The upcoming 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows, which Microsoftologists have taken to calling Windows 8 because Redmond has yet to announce an official name, has been appearing here and there and getting some press in the process. Microsoft has made a few statements, demonstrated early version of the OS, and some alpha code has even escaped into the wild. And the image that’s emerging is of Windows 8 as Microsoft’s take on the mobile transition, with the new OS running on everything from smart phones to server clusters. It also may represent Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s last chance to preserve his company’s digital dominance.
Ballmer confirmed back in January that the next major version of Windows would have a version for power-sipping ARM processors, which are mainly installed in smart phones and tablet computers. He reinforced this idea more recently by explicitly saying Windows 8 would run on all the hardware platforms Microsoft currently supports right down to phones, calling the next version of Windows Microsoft’s “riskiest yet. ”
Ballmer is correct: Windows 8 is make-or-break for Microsoft.
PC sales in the developed world are declining while smart phone and tablet computer sales — particularly from Apple — have been exploding. Embracing mobile then is much more for Microsoft than a strategy for success: it is becoming a strategy for survival. The risk lies in Microsoft’s need to retain desktops while simultaneously leaping the mobile divide, which they have never before tried to do with a single product.
The alpha versions of Windows 8 that people are now trading over the Internet dates all the way back to last fall and may well be the version shown by Ballmer at CES in January. It was shipped to hardware manufacturers to test on their computers only to be leaked to the public. And what we see feels remarkably like, well, Apple’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard right down to the App Store.
Between features that are operational in the alpha version or are hinted at in the code comments and registry, users are now experimenting with a 64-bit operating system (32-bit for the ARM version) with lots of extensions for mobile use like syncing to the cloud, 3-second hibernation, push notifications (borrowed from Windows Phone 7), a built-in PDF reader, and an attractive new user interface with some elements of that borrowed from Windows Phone 7, too.
Also hinted at in the code are effortless network connections to servers, printers and other networked devices like televisions.
There could be lots of other features, too, though the user experience from Windows 7 was that Microsoft promised more than it ultimately delivered.
One feature that has been getting a lot of buzz from developers is Windows 8’s apparent ability to boot from a USB stick. The attraction of this is the idea, popularized in the Linux community, of carrying on your keychain your entire computing environment including individually tuned operating system and all needed applications and files. Put the USB stick in any borrowed PC and you are in business, right where you left off on another PC. But given that USB-boot has also been a popular way to circumvent PC security systems and it seems to go against Microsoft’s own Windows Live cloud strategy, this may be an alpha feature aimed solely at OEM hardware engineers and completely missing from the final product.
Most Microsoft product roadmaps show Windows 8 shipping to users in the fall of 2012 after entering a formal beta test at Microsoft’s Windows Developer Conference in September of this year. Ballmer even said that last week in Japan, speaking to developers. But this week Redmond’s PR apparatus is saying Ballmer was wrong and the next version of Windows won’t ship to end-users until 2013.
Such a delay is not a good sign.
Though Microsoft is the dominant supplier of desktop software, what happens if a lot of those desktops go away or are not upgraded? That’s the fear that underlies Windows 8, making it so important. It is at platform transitions like DOS to Windows or standalone to networked where market leadership can change. Microsoft, as one of the smaller mobile players despite several tries over many years, is placing a huge bet that this time they’ll get it right. The company’s recent deal with Nokia, bringing the huge Finnish phone vendor into the Windows Phone fold, is an important part of this strategy.
But with desktops in decline overall, Microsoft losing desktop market share to Apple and being so far totally dominated in an exploding mobile market, the question to be answered is whether Windows 8 (or whatever it is finally called) will be good enough?
I doubt it.
If Windows 8 is a bust, then, what’s a Microsoft to do? That’s my next column….
Great post! Great use of hyphens.
I dunno about the hyphens, but great use of em dashes!
Microsoft’s problem is the past represents a huge cash cow, leaving little incentive to jump into an uncertain future. Bill did it when he launched Windows, but he had the Mac to show him the way so it wasn’t really a blind jump. It still took guts though. Stuff like that young men do, probably, ultimately, to impress the girls; middle aged men do it not. Ballmer is four years away from being 60; he’s not for jumping.
The key: MS had built Office on contract, and to their spec, for Apple. No such precursor this time. MS didn’t write DOS, although they did re-write it eventually. They had office applications, pre Office, which were dreadful. They had decent compilers, which got better when Borland pushed them, but those days are long gone.
The answer, if shareholders matter, is cash out. Not gonna happen, but what scam Bill and Steve try, I’ll guess we’ll have to wait for the next column.
MS is caught in a paradigm shift. is the classic desktop/laptop going away, except in stodgy business’ cubicles? business is becoming quite vocally resistant to coerced updates because of Microsoft’s pricing and steady demand for more computing power and memory to even start loading. you really can’t upgrade your existing machines any more, the whole shebang has to be replaced. and the programming is a moving target… oops, VS6 is not reliable any more, so go .NET… oh, wait, you need to use Silverlight… geez, none of this works on the web, half the users scream because their -ix boxes can’t pull up your website.
and they can’t get traction in smart phones with basically a 2002 product in Windows Phone, with an app store glued to the side.
the iPad has 95+ percent of the market and has gone viral inside business as a POS tool (that’s Point of Sale, perfectly good acronym, what’s wrong with you people?) WinSlabs are, charitably, double priced and half the machine.
this is 1H 2011, and they are talking about changing it up for keeps in 2 years with Windows “8”? by then, Android 5 will be on hacked ebook readers, and the iPad will have eaten the Intel/AMD personal system space.
Ballmer, ol’ boy, this is Windows 1.1 all over again. except Microsoft is not likely to survive until Windows 3.0 this time.
if it isn’t right, and out in 6 months for Christmas sales, you and yours are in huge, collective “stick a fork in it” trouble.
business is becoming quite vocally resistant to coerced updates because of Microsoft’s pricing and steady demand for more computing power and memory to even start loading.
And Apple’s strategy of everyone dropping your one-year-old iPhone and running out and getting a new one is any better? Businesses like to operate on 3 year depreciation for equipment for employees, and that flies in the face of Apple’s “gotta have it NOWWWW” strategy.
By comparison, MSFT’s strategy is more spread out.
Whatever dude. Do you know anyone who can’t use a 2+ year old iPhone?!?!
Apple products have much longer lives than Windows products and I haven’t seen that change. Lots of upgrades, but iPads will be fine for years.
