The New 'One Microsoft' Is Finally Poised For the Future

redletterdave writes: "The stodgy old enterprise company whose former CEO once called open source Linux a 'cancer' is gone. So is its notorious tendency to keep developers and consumers within its walled gardens. The 'One Microsoft' goal that looked like more gaseous corporate rhetoric upon its debut last summer now is instead much closer to actual reality. No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows. As goes the Windows kernel, so goes the entire company. Microsoft finally appears to have aimed all its guns outside the company rather than at internal rivals. Now it needs to rebuild its empire upon this new reality."

Comments

Re:doubt it

[phantomfive]

Please define "VB" as used in your post. It usually stands for Visual Basic, but that hasn't been destroyed - even going all the way back to the pre-DotNet VB6 the apps run fine on Windows 8, so that can't be it.

Microsoft 'supports' VB6 just enough that shills and sycophants like you can write posts saying they still support it. You can sometimes get those apps to run (assuming all the libraries you need work, which might not be the case), but if you want to change anything you better hope you can get VS6.0 running on Windows 8 (it crashes on startup).

Microsoft had no migration path for those apps other than "rewrite your code for .net." If you don't understand why that is a problem, you're on the wrong website. Developers did rewrite their code, mainly into web apps. I'm betting they won't want to fall into the same trap again; on the other hand, human shortsightedness springs eternal, so maybe developers will lock themselves into Azure.

If Microsoft hadn't failed at that crucial point of backwards support, the world would still be running on Microsoft, certainly for business apps.