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Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows
Deathspawner writes A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year.
Hope that he has a better luck in unifying Windows than those who wanted to unify Unixes
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hopefully this "unified" Windows will finally kill off Microsoft.
Where have I heard this before?
Windows 2000 .net
This is not a new idea.
I'm SOOOO glad CentOS 7 is now out!
People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.
STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What if Microsoft released a commercial "Window Manager" for Linux?
Wouldn't it be cool if they merged tablet-style touch functionality in to Windows? Just think how unified it'd be then; you'd only need one operating system for all of your... wait, they did? A disaster, you say?
the return of Microsoft Bob on top of Windows Vista renamed as Windows 3000!
The only distribution that runs on everything, and gives the complete MS Windows experience with the power of Linux.
The link to the actual article "a unified release" is completely empty... nice to see all the comments from people who haven't even read the article yet.
In typical Microsoft "All heads in our asses" fashion, they release Windows 8 with two completely separate UI's.. One doesn't work at all for desktop.. and the other barely works for desktop. Hell.. opening a PDF in Windows 8 is still a goddamn nightmare.
Now that they're unifying Windows, we know exactly what the customer wants:
1. UI separate from kernel (vector graphic UI for desktops, 2d UI for battery-powered devices)
2. Ability to customize installation (ie.. Windows embedded version, Windows business edition, Windows uber Gamer edition, Windows "I install Weatherbug and other stupid applications" edition, Windows "Gimme the shitty Widnows 8 UI" edition)
3. Ability to control data usage (ie.. Windows "I'm being charged for the amount of data because AT&T and Verizon are shitty companies edition")
What will we get:
1. METRO 80's colors EDITION
2. Cannot multitask edition
3. Super fucking bloated edition
4. We changed shit because we wanted to change shit and good fucking luck finding it edition
5. We give you errors if you're not connected to the Internet edition
6. We update your computer when you're trying to turn it off and take it with you edition
Bleh.. this was a minimal effort bitch session.. Microsoft already knows they suck and we only buy Windows because it's pretty much forced on us
--- We need more Ron Paul!
You want the same version running on servers as phones?
Ultra bloated phones here we come then............
master of none
If anything they should be diversifying and spinning off new organizations. "Unifying windows" is doubling down on the same brain-damaged strategy that brought us Windows 8.
I would hope this unification means that there will be suffice emulation built into windows that it will pick the kernel/libs/drivers required by the CPU arch, and userland apps can run in emulation (even if slowly) if they are compiled for the wrong proc. This would be a unified windows, that allows x86 and 64 bit apps run on ARM and vice versa (although the other direction is likely not as useful). And have a usable interface. This may actually be a killer OS. It is the next version after a bad one!
Silence is a state of mime.
http://www.zdnet.com/what-one-...
Yet another link to nowhere in the summary.
I wonder if the editors even understand what their job is.
Is he called "Says He" or "Satya Nadella"? Make up your mind Slashdot.
BULLSHIT! What he wants is to make ongoing costs just like Xbox Live, skydrive, Office 365, and all the other crap they've tried to push. No thanks, I don't want to pay $1200 a seat over a decade to use Office, thanks. EVERYONE is copying Call of Duty and the DLC era. The new CEO of MS was in charge of cloud services! I am NOT paying a subscription to use ANYTHING from Microsoft. The end. He needs to get over that or get the fuck out.
I only use Windows on rare occasions, so I may be missing something, but why doesn't Microsoft include a x86 JIT recompiler for ARM, just as Apple did with their PowerPC to x86 migration? I know they are locking WIndows RT to Microsoft's software portal, so running your old .exe file isn't possible, but it feels to me that they did this partially because they don't have a way to run it. Had they implement a recompiler and let you run any old .exe file, Windows RT would probably be doing a lot better than it is today.
Everyone thought an ARM version of Windows would be the death of Intel and AMD, yet Microsoft botched it so bad that they need not worry.
"One Windows to rule them all, One Windows to find them,
One Windows to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I had to use Windows Server 2012 for the first time a few days ago. Jesus Fucking Christ, I had no idea they had brought the Windows 8 Metro Hipster UI over to their server line of OSes. I couldn't belive it. It was damn near impossible to use.
Those are the only two Windows OSes that people actually use. It looked to me like they have already been fully unified. Both Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 are equally impossible to use effectively.
This is from page 5 of the Management bible. "Consolidation is always better". Don't question it!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I look forward to the day that Windows is uniform/compliant across the board with all other Internet scripting. If they can do that then I will take them serious. If not then they can just shut up cause I heard it all before.
