Linux is the center of the universe. Linux on the desktop is so statistically insignificant as to be practically non-existent, and platforms like Android are based on APIs that simply run onto of Linux but were written by commercial companies like Google (a proprietary search and advertising company, no less).

Re:All funded by Android

[grcumb]

It's cute how Slashdotters think Linux is the center of the universe.

Linux is not the centre of the universe. Linux is the glue that holds the universe together[*]. Even Windows PCs would be a damn sight less useful if it weren't for the presence of Linux everywhere from Google to your home router.

Linux on the desktop is so statistically insignificant as to be practically non-existent, and platforms like Android are based on APIs that simply run onto of Linux but were written by commercial companies like Google (a proprietary search and advertising company, no less).

That's a non sequitur. Since when does liking Linux - and using it professionally or for fun - have anything to do with its commercialisation? Free is still Free. And for the less dogmatic among us, even proprietary software has a place in the Linux world.

----------------
[*] Albeit in a wonderfully inconsistent, semi-anarchic way. ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/224/

Computing power allows it now

[msobkow]

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.

Re:Computing power allows it now

[scamper_22]

"Sure Linux has been doing that already for years, but it was designed that way -- Windows wasn't."

You say that as if what Linux did was a good thing.

There's a reason MS dominated the desktop. They made the desktop work. While some Unix person would just deal with slow graphic performance on a consumer PC, MS did all kinds of tricks and integration to make it work. Just try windows 95 on an old computer. Then try Linux around that time. You will not find it comparable. Windows 95 produces a superior experience by far.

*nix might have been designed a certain way... but its why they lost the war on the desktop. They built it in an ideal manner and closed their eyes when things didn't work nice. They ignored their customers.

It's the same reason why Office became popular. MS did things like save the file in binary to improve save performance. A more *nix minded person would have insisted on a 'proper' file format.

Microsoft has plenty of smart people who were more than aware of the *nix way of building an OS... most of this stuff was figured out a long time ago.

And so MS begins the long transition to the ideal OS, dealing with backward compatibility... the whole works. Can they do it... who knows. Will it be successful... who knows.

But I don't think there's any to be proud of in saying Linux was designed that way.

Re:Computing power allows it now

[0123456]

There's a reason MS dominated the desktop. They made the desktop work.

No, they made the desktop cheap. Windows 3.1 was a joke compared to Unix workstations or even Macs of that era, but a PC with Windows cost less than a Mac and far less than a Sun workstation.

Re:Computing power allows it now

[Elbereth]

Come on. AmigaOS, OS-9, and QNX all had amazingly modern features, back in the 1980s, running on, in some cases, 8 bit hardware. In fact, it turns out that RIM bought QNX Software Systems, according to Wikipedia. There's no reason for the OS to be special purpose or cut-down. The problem is with loading up the hardware with extraneous features, such as the ability to play DVDs or streaming media, while keeping the energy consumption minimal. The real innovation is that today's integrated hardware can easily play DVDs, while giving a useful life to embedded devices, thanks to both improved battery technology and energy consumption. It's not that the operating systems can finally have breathing space.

Seriously. Take a look at what the Amiga could do with a 7 MHz 68K CPU and 256KB RAM. Then, once your mind is blown by that, try out OS-9 on a 6809 CPU, dating back to the late 1970s. Both have features that only appeared in the 2000s, in more mainstream operating systems. QNX can even boot up a GUI environment, with a web browser and networking stack, on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Linux, Windows, and MacOS X can only dream about that (not that they are bad operating systems or anything -- it's just something they can't do).

It's a matter of priorities, really. Do you want to have your operating system coded in hand-optimized assembly language, with all the maintainability problems that brings? Or do you want an easy to maintain, C++-based operating system, that caches everything in the (presumably available) gigabytes of RAM of a modern PC? You can have features, performance, and low system requirements, but it takes a lot more effort than if you simply emphasize features. It also takes a lot more training.

Re:Computing power allows it now

[cusco]

Sure, a Windows NT machine was far less expensive than any of its competition (most large shops skipped 3.11), but what made it work was the simple fact that you could take something directly out of Excel and dump it into Word. You could connect Excel to your dBase or Paradox database, write a macro to do something with it, and print it in near WYSIWYG on any printer. Absolutely no one else could do that at the time. Not Sun, not AS400, not Linux, not Apple.

