Gartner or no, it seems unlikely that Microsoft would be able to sufficiently modularize Windows in order to do this even if they did agree it was a good direction to go. Modularity and separation of problem domains haven't really been Microsoft's strong suit, have they? I'm thinking, for instance, of how Windows Explorer locks up while waiting for a device (CD drive, network connection) to respond. There are good reasons for not mixing UI and device communications on the same thread, and yet they didn't even bother to separate them in the main user interface to the OS. (Well, they hadn't as of XP, anyway -- 18+ years into developing the OS.) That's just one example of a failure of modularity in Windows. The usual path they seem to follow, be it the message pump (remember when it was one pump for the OS and all apps?) or Internet Explorer, is to go monolithic and only modularize when the monolith fails. Not commenting on the good or bad of that strategy (that would be a different flame wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussion), but it gives insight into their approach to software development, one which is not particularly friendly to Gartner's ideas...
Anyone else disagree with ESR purely on timescales? He seems to think once we've all switched to 64-bit (and it's debateable whether that will actually happen by 2008), that platform will be locked in for 30 years. Seems unlikely. I doubt we'll move to 128-bit any time soon, but the next major platform shift, be it more parallelism, more collaborative and ubiquitous computing in the home, etc., will happen a lot sooner than 30 years from now. And FOSS (and Linux in particular) are well-positioned to be in on many of the things looking like coming down the pike.
Sadly, he may well be right about proprietary binary drivers being a necessary evil in the short term. But as J.P. Rangaswami points out chatting with Doc Searls in this month's Linux Journal, this probably is a short-term problem.
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Gartner or no, it seems unlikely that Microsoft would be able to sufficiently modularize Windows in order to do this even if they did agree it was a good direction to go. Modularity and separation of problem domains haven't really been Microsoft's strong suit, have they? I'm thinking, for instance, of how Windows Explorer locks up while waiting for a device (CD drive, network connection) to respond. There are good reasons for not mixing UI and device communications on the same thread, and yet they didn't even bother to separate them in the main user interface to the OS. (Well, they hadn't as of XP, anyway -- 18+ years into developing the OS.) That's just one example of a failure of modularity in Windows. The usual path they seem to follow, be it the message pump (remember when it was one pump for the OS and all apps?) or Internet Explorer, is to go monolithic and only modularize when the monolith fails. Not commenting on the good or bad of that strategy (that would be a different flame wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussion), but it gives insight into their approach to software development, one which is not particularly friendly to Gartner's ideas...
Anyone else disagree with ESR purely on timescales? He seems to think once we've all switched to 64-bit (and it's debateable whether that will actually happen by 2008), that platform will be locked in for 30 years. Seems unlikely. I doubt we'll move to 128-bit any time soon, but the next major platform shift, be it more parallelism, more collaborative and ubiquitous computing in the home, etc., will happen a lot sooner than 30 years from now. And FOSS (and Linux in particular) are well-positioned to be in on many of the things looking like coming down the pike.
Sadly, he may well be right about proprietary binary drivers being a necessary evil in the short term. But as J.P. Rangaswami points out chatting with Doc Searls in this month's Linux Journal, this probably is a short-term problem.
That is too cool.