The third link is not actually a link, since the <a> tag is missing the href attribute. I wanted to check what the CEO actually said, since "unify" could mean a lot of things.
Are they going for x86-64 only, killing the ARM-based WIndows RT, as Hot Hardware is reporting? They'd still have to keep ARM support for Windows Mobile. Perhaps they should have put Windows Mobile plus some tablet extensions on the low-budget tablets, that would have fit people's expectations a lot better.
Are they going for a single code base? In that case there would be multiple products created from that code base, so that doesn't tell us anything about the fate of Windows RT or any other specific products.
Are they going for a single product named Windows? While I think it would be good to drop the artificial home/pro/ultimate differentiation, having a different Windows for client and server use is still useful. Although that could be handled by having a different default configuration rather than an entirely different product.
Yes lets do that, lets take RT & Windows Mobile, two of the there worst performing software OS and shove it in to there main OS just encase they where not having enough problems making it half decent already. General rule of thumb: something that dose everything is not good at anything. Something that dose one things is good at it because that's all it has to do.
Lay off people. Close up products. Anybody can do this. It's standard MBA algorithm, squeeze a little here and there. Bob Lutz says that's the style that ruined American automobile industries.
The whole of Microsoft's strategy was laid bare by BG a long time ago: Sell OS licenses. Office was used to create a feedback loop. Now, Active Directory is part of that.
RT runs office, so it supports that strategy.
Make me CEO; I'll charge $250,000 a year. Problems solved, miracles cost extra.
How about natively booting Linux Mint 17 and putting 7 in Virtualbox if you must have this POS.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Jack of all trades master of none.
If I could have a Win 7 style interface on my desktop / laptop. I really good touch interface for my tablet / phone and a really good lounge room interface for my xbox that could run the same software across all 3. Now that would be cool! RT wasn't crap because it was a different interface it was crap because it felt like it should run the same stuff as normal windows but didn't
Only 1.5 TB and it will run on ANYTHING (with 8x8 core processors and 32GB of RAM). Of course it still comes in 24 different variations that all licensed differently.
Because everyone wanted Windows to run on ARM, despite Microsoft saying they wouldn't like it cause you can't run x86 software on ARM. You asked for it. They gave it to you. And it sucked every bit of what they promised.
http://www.google.com/trends/e...
Good: Plug phone into dock, phone interface disappears, desktop interface comes up. Unplug phone, and it reverts. You carry all your files with you. You go to a dumb monitor + keyboard + mouse anywhere and *poof* you have your desktop with you, and it's online because your phone has data. Yeah, it'll be a bit slow - so don't do heavy number crunching and you're fine. And they'll need to make it impossible to run phone apps in desktop mode or vice versa. Some things must be disallowed (although crafty software could intelligently flip between the two).
Bad: phone has desktop interface; or desktop has phone interface.
Which will it be?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
SO a bug will brick all copies now not just home/enterprise/server, and we get more stuff built into our OS's EG, Im a gamer I dont need alot of the "built in" programs/services, and alot I cannot disable.
In the Land of Redmond where the corporate spokesmen lie.
The special magic thing is to hit the Windows key + X. That brings up a menu that has pretty much everything you'd want to do from a start menu. Win + X also works on desktop Windows 8.x.
The hilarious thing to me is that the Windows 8/Server 2012 line is ironically the most keyboard centric version of Windows I've used, but all people want to do is bitch about the Modern (Tile) interface that you can completely, totally ignore if you're on something that has a real keyboard and mouse.
Also, Windows RT? It's not awful. Printing and scanning work great and they have real USB and storage support. Surfaces ship with Office pre-installed. RT is missing a lot of media consumption tools that are present on other mobile OSes, but as a device for doing work they're credible. I'd rather have an RT-based Surface than anything that runs iOS, though I'd prefer a good quality Android device to either.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
One size fit none.
Remember the time when you navigated to a site on your phone and it sent you to "special" mobile version (http:///m.****). Well, someone finally said hey, let's try to use a single site with logic embedded so that it looks different for any device, but retains the same functionality .
"Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors)."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
What's the difference here?
Making a single OS that works well for tiny phone screens as well as huge desktop monitors is like trying to make flying cars. It sounds great, and they promise it will fly like a plane and drive like a car... but instead you always end up with a bizarre contraption that flies like a car and drives like a plane.
is it possible for them to distribute windows with an adaptive gui that detects the machine type and provides a gui suited to that machine but still have the same basic operating system underneath...there by unifying the OS but not necessarily unifying the gui?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why do they keep trying to do this?