Exactly! The “explosive growth of mobile” is a BAD thing with a capital B! You want to know why PCs are flatline? because you don’t have to chunk them in the garbage after a year because nobody supports it!
I figure we have another 5-7 years tops for this “designed for the dump” thinking before it falls down and goes BOOM and if MSFT is smart while they’ll support mobile devices (hire the guy that does the “Tiny” versions MSFT, the guy is better at making a thin and light Windows than you! XP running great with full functionality at 64Mb? Windows Vista and 7 running fast at 512Mb with room to spare? Nuts!) they’ll make sure they keep the ownership of the desktop.
Because like it or not resources are finite, especially the materials which go into mobile devices, many of which are only found in the middle of warzones like the Congo. When the prices of these things shoot up because the commodities they are built on shoot up “designed for the dump” will be as dead as an 8-track and people will demand their mobile devices last like their desktops. The ONLY reason you are seeing this growth is the throw away culture, hell even my 68 year old dad has a drawer FULL of cell phones, simply because nobody supports or fixes them!
When you figure in the coming shortages of raw materials, on top of the damage the ever growing wireless bombardment is doing to us and the environment (look up colony collapse cell phones to see that it looks like the cell saturation is destroying bee hives, without which we don’t have food crops) people will have no choice but to curtail the mobile craze, and they are gonna want long life which MSFT has traditionally provided. Perhaps it is time to offer software contracts to the masses? Perhaps 5 years of mainstream OS support followed by a one time payment if you wish for another 5 years?
Because as someone that works selling and building computers I can tell you most folks are getting less than 2 years out of their phones, less than 3 out of their laptops and after that into the garbage it goes. We will simply not have the resources to waste not to far into the future, just as we thought nothing of giant Hemi engines when gas was $0.50 a gallon and now very few would even take a second look at a gas hog. There is only so much we can extract from the planet and at our current waste levels I’m betting within 5-7 years the “designed for the dump” attitude will come to a flaming end.
Microsoft is concerned, if not downright scared, right now.
They are getting squeezed, really HAMMERED, in the datacenter/server market right now. Sure there are some IBM & Sun installs here & there, but Linux is pervasive and its server market share is dominant & climbing.
On the portable devices, it’s all iOS & Android. Microsoft isn’t even an also-ran.
So that leaves the desktop. With more stuff moving to the cloud (who needs MS Office any more?), with Linux desktop distributions becoming more user-friendly, and with OSX/Mac gaining market share (esp. in the laptop market, which is growing even as the desktop market shrinks), it’s clear that the walls are closing in for Microsoft.
If they’d stop treating their customers like pirates, if they’d stop selling their product for 5 cents on the dollar in China, if they’d stop breaking useful features in every other version of the OS (based on history, Windows 8 will be the next bad one), then maybe they have a chance.
I don’t give them good odds. They will survive, at least for now, but their market muscle and technical clout are dwindling.
Can’t wait to read your next column.
Losing to Linux. Come on, have you even looked at the counts of OS shipments in the last 19 years? Linux shipments peaks and are declining.
How do you count shipments of a freely downloadable O/S that’s mirrored all over the place?
If no one knows the linux count, it may be small enough to make Jay correct.
Have you looked at the numbers for anything that ISN’T a desktop PC or laptop? Linux is on more phones by # of units shipped than anything else. Microsoft IS loosing out to either Linux or Apple in pretty much every market where they don’t have an entrenched monopoly. The current MS desktop monopoly is very difficult to dislodge since so many applications already exist for it, that can’t reasonably be ported (think internally developed software at corporations). In pretty much every other market MS has failed to really get anywhere (OK they made some headway with servers, but not much else).
Let’s look at some other markets:
– High performance computing is almost entirely Linux (95% of the worlds top 500 supercomputers)
– Embedded systems pretty much exclusively Linux or some specialized RTOS
(Linux is in an awful lot of TVs, home routers, in flight entertainment systems, car navigation systems, etc. Windows is pretty much entirely absent from those systems)
– Phones (as I stated above, including some stuff other than Android, like WebOS)
– Servers, do I really need to go into this one? (According to netcraft MS serves about 20% of hostnames, the rest is probably mostly Linux with some being the BSDs and proprietary UNIX)
For a very long time Microsoft road on the “it is all I know” mode of customer loyalty. Friends speak of the pains of DLL Hell, Viruses, Spyware, etc as if they are as unavoidable as taxes and death. I stopped trying to argue a long time ago.
Apple and Google has demonstrated you can have a complete computing experience with none of those issues. And they slipped in via the evolution of the cell-phone – something more pervasive that the desktop computer.
Microsoft is losing the server battle to IBM and Linux. Microsoft is losing the desktop market to desktop market shrinking and changing. Microsoft lost the tablet and phone markets due to not innovating in time.
Here is where I am hoping for some Cringely insight. Microsoft is too big and their products are two entwined with enterprise for them to vanish or become insignificant.
I see a dichotomy I cannot resolve in my head. They lost the Post-PC products war the way Apple lost the desktop. The survivable number of Post-PC ecosystems is approaching saturation and Microsoft has lost consumer faith – and they don’t have the “all I know” going for them. But don’t see their technology in enterprise as feasibly replaced in the short to medium term.
Where does this leave Microsoft?
If they’ve already lost the phone wars, and the desktop is going away, does that only leave The Cloud?
People like to talk about The Cloud like it’s already here. But 99% of the people I know do their work with locally installed software.
No, that leaves Post PC hardware – phones, tablets, set-top boxes, etc.
“The Cloud” is today’s buzzword for centralized storage. Software-As-Service is today’s buzzword for yesterday’s buzzword “Thin Clients”. Many people I talk to use all those words interchangeably.
Both those models are being pushed hard because there is a lot of revenue to be had being the gatekeeper of data and/or software. That makes me nervous.
And public cloud services are “data on a platter” for hackers. No self respecting company will want to put it’s mission critical data in a public cloud, and if they do, they deserve all the hacking they get.
May be they do, but as recent events have shown, their clients likely don’t. Only two ways around this: either the clients find a smarter provider, or we get criminal sanctions for this stuff. Criminal statutes *do* get corporate’s attention, don’t you know.
One place where MS, at least by the numbers, is doing OK is SQL Server. There’re still gobs of listing for SQL Server, more than most anything else. Well, MySql is really a RDBMS as typically used.
What threatens MS here is the rise of coding based datastores (NoSql, xml, json, et al). But that trend threatens Oracle and IBM, though less so since they’ve concentrated on Bigger Gorilla systems.
