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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."
They have a long way to go, one user interface for all idioms is kinda stupid..... that is why they are getting all the bad press with Windows 8.
the 8.1 update didn't fix all the issues with Metro, uh, Modern kicking your desktop and work to the curb when it feels like it. sucks. HULK HATE 8 !!!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
One thing this should help with is not making devs afraid to adopt a particular technology from MS, which is later trashed due to it having won a political, rather than technical, battle for promotion. For example, WCF was touted as the only way to do XML/HTTP services replacing the binary remoting protocol for several years, and then WebAPI replaced it. WCF devs are now irritated. Same with SilverLight, though WAY worse - "this is THE platform for Windows 8!", then, "Uh, not really.". I get the sense these teams have to compete for their platform to get noticed and marketed, instead of collaborate and take the advantages from two competing platforms.
"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.
I doubt it.
"If you want to use a Microsoft app, you can find it on whatever platform or device you are using, not just on Windows. Running behind everything is Microsoft’s Azure cloud and services."
That sounds more like it, you can have any platform you want, as long as it's running on Microsoft. Seriously, who do they even think they are fooling? It' sounds like an employee pep meeting.
"Time will tell if Microsoft’s overtures to the open source community are a real and altruistic form of doing business"
They aren't altruistic. If you think they are, I am just flabbergasted.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I still dont' trust MS. Once they start getting back large market share the old anti competitive stifling old fart of a company will emerge from behind the mask again.
They need to just continue to wither away. The software industry has never been as vibrant or innovative as the last few years when MS was down.
Ein Windows Ein SDK Ein...
err sorry.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It is a good case however, for you to not really be in the position to speak from knowledge on the subject. You've hated MS for years, and adding your two cents about "yea I went to Linux" over ten years ago seems about par for the course of Slashdot angry posts about Microsoft.
It's a tool. You use it in the right place, at the right time. When you get religion about a tool, then it tends to be a problem. MS or not.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Their motto of "Developers, Developers, Developers" also disappeared with Ballmer's exit. Everything is now getting locked down to the max in their attempt to be like Apple. What makes it worse is that they don't seem to have a direction as far as application development goes. They were strongly pushing portable .NET when there was no need for cross platform applications, but as soon as ARM gets into their mix of products, they drop that strategy and go with a native code strategy. It's all mixed up and extremely confusing. Their complete lack of direction is certainly not welcoming to developers trying to figure out how they should target the Windows platform, and that doesn't even take into account their confusion on user interfaces as well.
Microsoft's previous success was based on offering very cheap products that were friendly to developers. Yeah, their products were buggy and unfinished, but they were a bargain, and you could always "embrace and extend" them as you saw fit. Now, they are trying to market themselves as a premium luxury product like Apple (at least the consumer end) and walling the garden as much as possible. They're locking down the hardware, too, and alienating their hardware partners, who were the greatest drivers of their previous success. It's a big change. Can they do it? Hyundai managed to convert themselves from being a discount car manufacturer to a more upscale brand, but Hyundai didn't have the problem with their brand reputation that Microsoft has. Microsoft has made cheap crap for so long, I don't see how they manage to convince everyone that they are now an "upscale" high quality manufacturer of products and services.
The new captain has set a new course, one that veers away from the rocks. But this ship will take a long time and a lot of leeway to make that turn.
(Of course, I thought the old captain should have been 'relieved for cause' years ago, but since personally I'm neither a customer/user nor a direct shareholder in MSFT, it really wasn't my business :-)
Microsoft: Yesterday's Technology Next Week
They always reminded me of Yoyodyne Industries from Buckaroo Banzai, where the future begins tomorrow.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
One Microsoft to rule them all, One Microsoft to find them,
One Microsoft to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
What on earth are you talking about? Windows 8 is all about forcing people to get software from Microsoft's store. That's exactly opposite of leaving behind walled gardens.
Nothing about Microsoft has changed except its PR spin. It remains the same morally bankrupt skofflaw monopolist it has always been. Puff piece.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I don't think you have much of an idea of what a kernel is.
Just because you have the same kernel does not mean that you can run the same applications.
An operating system is more than a kernel, and additionally the same kernel may run on different CPUs, so no, just because two computers share the same kernel doesn't mean the same apps will run on them.
Look at, for example, a Linux based OS like Ubuntu vs a similar Linux based OS like WHAT_YOUR_ROUTER_RUNS for an obvious example! (Was tempted to use Android as the example, but I believe Android uses some customizations to the Linux kernel that make it not-quite-Linux-kernel-though-from-a-developers-standpoint-youd-never-know)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Been done. At least for Solaris and HP-UX.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Yes, it's true. They run the same kernel.