Microsoft's most successful era was when the 9X, NT, and CE lines were almost completely separate. They try to merge them, and there's disaster, new CEO comes in, wants to merge them in a different way. Windows 8 would have been fine if it were strictly a 9X descendant release. It is not suitable for businesses, there should not have been a Pro version, it should have if they needed to have two versions, been Home, and Home Ultimate or something. Or they could just bring back the Classic interface on all versions and stop trying to be something other than Windows. People hated Luna, people hated Aero, who exactly hated Classic?
Time to learn Linux, because I am NOT using your stupid "modern apps" on a desktop PC.
I had hoped it mean and end the the stupid several version and disk confusion.
Really MS, just release one version.
I'd love to see the math on how manufacturing different boxs, colors actually mkaes them money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So many negative comments here... as if people think that a unified OS must also mean a unified UI.
A single core codebase for the OS will have a few problems with performance on different hardware, but that is a separate discussion... and who expects Microsoft stuff to run quickly anyway?
However, incorporating a different UI for each target device means that you should not need to see the craptastic Metro UI on a desktop system or workstation, while touchscreen and small screen systems are not compromised by a need to develop elements for discrete keyboard and mouse input.
In the Land of Redmond where the chairs do fly.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Well, if they mean with unifying, going to keep the current Windows which uses WinAPI, then ok, but if they mean going all WindowsRT, they will loose a lot of businesses...
Alrighty, if the Man from Hyderabad wants a unified Windows, fine. But that doesn't necessarily mean a unified UI...except in dev cost terms.
WTF is so hard about a check box at installation time to select [klunky phone UI] or [hipster tablet UI] or [professional ubergeek PC UI] or whatever?
It's as easy as choosing between KDE or Gnome or Cinnamon, or Xfce or, uh wait...
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
One Windows to rule them all, One Windows to find them, One Windows to bring them all and in the darkness bind them...
It will be much much more interesting to developp for the Windows platform(s) and through that, the rise of C# to the top
and what's the bet they pull the same "sorry it won't run on your hardware", BS they did with Windows Phone 7. If they pull that again My lovely Nokia will be covered in cow excrement and lobbed through their reception area. They need to keep the existing Phone users on board or their "unification" is for shit. Windows 9 looks like it may be a keel haul for consumers anyway with its "always online, do you rent this" check, they may as well sell it through Steam, they would probably get more purchases that way.
I dont pay much attention to whatever weekly bullcrap comes out of Redmund.
All versions of Windows are terrible. XP.Vista.7.8.bodge
All utter crap. DLL's chaining the Operating System to installed applications. Thats a grade F right there.
Windows will struggle on with diminishing market share and "success" for decades. Even I know they wont go away easily.
But MS's future lies in it's [wonderful] applications and [maybe] cloud services. And they know it.
Nobody wants a unified windows.
Microsoft still does not get it - mobile devices and proper computers have two different conflicting sets of user interface requirements, and application behaviours.
If the underlying OS is not already unified, we can only assume that MS are technically incompetent, so I don't assume that that is what is meant by this.
The other important thing is portability. Gone are the days when applications only ran on one platform. If your software is not portable and cross platform, it is a rather sorry reflection on your development ability as an organisation. Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up. The question is whether they can do so, before they become irrelevant.
The special magic thing is to hit the Windows key + X. That brings up a menu that has pretty much everything you'd want to do from a start menu.
First off, that does NOT replicate the start menu. Not even close. More importantly who wants to have to do "special magic things"? Particularly non-intuitive, poorly documented, un-promoted "special magic things" that differ needlessly from previous versions of Windows and require a special keyboard with a Windows key on it. (pro-tip: not all keyboards have Windows keys!) This is change for the sake of change, not change to improve things.
The hilarious thing to me is that the Windows 8/Server 2012 line is ironically the most keyboard centric version of Windows I've used, but all people want to do is bitch about the Modern (Tile) interface that you can completely, totally ignore if you're on something that has a real keyboard and mouse.
No you can't ignore it. You can work around it but you can't completely ignore it.
Also, Windows RT? It's not awful.
Yes it is. Or at least it is awful for something that they called Windows. If it cannot install and run arbitrary Windows applications then it isn't Windows and shouldn't be called Windows. Call it something else because that's what it is. OSX and iOS share some underpinnings but at least Apple wasn't stupid enough to pretend they are the same thing.
Surfaces ship with Office pre-installed.
Swell - because that's the only app anyone ever actually needs. [/sarcasm]
It is obviously the way to go.
As PCs get smaller and more power efficient and tablets / phones get more powerful there will be a convergence of those form factors.
I think I understand why they want to do this: Only one code base, less overhead and more profit.
That's the benefit from their end. Plus for the users of Windows they (theoretically) have a more or less consistent experience on each device.