What is saving Microsoft is SharePoint, it’s all the rage. Most large corporations use Oracle as the backend, not too many use SQL Server (in my experience with large /medium pharma) small folks use MySQL.
Also Microsoft can buy market share — they did this with XBox. No reason why they can’t do it with mobile devices. Free Windows Nokia phone with each XBox purchased.
Is it really software that drives a consumer choice, or hardware?
Innovation comes from spotting a new process or technique which gives added user experience. Capacitive touch-screens made of glass for example. They revolutionised touch-screen phones/computers. I had resistive PDAs, resistive WinCE notepad computers. They failed, in my view because of poor technology. The iPhone and Touch took glass capacitive touch-screens and ran with them setting the standard. Now everything of quality uses them.
As I use both OS X and Windows 7 I can appreciate both platforms for what they are. Everyone (and I mean I only know of two exceptions) I work with uses Windows PCs and aren’t changing O/S anytime soon. For one thing they simply don’t understand the hype. iTunes syncs their iPhones to their PCs, no problem.
Where I think Apple wins is in the beautifully designed hardware which makes your average PC box look merely utilitarian. Like B&O does to hi-fi. They take new ideas and technologies and develop them, creating markets (iPad). Microsoft, on the other hand is really only software (I’m selectively ignoring games consoles!) and they have to service a bewildering array of components.
Horses for courses, as the saying goes. We need them both.
Windows OS architecture and security are sub-par. I am not going into the details of why. Any arguments to the contrary are irrational and not based in concepts of good software design.
Consumers are realizing they can raise their expectations. And they are.
Microsoft only software? Ignoring their game console – which is their biggest hope and the center of their new eco-system is short-sighted.
Ah but my ignoring of the game consoles arena was because this blog post was about Windows 8, not gaming. Microsoft also make keyboards, mice, web-cams etc and all are pretty good compared with other brands.
As for the technical aspects of one system’s superiority over another I seriously doubt most consumers understand the ins and outs.
Umm.. obviously you aren’t going into the details of Windows OS design anfd security because you don’t know them. A lot has changed with the OS security and architecture since Windows 2000 and even XP days. Time to look at a Windows OS thats newer than 11 years old.
I work in all versions of Windows and in the security field. Yes, Microsoft has made great strides with Vista and 7 – much improved. But it is still an architectural mess with swiss cheese security.
Dave is an ignorant moron. I am not going into the details of why. Any arguments to the contrary are irrational and not based in concepts of reasonable human behaviour.
See, this is a fun game that everyone can play…
— Like B&O does to hi-fi.
Have you listened to B&O stuff??? It’s pretty, and sounds crappy. Kind of like Apple, more sizzle less steak.
Good point! Last time I seriously listened to B&O was in the early-mid 80’s 😉
You are ignorant of the steak that is Apple my friend – you want sizzle, try Aero!! Ha , Ha. Can’t wait for MS to add Kinect to it new phones…. Why innovate when you can buy some sizzle and steal Apple ideas.
I wonder if a lot of the delay in the release of Windows 8 is in porting to the ARM architecture and trying to get all those bits and bytes in the right place. I remember Microsoft abandoning their multiple architecture support for Windows 2000 which at the time was probably the right move but in retrospect, maintaining some sort of architectural agnosticism would have put them in a better place today.
On the same note, Apple gained an advantage porting OS X to Intel and with the flexibility of the micro kernel underneath, porting to different architectures is probably much easier.
Having to rearchitect the Windows codebase to work on different platforms and scale down to a memory footprint comparable to iOS and Android will probably break them.
That all depends how much Windows 8 and the new Windows Mobile are based (and supports) legacy software. iOS abandons all Carbon and PPC legacy concerns.
iOS never supported Carbon and PPC. OS X has stopped supporting PPC for some time now. Carbon has been on the ‘do not use’ list since OS X 1.0. Carbon allowed easy translation for software written for OS 9 and prior. That was a long time ago, and it feels like eons.
Apple has successfully migrated its user base, and it has ended support for software and hardware along the way. Microsoft should do the same thing.
.Net is the framework holding Microsoft together, not Windows. Legacy support will be Sharepoint, Exchange and Office365, etc. The Win32 API is dead.
Metro is the UI for the ARM based versions of Windows 8. Perhaps Metro could run on Intel based PCs in a window. That could provide a singular view to the new Windows.
It could happen.
At the same time, I agree with Dave Smith. It will be like trying to shove 10 pounds of manure in a 5 pound bag. The software I reference might not be resilient enough to do what I describe. Metro may not be robust enough to support the platform.
And then there’s Microsoft’s track record…
OS X still supports PPC. Rosetta is an optional install for “Snow Leopard”. I know this because I still use an old PPC version of Photoshop.
The upcoming “Lion” will be the first version that completely drops support for Rosetta.
You’re right Michael, Rosetta will run PPC software in Snow Leopard, but it looks like that is the end of the line.
I was referring to OS X being able to install on PPC hardware. I think Tiger was the last OS X to install on PPC hardware.
Good insight on Microsofts problem from Marc Benioff the SalesForce.com CEO. Here’s an excerpt (part was repeated on DaringFireball):
“Our flagship, Sales Cloud, continued to crush the competition in the quarter. Microsoft’s desperate strategy of underfunding, pricing with undifferentiated and highly proprietary products basically has had the same impact on our business as the Windows tablet and Zune did against the iPad and iPod. We call Microsoft’s strategy, “the Zune strategy”.
It’s the concept that they can take a proprietary, undifferentiated offering at a lower price and somehow make an impact on a high-value, highly differentiated product that’s loved by customers. Microsoft has not changed our exceptional win rates or affected our average selling price with this Zune strategy.
Customers continue to want visionary products that give them a competitive advantage, not the me-too Zune-type products locking them into these old, proprietary, desktop-driven platforms that are dying off.
Against Microsoft, we won significant new or add-on business at companies like Eli Lilly, Cargill, Honeywell, Ingram Micro, Changi Airport in Singapore, Bombardier, Bank of Espirito Santo, Biotec, Digia Finland, Greenway Medical, LQ Management, LXE, Misys, Monumental Sports & Entertainment, and the New Zealand Defence Force.
These wins against Microsoft were new wins, but we also signed companies that had bought the Microsoft Zune CRM, tried it and threw it out, and customers included the Advantage Brokerage Support Services, Angie’s List, CHC Helicopter, the Nemetschek Allplan and the O.C. Tanner.”
Full transcript is worth a read especially if you are located in Redmond.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/270964-salesforce-com-s-ceo-discusses-q1-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript
I wonder if this would still be a major issue if Bill Gates were still CEO?