But no, you can't run Windows applications on a Windows RT or Windows Phone device.
iOS runs the same kernel as Mac OS X, but you can't run OS X applications on iOS.
Android uses the Linux kernel, but you can't run Linux Desktop applications on Android. (At least, not without a lot of work adding the needed libraries and recompiling everything for ARM.)
"Same kernel" doesn't mean "all the applications are interoperable."
It's a tool. You use it in the right place, at the right time. When you get religion about a tool, then it tends to be a problem. MS or not.
This. Many people seem to think that Linux and OSS is some holy water which should be applied everywhere possible to automatically make things great. And just like with a religion, friends and families must be converted.
One code base is just the first step. The problem is how tightly the presentation layer is tied to the kernel. Microsoft would have been in a better position if they broke it out more like the linux pyramid with a common kernel at the base, plumbing in the middle and a display manager on top. Then, the presentation layer in that display manager could be swapped out as needed based on the form factor involved.
KDE did this with their netbook and desktop interfaces. Regardless of which one you use, it is still all KDE underneath. One Microsoft should be about have "one" Windows with interfaces tailored to specific use cases, not "one" interface for all use cases.
Windows operating system will be free for devices under 9 inches
EOM
love is just extroverted narcissism
One turd, not several. Wow. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The links have long disappeared due to DCMA takedowns.....
But GPL is indeed cancerous, intentionally so. Interacting with GPL code is a mine field if you don't want to GPL your code as well, there was no lie in that.
You make is sound like a bad thing.
Even for a windows vibrator?
Sorry, but I was producing 'spaghetti code' long before windows 95 came out. :)
Perhaps I should sue.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I would have thought they'd want a kernel optimized for small devices driving the phones and a different one for desktops. Maybe have them implement the same API. But isn't the kernel something you'd want optimized for the device family?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
> No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows.
Maybe not right now, but soon. And that's a good thing how?
> As goes the Windows kernel, so goes the entire company.
Um, yep. And again, that's a good thing how?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Probably not entirely true right now because most of their development has not touched the SDKs for these platforms. It is still a work in progress and their new Unified App framework will most likely make your desire a reality. The fact that they went from Windows CE during the Windows Phone 7.X and earlier days to an NT kernel for 8 shows this progress in the phone space for Microsoft. It also helps that they are migrating from XAP apps to Appx. The new Xbox One uses something based off Windows 8 components (At least kernel, not sure of anything else). Even the Windows for ARM called RT (Big fan of mine by the way for all the haters out there).
.NET framework. That would potentially mean that even Android/Linux could use the same app in some ways.
They are getting there, but it is not an overnight accomplishment. That would be like saying tomorrow PS3 games will work without recompiling on an Xbox. They have to update headers and references to SDKs they are using to make it work on another platform. This is where Microsoft is really wanting to head with the Unified Apps. They want to have their framework on everything so you do not have to recode. Even better that they are open sourcing good portions of the
They're still evil.
It's one Microsoft, so it's it's, not they're. Also, while this is promising:
The New 'One Microsoft' Is Finally Poised For the Future
of moving from many to one and hopefully beyond, this statement seems a little premature:
The stodgy old enterprise company whose former CEO once called open source Linux a 'cancer' is gone.
However, this a hopeful trend towards you eventually being able to use the plural "they're". At that point, though, "still" may no longer be valid.
Ok, I went to linux 20 years ago.
I am also in IT, I am a Linux systems engineer. (over 20 years at it, Solaris before that, Sun OS before that, SCO and ATT System 5 before all of it)
I use windows on my work desktop because someone else decided it was the correct solution.
I have listened to management for 20 years demand that "It should be a windows solution" when really the solution should be looked at and choices made based on the merits of the job at hand.
I don't hate Microsoft, I also do not believe that every answer should be to use a Microsoft product. If a tool is a tool then join me and give Linux a try, otherwise you are the one who is not "in the position to speak from knowledge on the subject"
long done deal
http://code.google.com/p/linie...
Linux is no panacea. It is, however, a completely reasonable alternative for those who don't like Windows.
I don't care about a limited 2 aps at once, or touchscreen. The one thing Windows needs is the ability to fearlessly run applications. Windows should have been virus proof back since 98 when the Internet was becoming a big thing. It isn't as hard as you'd think to make an OS virus proof if that is what you're designing for.