But it is a stupid idea.
Disagree. The *idea* is very smart and to varying degrees Apple and Google are doing the same thing. It makes a lot of sense to have things as similar as possible across your devices. The implementation however is another kettle of fish altogether. Microsoft badly fumbled the implementation. I just started using my first Windows 8 machine recently and it is horrible. Hard to find things, unintuitive, clumsy adaptation of a touch interface onto a keyboard/mouse system. Used to be that Microsoft tried to put their keyboard/mouse system on touch screens and now they've swung the pendulum too far the other direction.
The different devices provide different functions and shouldn't look the same or be the same.
That doesn't mean they can't look and behave similar but your basic point is quite correct. A touch interface can share some but not all features with a keyboard/mouse interface. The OS will need several interfaces and should present the one most optimal (or most preferred) for the equipment available. I don't need big touch screen tiles on my dual monitor non-touch system at work. I don't need a mouse interface for my smartphone. Doesn't mean they can't share certain similarities but the needs of different interfaces must be respected. As you said you don't put a steering wheel on a bicycle.
"will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release "
That's why MintLinux is so popular now.
They've been trying this shit for YEARS and fucked it up EVERY TIME. A phone is not a tablet is not a laptop is not a desktop is not a games console. They have been throwing away good, functional UIs in favour of making an unusable compromise run on everything. If they're talking about a windows "kernel" then fine, I get it. But they won't be.
"By next year" sounds like a deadline and an impossible one. I guess he felt that employees were not stressed out enough, and needed impossible deadline to whip them into shape.... Why would anyone work there now?
GM in the 80's "unified" all their drivetrains
Which is not in principle a bad idea. Everyone else did exactly the same thing about that time. Having redundant competing engine designs in different parts of your company is economically not very sane. Why not put all your resources into making one really good engine/drivetrain which can be adapted to specific needs. There of course has to be a clear understanding of when things need to be different and when they don't but that is a solvable problem.
The GM brands became rather superfluous, and consumers were quite lukewarm to the generic "all-in-one" options for GM cars.
And yet they still bought more GM cars than those from any other manufacturer. GM lost market share but they didn't remotely become irrelevant.
GM cars from the 80's are considered to be the worst built and least desirable of the company's history.
That has to do with a lot of factors besides just the drivetrains. They weren't actually worse built than the cars from previous decades (structurally) but the problem was that they weren't really much better. Whereas their competition, particularly the Japanese, were making big advances in quality and taking market share as a result. GM was lazy, arrogant, and sloppy in a lot of ways that they are still paying for today.
"One size fits none".
What a dumb idea this is. A total pile of horse hockey.
Will never be defeated!
So what they are talking about is, Universal Apps. aka the ability to write an app for "Windows" and have it run on Windows 8/9, Windows Phone and XBox etc.
They are already there for the most part with Windows and Windows Phone. There are however a small subset of windows runtime APIs that are not available yet.
And this isn't a .Net thing. Universal apps can be written in C++,C# and JavaScript.
Windows RT apps are written on the Windows Runtime APIs already. If they kill Win RT it has nothing to do with unifying Windows but rather Intel's catching up on Mobile Device CPUs
Unifying the underlying architecture to enable different platforms to talk to each other, while allowing for different UIs for each platform, is a good idea.
But it's pointless, because MS has no mobile presence worth speaking of. Android and iOS are what people use and have already bought into that environment with their data and apps. Just like you can't push people off windows because their customers are already entrenched in windows as their desktop OS, MS won't be pushing anybody off their mobile devices onto a windows-based mobile device. Maybe MS might even develop a few attractive feature for windows phones, but it'll still lack apps, and lack a customer-base needed to drive app development, and ultimately, it's doomed to fail. If they were going to pull this off successfully, it would have had to have taken place years ago.
Now, if they want to unify desktop and mobile, they need to build in Android and iOS support, because that's where people are.. Otherwise, this whole endeavor is pointless.
Maybe they'll follow Apple, Cisco, Juniper, etc. and the unified windows will be a graphical overlay of *nix.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
not anymore.
How is windows 8 less intuitive? My response time is faster with metro then navigating through the old menu system which by the way was forced on by MS in 1995 and people adopted. Well, I actually used the "favorites" part of the start menu in win7 and everything else that is often used is pinned to the taskbar, moved away from rocketdock. You can also re-size the icons small to fit your screen if you don't want to scroll left and right. Plus, metro works wonders on multiple monitors you can select it from any screen.
Microsoft should had released sp2 for windows 7 and just release windows 8 with the "WinRT api" architecture leaving out "COM", ".NET", etc... every last bloat from the last 2 decades.