Gates recently went on record stating Microsoft did not drop the ball!
My, that’s some tasty Kool-Aid, eh, Bill?
I don’t think Gates would have made any difference. He is a shrewd businessman but I think he had a lot of luck too and was just in the right place at the right time. I doubt he could do anything to help MS now.
The next CEO needs to be a visionary that isn’t afraid to cut things loose. Maybe spinning Office into its own separate company would free MS up to concentrate on their OS strategy.
In fact, I don’t know why their isn’t a separate skunkworks division that is developing a new OS from the ground up to replace Windows and all it’s legacy baggage.
If they lose this gamble they might have enough cash left over to buy out the wine project and use a Linux or BSD kernel for their reboot… much like Apple did.
Apple added foo-foo design skills and user-interface insight .. what would Microsoft have left to be a differentiator? Maybe supporting legacy-trapped businesses would be enough.
Have you used wine? It doesn’t do much more than support games, which is about all its users want. Any call into the OS kills it, so no Word or SQL Server or anything that matters.
Who uses Word? Almost everyone I know uses Docs.google.com. it’s free and “Good enough”
Who uses Word? Well, for starters I, all my colleagues and every employee in the company I’m presently working with (35,000 employees). My wife uses it. My kids use it. Most of my friends use it.
We’re not into all this “Microsoft is Dead” prognostication, we just use the stuff and it works.
-Max
Why do all those people still use Word? Because you don’t have to change and/or you don’t know any better.
That ain’t a great recipe for innovative success. You keep paying for Word and everyone else will enter the next century.
Games are really the only thing wine needs to support. Anything else has an alternative that’s as good or better on the libre software side.
But, but, but MS needs all that Office and SQL Server and Sharepoint and and and revenue. Windoze isn’t the main revenue generator, but is the enabler of the applications which do generate revenue. The wine notion would mean having to port all those applications to the *nix kernel of choice, since wine can’t handle that part.
Er, no. wine will mostly run word (or at least if at any point it does not, it’s one of the things they put a lot of effort into fixing). Lots of apps work unmodified, other than games.
Ok it probably wouldn’t do too well with the server stuff, mostly because it’s targeted at desktop stuff, and even if the server stuff runs it’s probably not going to perform very well…
But it does go far beyond games.
Reading the comments so far (especially Marc Benioff’s quote) it really hits home that consumerism is the driving force behind Microsoft’s problems.
People want to use their cool highly personalized devices at home and at work. That is driving control away from the tradition authoritarian and Microsoft centric IT.
If Windows 8 is a bust, then, what’s a Microsoft to do?
I have no idea what your next column would be about, but if Windows 8 was a bust, as stockholder, I would demand Ballmer and the board to resign, have Gates return only as an interim CEO until a new board and chairman with bold different ideas for company could be installed.
I would start shorting Microsoft, if I was a dirty-brown-shorts (ewwww) Wall Street type.
— bold different ideas for company
If you have any, send the BoD an email. They might hire you.
Apparently Ballmer’s resignation is already being called for.
https://www.cnbc.com/id/43175658
Mark, I defiantly agree with your overview.
The shear diversity and speed of change meant has their VSM has jammed repeatedly.
I like many here have been watching the geek embraced hacks around Kinect.
Although the hacking has been vehemently discouraged, MS has softened a little and is encouraging it now. Incorporating hacked Kinect could well prove to be the point of difference.
Could an interactive Minority Report GUI be incorporated in Win8, using Kinect?
Adding Kinect is not that simple, the culture at Microsoft has been structured wrongly. Simon Sinek video covers what I mean.
http://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4
Whom do you /defy/ to agree?
Wow, history repeats itself. Many years ago there was an old paradigm for personal computing and a new one — DOS and Windows. One of Microsoft’s now extinct competitors had a great database product and an up and coming spreadsheet product. They were poised to take over Ashton-Tate and Lotus’s market positions. The world was clearly moving to Windows. This firm decided to create new versions of their products simultaneously to support BOTH operating systems. Most software products were at the limits of DOS’s capabilities. This firm developed some very sophisticated memory management technology to force fit their applications into DOS, instead of moving on and developing a really great Windows version. Their products were late and buggy. No one wanted the DOS version. The Windows version wasn’t as good as it needed to be. Microsoft Office was then free to take over the world, and it did.
It is stupid to make one OS fit several disparate platforms. Yes you can borrow code and concepts. But at the end of the day it is best to create a best of class product for your next big platform and not try to drag along the past. Borland tried and it put them out of business. Steve Balmer — please, please don’t repeat Philippe Kahn’s mistake !!!
It is also stupid to “keep up with the Jones.” Yes having a bootable USB stick with all your stuff is a neat idea. But in the corporate world there is another word for it — a huge security risk. If someone can boot up a PC on my companies network without a proper authentication — that is a problem, a really big problem. Steve Balmer — please, please give serious thought to WHAT features you choose to add and WHY.
We really don’t need a new version of a desktop operating system. If you feel you have to develop one, design it to be ultra reliable, more capable, and a good workhorse. Design it to do serious video editting/graphics work. Design it to support much better, higher resolution displays. Design it to handle massive amounts of data efficiently.
You definitely need a new operating system for handheld and small electronics. It needs to be small, very clean, secure,. It needs to have very good realtime and multitasking features. It needs to promote very high quality applications with a very good and standardized user interface.
Steve Balmer — before you get too carried away. You need to give serious thought to how Microsoft will make money with a handheld device operating system. I am sorry but I am not going to pay much for my applications. I can count on one hand the number of applications we’ve “purchased” for our iPhone and Android devices. There is an entirely different business model with handheld products. You can not assume Microsoft past business model is applicable for the future. Given this, from a financial point of view you would be wise not to build one OS to serve two entirely different types of business.
Last week I was of the belief Microsoft was actually close to a new business vision, and a good one. One that would make lots of new money for years to come. I was seriously thinking about buying some Microsoft stock. If Microsoft is really going to create Windows 8 to fit everything, then maybe I should invest my money elsewhere.
— It is stupid to make one OS fit several disparate platforms.
May be so, but that’s what *nix has done. Linux is only one version, which has itself run on multiple hardware (instruction sets). It can be argued, and I do, that *nix is the single most important reason we’re down to a few cpu’s. Before that, the hardware (instruction set) and the OS were Siamese twins and there was great diversity. Not any longer. *nix “proved” that an OS could be instruction set agnostic. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is moot.