.exe from the Internet. We're even wary of .png and .mp3s because of buffer overflow exploits. This should have never been the case.
The moment your platform becomes a fearless platform to try new software, people will try software as a hobby. The way Windows is now, before aps are catching on, no one in their right mind is going to download random
Now aps won't catch on really fast because only Windows 8 does Aps. If Microsoft was smart, they would have allowed all versions of Windows back to XP use aps. That way more people would make aps. It would have caught on a lot faster. And since Microsoft probably has an "ap store", they'd have made more money even. The short term money isn't what wins you control over the Internet through which gives you the long term money gain. The key is you want more people to buy your OS over a MAC which word on the street says is harder to get viruses.
Aps could be a good thing for Microsoft's future, but they didn't do enough to have them take off with initial velocity. My guess is there's some self proclaimed genius at Microsoft,"Everyone's gonna love aps, they're going to buy new copies of windows just to get aps. If we make old versions of windows use aps, we'll just lose sales!"
God spoke to me
Agreed.
meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This would happen to any group that gains market control.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple...
Not at all true. IBM and Apple both are strong contributors to many open source projects, so as they gain power lots of tooling and frameworks are produced that benefit everyone outside those companies.
Microsoft traditionally had contributed little to open source, with everything being worked on held internally. That's changing to some extent, but that was the reason why the industry suffered under Microsoft dominance, because so much work was locked to Microsoft and only usable by them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can "interact with" GPL code just fine, as long as your proprietary code isn't a derivative work of the GPL code in the copyright sense.
So you can exec() it, you can call it from the shell, you can send packets to it and receive responses, in some cases you can even have proprietary code as a module/plugin being called by the GPL'd code.
Many websites only work well on IE - especially some internal corporate ones.
I'm agnostic... I design solutions around Linux or Windows; it's the core requirement that makes me choose a technology, not a technology that makes me fix my requirements.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The links have long disappeared due to DCMA takedowns.....
No they haven't. You just do not want slashdot readers to read them, because they do not say what you claim.
http://www.internetnews.com/de...
Quote from that article:
One technology enthusiast at Web site kuro5shin noted many of the hacks (additions) to the code base included some colorful comments and creative use of adjectives in noting programming changes.
In this case, the reviewer concluded the code was generally "excellent." But he also noted the many additions to the Windows code to be almost universally compatible with previous Windows versions. And third-party software has "clearly come at a cost, both in developer-sweat and the elegance (and hence stability and maintainability) of the code."
GP is correct, those who took a look at it indeed came away with the impression that it was quite pristine.
You, OTOH, are just lying.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
.NET was never cross platform. It was cross platform if you thought there was a difference between Windows XP and Windows Vista. NET was cross language platform. You could write in any language and it got complied down to byte code that was run on a .NET VM. But .NET only ran on Windows platforms.
Mono, the open source implementation of .NET, ran on other platforms which made .NET kind of crossplatform.
If you bought into .NET, you bought into Windows and you didn't need .NET for any other platform. Mono was a nice try, but without Microsoft's imprimatur, is was doomed. Had Microsoft embraced Mono or absorbed it, I think that Java would be dead and Microsoft would pretty much rule the developer world.
Over ten years ago? It's almost twenty years.
h@hh@hh@...@.&.... "You shall not pass!"
It's the users/developers/admins, not MS -- at least not any more. I have MSDN and have used the support call, and I was impressed. I learned more about debugging on their OS in four hours than in four years on my own (came to an MS shop after 15 years of Unix/Linux). Some awesome stuff; even better than tools I used on Linux or Unix.
Now, a year later, after I "got it" that Windows is TODAY (unlike 15 years ago) a decent OS, I'm using the CLI and scripting in PowerShell and treating the OS with enough respect to learn about it before making judgments. What's interesting is that SO MANY MS devs simply never took the time to learn tools which have been available for 5-10 years to make MS administration relatively modern.
You don't have to touch a mouse to configure a full ASP.Net/IIS application stack on Windows since server 2008. Yet people still do it one machine at a time, manually, doing in five hours of people time what can be done in 15 seconds of people time. And yes, all of it is WELL documented.
However, I find that when something goes wrong with Windows, no one actually calls Microsoft for support despite paying for an MSDN subscription. We've had trouble connecting to SQLServer or the jdbc driver for SQLServer has a memory leak, don't call Microsoft. Instead my manager scours the internet and says, "take this website's advice." How, I ask you, how is that different than Linux? So much for better supported.