It'd be nice if they had one OS for client machines, one for servers, and one for mobile. Not
, etc.
Good luck with that. Been down that road several times. Management does not seem to understand that software 'unification' is just as elusive as the GUT in physics.
If what's his face hadn't gotten leukemia or cancer or something, we'd probably be running on it instead of NT, but since he did M$ sold it off, developed OS/2, decided not to play with IBM, and developed NT. And the rest as they say is history.
Not all but certainly the vast majority.
No Macintosh has a windows key and those are fairly popular. Plus just because lots of keyboards have a Windows key doesn't mean the system should assume or be designed to assume that they all have one.
Honestly I never use it even when I have it. I just can't figure out how to work it into my workflow in a way that makes sense to me. I use Windows, Mac and Linux machines regularly and utilizing special keys just screws me up. I try to keep things as similar as I can across systems. YMMV of course.
The bigger problem with global shortcut keys is remote desktop tools, VMs etc. Will the global shortcut be picked up by the outer system? the inner system? both? (IME it's usually the outer system but I haven't tried win8 yet) what do I do if I want the other one?
I run Win8 through VNC. It's the outer system that typically picks up the key making it effectively useless. I presume the same would generally be true for a virtual machine but I haven't specifically tried that yet.
Actually, all decent ones do, but the key might be labeled "Meta" or "Cmd" or a funky icon something.
Demonstrably not true though I'll freely concede that the majority of keyboards sold have one or something that could serve as one. I know it's not true because I own several better than decent keyboards which lack a Windows key or any equivalent. That said, it's still not a good idea for Windows to presume or depend on the existence of a Windows key. It's fine to use but honestly I don't know anyone who actually uses it, myself included. I'm aware of what it can do and have tried using it a bit but I can honestly say I've never once seen anyone I know closely use the Windows key. Ever. Not kidding even a little bit.
If people could write real *Windows* applications for ARM, instead of just tablet apps, Microsoft would be in a better place right now. Many programs are released for x86 and x64 simultaneously... Why not ARM as well?
Why don't they just change directions like Apple did and put Unix underneath?
And less than Ubuntu Unity, if that is possible. I had resisted having anything to do with Windows 8 because Metro Sucked, and now I know that is true, having had to struggle with it today on a laptop. Thank God I didn't buy a machine with it preinstalled, I'd just nuke it along with secure boot and just use BIOS boot and boot a Linux. (I know that some Linux plays with Secure Boot.).
Windows 8 still feels like a single-process machine. I couldn't even cut and paste snippets from the browser into Idle (Python) such as I could do in any Linux system and because the OS is so slow, the pointer kept vanishing for minutes at a time, bogus. Windows 8 seems to isolate apps in their own desktops and not support clipboards between them.
So, I hope that if Windows is to be simplified that M$ has the wisdom to not use Metro as the standard. Can the end of M$ be that far off? We can hope.
Doesn't work with rings, clothing, or operating systems. A cell phone is not suited to work as a web server or a database server. No version of photoshop works on a cell phone or a tablet. Desktop work when done on a touch screen will produce gorilla arm. Nobody writes code on a tablet. And any attempt to do all these jobs on one OS will end up doing a poor job on all of them.
You have a point. Lets put it this way: I don't really care if the OS eats up 5 MB or 50 GB of my hard drive as space is cheap these days. I do mind, however, if the OS or the software it is bundled with is annoying, obtrusive, obnoxious, useless, superfluous, unnecessary or outdated and makes me spend time to get rid of it.
I read that as he wanted to uglify Windows. Of course, Ballmer's already BTDT. And trying to pick the prettiest Windows ever is like picking the tastiest catshit.
It's been done before: http://www.newser.com/story/191376/ex-reebok-ceo-wins-gop-senate-primary.html
As far as I'm concerned MS can shitcan the while RT thing. Ive had two Surface RT tablets in the past 11 months. The first new one would constantly freeze up which was real annoying especially after I had typed a relatively long post on a website only to have to restart the tablet and thus loose everything I had typed. Then the battery died on it after 9 months. MS replaced it with (I'm assuming) a new RT Surface about 8 weeks ago and even though the battery hasn't died yet the second one constantly freezes up just like the first one did. The only reason I keep the Surface is the supposedly added synchronization with MS products. If I had the dough I'd dump the Surface and get a different (and cheaper) tablet. A family member recently bought an IPad Mini at Target for $399 plus received a $100 gift card from the store. If it weren't for the small size of the Mini I'd consider getting one. Either way I'm finished with the MS RT. And there is no way I'd even consider spending a grand on a Surface Pro.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire