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.

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

[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.