Hold on, you're paying for support, no one uses it and somehow that proves that MS products don't have good support?
.NET was cross platform--at least cross hardware. Yes, it was Windows-only, but a .NET application could run on an ARM machine or any other hardware that might run windows, since .NET was hardware independent byte code. Yes, you were still stuck on some form of Windows OS to use it, but now that they are selling windows on both ARM and Intel, it would seem to behoove them to support a portable hardware application strategy, yet they have essentially abandoned it.
95% of the article has no substance and is clearly a bunch of marketspeak, though it's not clear who the marketspeak is targeted at. Users? They're not gonna care about any of it because it's gonna make sense or doesn't affect them. Shareholders? Maybe.
There's really only two bits that seem to mean anything:
No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows.
That's cool, and it actually means something. But do users care about this? Do investors care about this? How many Apple users know or care that Mac OS, iPhone, and Apple TV all share the same kernel? In general neither users nor investors know what a kernel is.
If you want to use a Microsoft app, you can find it on whatever platform or device you are using, not just on Windows.
That's means something too, but....are you freakin' kidding me? So if I'm making an Windows app, I'm required to design it to work well on a desktop, tablet, phone, and gaming console? What if it's an awesome app that sucks on a little phone screen? What if it's an awesome app that works well on a touchscreen but sucks with a mouse? What if it's awesome with a keyboard and mouse and sucks on a touchscreen? You get the idea...this is the whole thing they're trying to do with Windows 8 and surface and they're failing to hear users screaming at the top of their lungs DO NOT WANT.
(AC because modded)
What's wrong with the NT kernel? It's one of the most robust ones out there now.
Been done. At least for Solaris and HP-UX.
...and since discontinued
Best tools, best language (C#), best jobs that pay well. Thanks MS!!!
"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." Seriously what is he talking about? The kernels were already the same on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Xbox One, and Windows RT. This already has been happening for many years now. This is public knowledge that anyone could know if they just bothered to look. By the way, they announced at the //Build conference a few weeks ago that even the app model an WinRT APIs are going to be converged now between Windows, Phone, and Xbox so you can write one app for all of all platforms once.
Spaghetti Code was already an old phrase when I learned Quick Basic on DOS 4.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Bravo! I can't wait for Windows RG!
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Structured programming has been a thing since the 1960's. AFAIK, the derogatory term "spaghetti code" has existed since before Dijkstra's "goto statement considered harmful" in 1968. Of course it is possible to make spaghetti with structured code too, but that is art.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
OK we are going to talk about Bob. Bob was Melinda French's idea. Melinda was the Marissa Mayer of her day. Hard body rock climber / magazine model / super genius rock star programmer / usability expert. The paradigm was a sort of 2D representation of the familiar world for the novice user - a VR not unlike Oculus Rift is today. The hardware and software weren't yet up to it. But Bill letting her reach for the stars and getting in a late night scrum with her now and then? Well I try not to hold it against a man that he did the thing I, in his place, would have done. For all the miserable inane products foisted on us by Microsoft, the myriad ways they have thwarted progress, subverted security and manipulated the dialog of computer science until it is a cartoon I hate them. But for me, Bob gets a pass. Bob was a long shot at a transformational paradigm that was just too early. And Mrs. Melinda Gates has still got it goin' on.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Something to think about regarding the it's vs they're in regards to companies is the origin of the speaker. Collective nouns in American English almost always have singular verb agreement, in British English it is common to use plural verb agreement.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
IE11 on XP is a cue that they have divorced the old thinking. If you see that, you will know this is the dawn of a new age. You know they can do it. The browsers they are competing against can. But they won't do it because they rely on the latest IE to sell the latest Windows, fragmenting their user base.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You do realize IBM has been a going concern since way before the term "Open Source" was ever uttered?
Yes of course. But IBM has been supporting open source fairly well since 1998 or so. They had a lot of open source Java stuff, including the not insignificant Eclipse...
Apple is one of the most closed computing ecosystems in existence for both hardware and software.
Webkit, BSD, Clang, GCC (before Clang), etc. etc. etc. Apple is one of the most OPEN ecosystems around as far as the OS goes, relying on many open standards to work and which they give a lot of code back for.
Like Goggle they open source some code but don't think for a second they are open sourcing anything might actually result in giving a competitor a chance to catch up.
Webkit and Clang alone prove you very, very wrong.
Their contributions to open source are used to generate good PR in the development world.