My mom's coworker had three computers on her desk, a Wang word processor, an Apple running VisiCalc for accounting, and some ugly CPM machine with the customer and case file database. To get data from the customer database she brought it up on the screen and typed it into the Wang. Forget KVMs, none of the three machines had even vaguely compatible plugs on the keyboards or monitors. You'll never hear her bad-talking Windows, because she remembers what her work space was like before.

Re:Computing power allows it now

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Computing power allows it now

[rust627]

There's a reason MS dominated the desktop. They made the desktop work.

No, they made the desktop cheap. Windows 3.1 was a joke compared to Unix workstations or even Macs of that era, but a PC with Windows cost less than a Mac and far less than a Sun workstation.

No, they made the desktop (relatively) cheap, if you bought it bundled.
They made windows ubiquitous.
and with an ecology that made installing and running programs a relatively brainless affair (click on "install.exe") that anybody could do.
Yes windows 3.1 was a joke compared to other stuff around at the time, but you didn't have to worry about "apt get" routines or broken dependencies
If a program didn't work it was a rare thing and most people stuck with commonly available programs and just lived with BSOD. This is just how computers were.
And while we all dreamed (and still do) of Linux on the desktop becoming more common, the reality is that as long as we don't have a simple unified ecology for installing ALL programs across ALL flavours of linux that we wish to see deployed in the common operating space, then Linux will continue to be seen as "too geeky" and our dream of Linux as an option for all is doomed to always being one step away.
This is another area where the mac way of doing things (sorry to bring religion into this) works.
a single unified system, Installing programs is a breeze, anyone can do it, even those who have trouble tying their own shoelaces.
Linux is seen as the third contender, but unfortunately we are taking the same route as the music industry. Instead of unifying under a common banner, we are dividing and deviating under multiple different banners and ways of doing things.
over the last 12 months i have heard of at least 20 different (and according to the fans) incompatible forms of heavy metal. the differences are subtle and the bands encourage it because it differentiates them from the others, but in the long run it hurts them all by dividing an already limited market into smaller and smaller subsets.
KDE, Gnome and Unity all introduce their own incompatibilities, some minor, some that are irrelevant and some that restrict which version of a program you can run. Then there is the question of which distribution you are running, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, the list goes on, and now we are talking different install methods for different distributions.
So to create a program that "just works" for Linux, you need to make sure it works for all the different GUI's (not just your personal favourite), and has install systems for All of the different Linux sects, i mean flavours.
For anyone wanting to earn money for software, it is enough of a hassle to get a program up and running with equivalent functionality for both windows and Mac, and some companies don't bother with both.
to then expect them to spend more time creating a Linux version and create all the extras needed to make it work (and easy to install) across all flavours of distributions and GUI's for a miniscule section of the market,plus the testing time to make sure it works, even just across the common variations......
I am not saying we are losing the battle for the desktop, we are slowly gaining ground, but only with those who are open minded enough (and tech minded enough) to accept what we can provide, and the more we fork and deviate (no matter how valid the arguments), the more the management of Microsoft and Apple enjoy it. A small amount of FUD can then amplify the fear of the unknown in the generally technology fearing population. and they do not need to divide us to conquer the marketplace, We are doing that for them.
And yes, I know of all the stories of "I installed (insert favourite Linux Distribution here) on my ageing mother/father/uncle/aunt/cousins computer and they have never looked back", but that is the point, you installed it for them, overcame their fears and helped them through the process, and are available to guide them when they try to in

possibly a boon for malware

[sl4shd0rk]

All those connected platforms running one OS. This kind of exacerbates the monoculture drawbacks.

Re:How many times do I have to say it?

[Hardhead_7]

What seems more likely to me is that the next Xbox will run on x86-64, and basically run a stripped down version of Windows 8. So there would be no emulation fakery required. Sure, the first generation of games would require very expensive PCs, but three or four years down the road, a decent gaming PC could boot into "gaming mode" and play Xbox games easily.

Re:Or it'll become bad like recent Ubuntu releases

[obarthelemy]

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 hardware wasn't there 5 years ago...

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Everything old is new again

[shutdown -p now]

Tablet PCs failed because they tried to be PCs first and tablets a distant second. The UI was never properly optimized for touch, for example - it was assumed that a stylus and handwriting input is all you need. That is why it fell on its face.

Re:One OS

[lucm]

Maybe you mean one "iOS" ?

Oh my mistake. Same thing, different monopolistic company.

Re:Or it'll become bad like recent Ubuntu releases

[Grishnakh]

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.

Isn't HP already doing this?

[Wormfoud]

With webOS on their phones, Touchpad tablet, and soon (as announced) on their PCs - isn't HP already moving in that direction?