Linux runs on more platforms than anything else, ever… and it scales quite nicely from your home router or TV UI to the top 500 supercomputers in the world (95% of them in fact). Same OS, same kernel, same code.
[…] Read more… […]
Why doesn’t Apple just move on to OS11? Wouldn’t that just be a merging of OSX and IOS? You know that they are working on Touch Screen iMacs… They could make THAT system run on iPads and MacBooks. Then release OSX that runs on ANY Intel machine. ANY! Sell it for $40. Have Dell license it and stick it on every Dell computer for $5. What would they lose? Microsoft!
Apple will move to iOS and ARM as its sole platform. Multiple platforms is expensive. These things take time. Lion will be huge step in that direction.
Apple is not moving to iOS and the ARM platform that make no sense at all. You must not be a developer so I’ll explain. The iOS operating system is a subset of OS X with some extensions added for a Pad device such as touch. It will always be a subset of OS X since it runs on a puny underperforming ARM processor (compared to the latest Intel Core i5 and i7 processors). An Intel chip can emulate an ARM chip with cycles to spare.
You will see UI features of iOS moved to OS X when it makes sense, but that’s a cup of water in the ocean in comparison to the large OS X code base. The ARM chip will never match Intel on performance. Also Apple would lose the option of running Windows applications under Boot Camp or Virtual Machines like Parallels. Users wont stand for that! This hole ARM rumor started from Apple maybe using Intel Fabs to create the A5 chip instead of or in addition too Samsung.
Don’t get me wrong, the ARM is a great chip for what it’s designed for. Small devices that need to run fast with low heat on little voltage i.e. iPads, iPhones, …
“You must not be a developer so I’ll explain.” Wow, that is both assuming and condescending.
“The iOS operating system is a subset of OS X with some extensions added for a Pad device such as touch.” Derivative and parallel – Yes. Subset – No.
“It will always be a subset of OS X since it runs on a puny underperforming ARM processor”. There is much more to a computing device than the processor. And their is much more to OS services than processor task scheduling.
“An Intel chip can emulate an ARM chip with cycles to spare.” Today.
“You will see UI features of iOS moved to OS X when it makes sense, but that’s a cup of water in the ocean in comparison to the large OS X code base.” Tell that to the 100s of 1000s of iOS apps using iOS services not in MacOSX.
“The ARM chip will never match Intel on performance.” That is a funny prediction.
“Also Apple would lose the option of running Windows applications under Boot Camp or Virtual Machines like Parallels.” Boot camp – Yes. Virtual machines – No.
“Users wont stand for that!” The millions of iOS users won’t stand for having apps that run on desktop hardware. Nor would Apple want those millions of iOS users buying desktop hardware.
“This hole ARM rumor started from Apple…” …buying a processing architecture, making more money than Microsoft on that platform, making Lion look like iOS, and not wanting to own multiple platforms.
“You must not be a developer so I’ll explain.” Wow, that is both assuming and condescending.
–Didn’t mean to be, sorry, it was like 2 a.m.
“The iOS operating system is a subset of OS X with some extensions added for a Pad device such as touch.” Derivative and parallel – Yes. Subset – No.
–OS X was a Derivative of OpenStep, iOS is a Subset of OS X.
“It will always be a subset of OS X since it runs on a puny underperforming ARM processor”. There is much more to a computing device than the processor. And their is much more to OS services than processor task scheduling.
–I totally agree!
“An Intel chip can emulate an ARM chip with cycles to spare.” Today.
–And twenty years from now two. There two completely different chips for two completely different devices. Understand, I think the ARM chip is great for what it’s designed for and if Intel want’s to compete in that market they better get there asses in gear. The ARM market is were all the new growth is going to come from.
“You will see UI features of iOS moved to OS X when it makes sense, but that’s a cup of water in the ocean in comparison to the large OS X code base.” Tell that to the 100s of 1000s of iOS apps using iOS services not in MacOSX.
–I’ve been an GUI developer since the original Mac 128K. The amount of iOS features that will be back ported into OS X will make up .0001% of its over all code base.
“The ARM chip will never match Intel on performance.” That is a funny prediction.
–That’s the easiest call of them all. There so far behind there not even going to try nor should they. There in a very different market.
“Also Apple would lose the option of running Windows applications under Boot Camp or Virtual Machines like Parallels.” Boot camp – Yes. Virtual machines – No.
–Okay, you got me on this one. Yes you can have a virtual machine all in software, god knows I had VirtualPC on my Mac years ago and it ran at about 30% the Intel speed instead of Parallel which runs at 90%. And to get that kind of speed it took a PPC to get 30%. You would need an ARM running at 5X it’s current speed to match what Parallels does today.
“Users wont stand for that!” The millions of iOS users won’t stand for having apps that run on desktop hardware. Nor would Apple want those millions of iOS users buying desktop hardware.
–I wasn’t talking about the iOS users, I was talking about the Mac users.
“This hole ARM rumor started from Apple…” …buying a processing architecture, making more money than Microsoft on that platform, making Lion look like iOS, and not wanting to own multiple platforms.
–No it didn’t come from Apple.
I love the iOS, and even convinced my daughter to buy an iPad 2 (which she and I love). I’ve been an Apple II owner and have owned nothing but Macs since the original 128K (I told my wife tonight I want to get the 27″ i7, it didn’t go over to good, but I planted the seed). I’ve been a developer for the Apple II, Mac, and Windows. I would love to get a chance to develop for iOS. It’s one of the most exciting software challenges to come along in a very loooong time.
Don’t forget that for most people “good enough” is all they need. If the Intel processor is 10X “good enough” and the ARM one is 2X “good enough” they become interchangeable based on processing power.
The tricky part of this comparison is that “good enough” varies based on what you want to do. For example, an I/O intensive process doesn’t much care how fast the processor is. Even rendering graphics isn’t near as processor intensive on a 3×5 inch screen.
I’d love to see research showing what percentage of people use various types of programs based on how hard they push the device hardware, whether it be CPU(s) or graphics processor(s). If they show the change over time and compare it to the hardware capabilities of typical computing devices available at that time, I think we would see more users over time with devices that have more than enough processing power to handle their most intensive application’s needs.
This trend is not likely to go away.
