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

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

[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.

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.