Their contributions are for the most selfish of reasons - because then other people and companies can build atop it, and Apple can bring those changes back into the fold. So has it been with Webkit, so has it been with Clang. You don't have to think that any company is a paragon of virtue to strongly support open source, there are fantastic financial and engineering resource reasons for doing so that have nothing to do with PR.
The very notion that Apple care about PR in the development world is frankly laughable. No-one caress about development PR except MAYBE for platforms struggling to get developers, which is not true of iOS or OSX.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Phone and desktop the same.
I have listened to management for 20 years demand that "It should be a windows solution" when really the solution should be looked at and choices made based on the merits of the job at hand.
THIS! And just when I'm out of mod points. Someone mod this guy up and get it to 5.
I don't hate Microsoft, I also do not believe that every answer should be to use a Microsoft product. If a tool is a tool then join me and give Linux a try, otherwise you are the one who is not "in the position to speak from knowledge on the subject"
I've spent way too much time on the front lines, trying to fix microsoft fuckups with incredible meeting burn rates to not hate them. After-Patch Tuesday Wednesdays were like being waterboarded some times.
But yes, people should use the best tool for the job. Way too often any more, it is not a Redmond OS product.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Hold on, you're paying for support, no one uses it and somehow that proves that MS products don't have good support?
No, it means that it's of no value to call Microsoft support. We actually want to get things done instead of hearning how it's not their problem.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They got in (the recent) deep shit by making their PCs just like their tablets. Now they're literally the same OS. Great. Now I have to start selling Linux at my shop on 3 years and my 2 degrees are worthless. Fan-fucking-tastic.
That would be IE6 - and if they are still running that version they are not supported by Microsoft properly since even Microsoft moved on long ago. The most popular (surprised me, I just assumed IE was still due to bundling) browser now is Chrome. Most browsers including IE are closer together in their use of standards so they are becoming interchangeable.
http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/...
Posting to undo accidental mod.
Many people seem to think that Linux and OSS is some holy water which should be applied everywhere possible to automatically make things great.
Freedom and openness (interoperability and transparency) are principles which should be applied everywhere possible, which do automatically make things better than the alternative: protected, proprietary interfaces whose workings you are not permitted to know.
And just like with a religion, friends and families must be converted.
No, people simply must have the bullshit washed out of their heads. They have to be converted away from the mindset that keeping secrets makes a better world. People naturally want to share their ideas with other people, they learn not to by being ridiculed, taken advantage of, or attacked — or by being forced into an economic system based on artificial scarcity and designed to maintain an extremely unequal status quo.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The wanting mostly happened circa 2000. Netscape 4 was getting long in the tooth; it choked on complex pages and the Javascript implementation was horrible. Netscape 5 (an update of 4) was abandoned, and the fruit of Netscape's ground-up reimplementation, Netscape 7 / Mozilla Suite 1.0, didn't reach full release until 2002 though many of us were using beta versions before that. IE was, for a brief time, the best readily available browser. I stuck with Netscape anyway because it was fully cross-platform; there was an IE for some versions of Unix but not for Linux.
Yeah, I was writing FORTRAN back about 1970 and I heard the term back then. It is only for the abuse of GOTO to kludge code together.
Indeed,
in the old times it referred to BASIC-alike codingg style of putting everything into a singe large GOTO ridden program vs the use of functions like in more "normal" programming languages. You may not recall that but there were actually programs that were written just like that: A loooong sequence of instructions with gotos were needed.
Later I have also read this term referring to (then) "normal" coding vs. OOP.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
My parents are unfortunately too young and already tainted by such infernal contraptions as the typewriter and the telephone dial (both with buttuns and actual dial)
Quite a pity. I blamte the industrial revolution for that, damn steam engines.
I myself, at my tender age of 50 still have problems trying to type on my iPad... so that's why I'm writing this on an antiquated Keyboard (Microsoct Classic, BTW) and on a normal desktop PC.
I am certalinly in favour of modernity, don't take me wrong: I have tried to talk my boss into acquiring Wacom tablets and touchscreens to replace our old fashoned keyboards, macs and sepcially our Linux servers... I agree, trying to type a lengty one liner in bash with several regexes and a few instances of variable substitution is difficult on a touchscreen or with the stylus, but for the sake of modernity, we must mater this art! No matter how many hours we waste and how angry our customers grow: Modernity is the way to go! Unfortunately our IT dept manager and our CEO don't share my points of view aducing such feeble arguments as "productivity" and "RSI".
Ahh, the tribulations of beeing so young.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
That's gross mate!
-- 29A the number of the Beast