@Iee “I think we would see more users over time with devices that have more than enough processing power to handle their most intensive application’s needs.” That’s true since if they try to install something that needs more power than they have, they will just uninstall it and say it’s crap. That’s sort of what happened with Vista.
john C. OSX already runs on most Intel PC hardware newer than 2008. So Apple could release this Intel platform now. google ‘hackintosh’.
dave. Apple has already made its Intel workstation OS cheap to maintain by porting it to run on top of a BSD kernel. It is in a good position to leverage the vast amount of open source development and developers to keep its workstation current and only focus on the bits that really matter, for example, as you suggest, moving to the ARM platform.
NextStep was written on top of the BSD Kernel. MacOSX is a rebranded newer version. It ran a many different types of processors. Apple kept the Intel build alive knowing very well that they may need to abandon the PPC architecture. The release of the first Intel Apple consumer product was about 6 years ago – long before this new landscape.
Apple purchased ARM. They own their own processor. They lost PPC to XBox. Apple does not like having another organization control their components.
Apple is making an awful lot of money on apps made for the ARM processor. Modern development tool chains and the Framework style binary packaging makes it easier for Apple and developers to maintain multiple platforms. But why would you given their new post-PC platform?
NextStep was written on the CMU Mach kernel, an independent development from BSD (hey, kids, let’s write a Unix!). like the rest of the world (think networking and sockets) BSD provides the underpinnings for much of the real world support. a make with correct libraries has in the past made packages ginned up for Linux work on OS/X.
all these -ix variants have a good probability of interworking if standard calls are used and variant-specific libraries have been standardized by their appropriate open-source communities.
the MS equivalent is supporting everything back to DOS 2.1 calls without patching the 20 years of bugs in the original code. which explains their lock on business; the old stuff still works well enough. unlike COBOL, however, there is not evolution under the hood to improve the bug-trapping.
Vista started breaking the 0-ring assumptions, however, and moving off XP to newer versions is as close to a “market review” risk as is rewriting everything to public standards and putting whatever is cheapest by the container on the desktop.
so MS has issues on all fronts.
they’re almost better off using Whatever Special Magick ™ in the OS and emulating everything if you don’t buy their conversion packages.
If Apple opened up access to their OS then they would lose their sheep!
If Apple can’t control fully, their customers then they are not interested in them.
Apple will always be a niche product due to it limited use and appeal. Its trendy but not not useful, its pretty but not value, etc etc
Microsoft Windows is the general purpose product and works well, but unfortunately has tied itself too much to the desktop. It aint pretty but it works.
Apple is definately NOT the solution to real computing, and desktop computing isn’t going anywhere soon!
Can you imagine a world where a meglomaniac dictates what you can and can’t do on a computer, controls and charges for all content it processes, and limits your access and availability to data? Hang on, if your an Apple user then you do!
Finally! My Steve Ballmer article is coming! Looking forward to it Bob!
My totally unscientific prediction is that Windows 8 will suck because the history of Windows is that they come out with a decent product and ALWAYS follow up with a buggy follow up. Consider: Win95 was pretty good. But Win98 was buggy. WinXP was good. WinVista was, to put it kindly, ahead of its time. Win7 so far seems to be pretty solid. So the only conclusion I can reach is that Windows 8 is gonna SUUUUUCCCKK.
Poor Microsoft. This upcoming debacle will be yet another nail in their coffin.
Microsoft has become an unnecessary cost centre. Every time it decides it needs to create a new OS for its own reasons, it costs its existing users vast amounts of time and money. Most people need a new OS like they need a hole in the head.
The best thing would be for MS to go into a full-time maintenance mode fixing holes in existing products such as XP and 7. We might not even mind paying them for this as it would save time an effort in the future. It should be pointed out though that this could be done better by opening up Windows to the open source community. If MS remains involved in the process it can be allowed to fade away and die when all the bugs are fixed or nobody uses their software any more.
Remember, we should require all commercial organisations to provide a net positive input to our society. We don’t exist to support commercial ego trips.
May 26 (Bloomberg) — Greenlight’s Einhorn Says Microsoft Should Replace Steve Ballmer
Greenlight Capital Inc. President David Einhorn called for Microsoft Corp.’s board to replace Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, saying the software maker suffers from “Charlie Brown management.”
https://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-05-26/greenlight-s-einhorn-says-microsoft-should-replace-steve-ballmer.html
on MarketWatch I recommended shorting 5 bucks. the history is solid in favor of a slide on all fronts.
What an insult to Charlie Brown!
Price, timing and UI.
Price of the OS < $100. For everybody.
Timing, early 2012.
UI better by a mile than Honeycomb (currently the best) for tablets. Taskbar UI ok for desktops and laptops.
IMPHO release to vendors by August 2011 for Christmas shipments, or windows becomes market-irrelevant. maybe not Win8, but that’s a stopgap on the way out for devout MS shops who need years to transition away.
Microsoft’s undoing will be its desire to completely dominate the market in the way it did during the PC era. They just don’t seem to get the “eco-system” era. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, his mantra was “MS doesn’t need to lose for Apple to win”. I don’t think Balmer and Gates are capable of such humility in knowing when it’s time to start playing a different game.
UNIX
LIVE FREE OR DIE
Unix is forever
There’s a wider malaise at Redmond evidenced in their employees’ extranet activity. They have attained the critical mass of a self-serving bureaucracy and are in the process of tearing themselves apart from the inside out. Split-up and sell-off is now an attractive proposition for those senior execs with a weather-eye on an IPO of their respective divisions.
“3-second hibernation” ok so in other words they are still keeping their obsolete page management scheme. Running NT on a 486 with 20 megs or RAM it made total sense to be pessimistic and write everything in to the page file as soon as possible. That way if you needed more memory for another process you can just free it, you don’t need to wait while it pages out. Thats good because it means you can do your pagefile writing I/O when there is the least amount of other disk I/O happening. Its very efficient if the assumption is for any process its going to need to be paged out at some point.
It totally sucks on current box where people have 4 gigs of memory in their single user desktop. Chances are there is NO need to page out any given application; but there is other disk I/O happening. So Windows users get to listen to disk rattling away constantly. Stupid Stupid
Although it does mean you can hibernate quickly because you don’t have wait while everything is written out to the page file, its already there.
Linux distros have a target of a 3 second BOOT. And it has been done (not with an out of the box install, but most of the time if you have an SSD you’ll get boots 10 seconds or less…)
There’s no need to actually discard pages that you’ve written to disk unless something else wants them, and in fact it is a good idea to keep lots of easily discardable pages around… I’m not sure what MS actually does… but writing pages to disk if you’re not otherwise busy is a good idea. Everybody does it, (Linux, MacOS, BSD, etc all try to keep most of the memory as clean pages, they don’t throw them away until something else needs the space, but they do swap them out)
The classic case for a paradigm shift in technology was from propeller to jet airliners.
