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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I was saddened to see Ballmer go. I felt that all the Microsoft toadies richly deserved him. It would have been nice to see him go down with the ship, but I knew in my heart what rats do when the water starts rising. I sincerely hope that Nadella proves himself fully worthy to fill Ballmer's clown shoes.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
By the way I actually like the idea of snapping the Modern apps to the side of the desktop. It's a good way to utilize a widescreen monitor by docking Twitter or something else there. I wouldn't care about Modern apps otherwise, but this is a fun feature.
Of course. The whole problem with Metro/Modern was that they set their user-interface back to the DOS days with only a single application displayed at a time. As long as Metro apps work in Windows, Metro is no longer a huge step back.
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.
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
Linux is no panacea. It is, however, a completely reasonable alternative for those who don't like Windows.
meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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*
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.
.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.