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.

Comments

Best Wishes !

[Taco Cowboy]

Hope that he has a better luck in unifying Windows than those who wanted to unify Unixes

Re:Best Wishes !

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

Re:Best Wishes !

[Cryacin]

Meet the new boss. Same as the boss before the old boss.

Re:Best Wishes !

[techno-vampire]

I'd love to see a single UI that works across...

You might, but I, at least, wouldn't because what you'd end up with was a UI that worked equally badly on all types of screens and wasn't really right for any of them. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, preferring to use Linux, but I will say that they're right in not trying to shoehorn a One True UI onto everything.

Re:Best Wishes !

[arglebargle_xiv]

I'd love to see a single UI that works across...

Microsoft have already done that. In Windows 8 they unified the Windows interface around the design for the vast number of Windows cellphones out there, leaving the totally insignificant Windows desktop/laptop market to wither. The overwhelming market response has justified this decision, in as little as twenty years Windows 8 could even overtake XP.

Re:Best Wishes !

[Miamicanes]

Yes... and no. In theory, if you did a virgin installation of Windows 95 onto a pristine new computer whose peripherals ALL had genuine Win32 drivers capable of running in 386Enh protected mode, and you ONLY ran "true" Winapps that bent over backwards to have no dependencies on realmode, DOS was basically a Grub-like stage 2 bootloader invoked by the BIOS that loaded Windows, kicked the PC into 386enh Protected mode, and handed it over to Windows. And you probably had a pet unicorn living in the back yard ;-)

From what I remember, the compelling feature of Windows 3.11 that distinguished it from Windows 3.1 was native Win32 code for reading & writing (V)FAT filesystems on IDE hard drives (which gave it a HUGE performance boost compared to 3.1).

I believe that one of Win95's launch-time features was that Microsoft re-implemented the VESA BIOS extensions (and original VGA BIOS) as proper win32 drivers, so that manufacturers like Tseng and S3 only had to provide them with "miniport" drivers that did the grunt work that would have otherwise required them to fall back to realmode. I'm pretty sure the 386enh hooks for video BIOS emulation existed in 3.11, but the actual Microsoft-written code was given to vendors to distribute on their own disks & wasn't directly used by any video cards the day Win3.11 went to manufacturing. In a sense, Windows 3.11 existed to give videocard manufacturers a prototype platform so they could develop and test their protected-mode drivers on a released operating system.

Yay.. This is easy to imagine

[brxndxn]

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

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you must have heard this when reading the writings of Isildur, after the battle of Dagorlad.

      Windows Three for the Elven-kings under the sky,
        Windows Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
        Windows Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
        One Windows for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
        In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

        One Windows to rule them all, One Windows to find them,
        One Windows to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

        In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Re:Death bell tolling for thee....

[FuegoFuerte]

I think/hope you misunderstand. Where Ballmer really wanted to have one Windows to rule them all, with one crappy UI on all of them, I'm hopeful Nadella is talking more of a unified base with UI adjustments/differences as needed for each device type. You can have a unified release of the base OS with one style interface for tablets, another for desktops, and possibly another for servers. Windows Server has been doing this for a while, with some versions coming with full UI and others with just the CLI. They're a unified release - they come out at the same time and use the same base, but there are different UIs available, similar to one release of Slackware coming with multiple window managers and it being the user's choice which one to use (if any).

So, to give people their "bad car analogy" it's like selling an International DT466 engine in a school bus, a semi tractor, a very large pickup truck, a combine, and a tractor. It's the same engine ("unified release"), but the user picks the chassis/body appropriate for their need. If Microsoft can successfully pull that off, it will be a big win for both the company and consumers.

Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Death bell tolling for thee....

[plopez]

If it was a good idea Apple would have done it long ago ;)