Before the shift, if memory serves, Douglas was #1, Lockheed #2, Boeing #3.
After the shift, Boeing was #1, Douglas #2, and Lockheed #3. And along came Airbus with help from European industrial policy. Lockheed dropped out. Douglas merged with McDonnell, and lasted until the mid 1990s. Today there’s only Boeing and Airbus.
Microsoft deserves this fate. They forced Windows 3.0 down the worlds throat at the expense of OS/2 which was a vastly superior system. How many productive hours were lost during the 1990s because of Windows locking up on people while they were in the middle of building documents and spread sheets? Only a fraction of that productivity would have been lost under OS/2. IBM’s big mistake was not just giving the operating system away for free.
I don’t have much faith in Micosoft. They build junk. Personally, I think Microsoft would be better off buying RIM. They seem to have a good operating system for Ipad type devices that could maybe be expanded down to Ipod touch sized devices. Make Skype work on them with (better) push notification and use 4g mifi’s to eat into smart phone markets. Sell mobile mifi’s at a fraction of the cost of a phone (okay so they buy Clear as well). Give the stuff away for a song.
The company reflects Gates’ personality. They got market share by getting to an inflection point in technology first with an inferior product but high volume. If you get there first you don’t have to be the best. If you are second or third, you have to be the best, and you have to accept radically smaller margins, meaning sometimes giving stuff away.
Microsoft hasn’t ever built a better quality product (with the possible exception of Excel, in the 1980s); especially when it comes to operating systems. They are on their way out.
My knowledge in these areas is tiny, so, Im anxiously looking forward to the next column to see what you have to say.
— They got market share by getting to an inflection point in technology first with an inferior product but high volume.
Gates and Co. were just serially lucky:
1) Digital Research blew off IBM
2) Seattle Computer had QDOS, which MS “stole”
3) Lotus built 1-2-3 to only one assembler/OS and chose PC-DOS
4) Apple contracted for Office
5) IBM did let MS spike OS/2 (stupid twice with Gates, of all things)
6) most importantly, the 1-2-3 lust allowed MS to write anti-competitive contracts with PC vendors, for which they got a very late slap on the wrist
All good points – and agreed.
MS took advantage of ‘strategic opportunities’ left open to it by IBM and others. So perhaps they had good business strategic thinking back in the day.
Today they don’t seem to have that.
Then there’s the tactical thing – that’s the execution part. They’ve never had that.
They always fell back on their strategic positioning, which meant using the coercive means brought by size and market dominance, when able to do so.
Not sure what they can do good these days – if anything.
Bet Cringely’s next column on this subject has to do with how you cope with large size, but poor strategic and tactical capacities. How does an elephant survive?
I think a good strategy would be a two pronged assault: one aimed at basic education, and the other at corporate market.
I think a smart strategy might include dumping cheep ipod like tablet clones on the market that were real good as text book readers, and that had cheap, easy, robust docking capability to cheap dumb keyboards for students (I think one of the taiwan mfgs already has a good model of this sort of thing). They’ll carry these devices from class room to class room. These devices don’t need to have hardly any moving parts. Then flood the education markets with them and perhaps a higher end one for corporations. Offer different scales of the same basic product, from 3.5, to 5, to 7 to 10 inches. Develop a hub and sync node for multiple devices and backups – people are going to lose and break these things all the time.
I think Apple at this point is farther down this road when it comes to making their device a reader for the education market. Amazon has a similar mind, but they don’t quite have the right device yet.
In the financial news today is a growing number of investment groups calling for Steve Balmer to step down. From a Wall Street perspective, Microsoft’s stock has been flat for a decade and this is unacceptable. They feel it is time for Steve to go.
That said changing CEO’s is a very risky move and it could take several CEO’s until one is found who can produce results. If however a Windows 8 OS that fits everything is in fact Steve’s decision, then he needs to go.
https://www.winsupersite.com/article/commentary/microsoft-fix-microsoft-136203
Hey Cringe, what are you smoking these days?
How do you see Apple’s 90+ percent market-share in tablets as insurmountable, when the rest of the industry is just waking up? Sooner or later someone is going to kick their butts with far more reasonably priced, probably Android based products, that the rest of the world can afford.
At the same time, you figure Microsoft is lost with the same 90-or-so percent of the desktop market, a strangle-hold they’ve maintained for decades.
I’d love to know what you think is going to replace Windows in the near to medium future. While I prefer Linux and OSX over Windows (though 7 is a significant improvement), when it comes to software selection, nothing comes close to Windows.
Over the next couple of years, mobile devices will likely become powerful enough to replace netbooks, laptops and desktops. However to make any real dent in laptop/desktop sales, they’ll need more convincing user interfaces: most people will quickly tire of typing on a 10 inch iPad, or for that matter reading a 10 inch screen. To seriously replace desktops, mobile devices will connect to keyboards and screens, much like those found on desktops, and users will expect full-featured applications, not the over-simplified versions currently available on tablets and phones. Microsoft and its developer ecosystem will again rule this space.
Cheers,
Peter
“How do you see Apple’s 90+ percent market-share in tablets as insurmountable, when the rest of the industry is just waking up? Sooner or later. . . . . . ”
Don’t hold your breath, the phone OEMs do not have clue what they’re doing, as for Rim, both half-CEOs seem to be somewhat delusional. I have some hope for HPs web-os, time will tell.
Apple’s main rival will be Amazon going forward, this could be interesting as they seem to have opposing priorities – Apple provides content in order to sell hardware, while Amazon will probably sell their tablet(s) as cheap as possible and make money on the content.
— At the same time, you figure Microsoft is lost with the same 90-or-so percent of the desktop market, a strangle-hold they’ve maintained for decades.
The issue, no where near decided yet, is whether *any* desktop will dominate the future. I’ve been writing for some time that with high-core-count/SSD machines (cloudy or sunny), commercial/business apps (you know, the sort of thing MS has been flogging for decades) may well move back to the VT-300/X-window connected to a *nix database semantic. If that happens, MS is toast. The big stumbling block is figuring out: that data needs to be structured in small, easily digested bytes (aka, a BCNF RDBMS, which is antithetical to the flatfile messes beloved of OO coders), and a display paradigm for same. Ya ain’t gonna Word on a Phone.
At my work (an MS shop), we’ve taken to moving standard office users to VMWare network vm’s and for power users, local vm’s with various Windows and Linux/Unix vm’s. Add to this some roadmap info a couple of Intel engineers were spinning for us on their push for increased hypervisor capabilities, and security office’s wish for users to not have hardware access, I see a time when regular users will do everything in a vm, whether local or network based and only admin/support will have access to base OS. Also, OS’s may become more like Linux window managers, where main part of app code will run and only GUI interface will be different. Google’s already pushing for this and mobile apps are also heading this way.
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MS are just too slow to react, Windows 8 in 2013 should be a service pack to Windows 7 now, where will Google and Apple be by then ?
The old school Windows marketing model, and big company arrogance pushing its weight around are no more, going down hill, look at all those long term innovative employees whom have leftleaving.
I don’t see a big operating system migration in the future. A smart phone is basically a toy. You can’t do any serious computing on it. All of these people going out and buying smart phones also have desktop computers at home and work. Sales might be slowing for desktop pcs but thats because everyone already has one that does what they need it to. Smart phones are still finding their feet and new versions are being released so people are having to upgrade all the time. Out of the millions of smart phones being bought that are making these graphs look so steep how many are replacements for lost, stolen or outdated smart phones? And how does this map against the number of desktop pcs in use?
nice stuff about replacements for lost, stolen or outdated smart phones….
Yet another wankerific article on what Microsoft needs to do to keep from failing. It’s really amazing how many bloggers know better than the top tech CEOs in the world. Remember in the 1990s when every few months somebody was announcing the death of Apple? Good times.
Except that it’s historical fact that MS success, far and away and with only minor exceptions, are directly traceable to luck (and monopoly control; those contracts): outside forces made decisions which redounded to MS’ benefit without MS having to actually do anything.
GREAT point. Absolutely spot-on.
I guess that fear of irrelavance could be what is behind their free xbox promotion to college students.
I don’t claim to be an expert on these things but I’d be willing to bet IOS (for iPhones, etc) and OSX (for workstations and laptops) are two different operating systems. While they have common elements the differences exist for very important reasons and Apple will continue with a 2 OS strategy for quite some time to come.
Starting with Windows 7 Microsoft started calling many of its products Windows 7. The embedded version of Windows used in phones is nothing like the desktop operating system of the same name. Now I would like think maybe Microsoft is not merging the OS, but plans to calls all the new releases Windows 8.
Calling everything by the same name is rather silly. However force fitting everything in one OS would be crazy.
I am going to go out on a limb and say the world has not settled on one tablet. Apple’s iPad is clearly the best engineered, best designed product in existence. Today they are the clear leader. I know however if Google or Microsoft chose to, they could become a serious competitor. I think they both have management problems holding them back. Apple has a special culture that is capable of producing best in class work. When Google and/or Microsoft learns to do the same, then things will get interesting. Between the lines of Bob’s column is a sense Microsoft still has many organizational problems to overcome.
I agree with most of what you said, with one minor correction. Microsoft has never claimed that Windows Phone 7 is anything like Window 7. What they have been saying is that when they get to Windows 8, they will have a port or version for phones and tablets so that they can say their plan is Windows on everything. I agree that at first this will just be a silly name game. But, speaking as a umpc user, with Windows 7 Ultimate on a shirt-pocket size Atom 1.86 GHz device, I can imagine a future dockable computer/phone allowing people to have one device that works on the desktop and fits in your pocket for portable use. MS won’t do it alone, but with Intel’s new 3D chips, it sure seems possible.
I agree that Microsoft can’t afford to mess up. While computers are generally long-term products that most people can be 1 OS version late behind, any public perception shift away from Microsoft will have a very serious impact years down the road. Just see what the iPod effect had been, Apple is now the coolest tech company perceived.
Microsoft will be here for a long time but their lack of innovation and business model is damaging them.
Ballmer seems obsessed with shoehorning Windows onto every device and platform that exists.
Before Apple built a tablet that people wanted the previous attempts by Microsoft were laughable, the touch components were awful and the device struggled with XP’s core designed for mouse and keyboard.
Surely if MS want a piece of the tablet market then Ballmer has to understand the market but its clear he hasn’t a clue.
Apple gave people a lightweight tablet with a proper operating system that looks and feels good, it just works.
It has an army of small apps available which are lightweight and designed to work with little power.
So it would be logical to develop the WP7 for the tablet market,,,wouldn’t it,,?
Stripping down Windows and banging in some extra components won’t get you anywhere!!
The only reason MS would do that is to run legacy Windows programs which will look and feel awful on a tablet.
This is assuming that MS even get 8 right, making 7 was easy as it was basically Vista without the warts but if 8 is to do all the things Windows says it will then it will need to be one helluva operating system..
I have friends who wont move from XP as they don’t see anything in 7 thats ground breaking and there kinda right.
8 is a big deal for MS and i agree with Bob,,its beyond them….
[…] this week’s Lockheed Martin network breach story intervened, I wrote a column about the strategic dilemma faced by Microsoft from downward trends in both product pricing and new installations for its flagship Windows and […]
You know, the level of hysterical pronouncements on this page are astounding. Microsoft is a behemoth. It will take a LONG time for them to go away. They may lose the lead in the next 5 or 10 years, but all the way down? That is a wet dream without any substance.
I worked at Unisys in the late 80s and early 90s. That company has to have had the stupidest strategy going, yet they are still around.. a ghost of their former selves.. but still around. MS has some funky strategies going on right now.. but they understand their customers.. and there are LOTS of them.
Well, let’s see – Microsoft has been shipping 64-bit versions since XP (XP-64), though they didn’t really get it right until Vista (Vista 64) which followed on with the Win7 64-bit mode that was supremely better than what Vista had, which was already many many orders of magnitude better than the XP version. Add to that the fact that Microsoft has been talking since Vista that the version after it (e.g. Win7) would be the last consumer version to ship with 32-bit mode, and all versions thereafter would be a 64-bit version – so Win8 being 64-bit is nothing new.
Win8 is, after all, a follow on to Win7 much in the same manner than Win7 is to Vista – essentially service packs by another name. Gone are the days when MS ships 5 or 6 service packs, now that they are doing 1 service pack and then a new major release – you can see this across all their product lines, with exception of Windows where they sometimes still ship 2 services packs.
Again, with Vista/W7 and now Win8 MS is simply releasing refined versions, not reinventing the whole system on each release (ala WinNT4 -> WinXP -> Vista) – even if there are major visual shakeups (e.g. WinXP -> Vista -> Win7). Thanks to Ray Ozzie, MS can now do more iterative cycles as they have (and continue to) reduced the dependencies and removed kernel->userspace cyclic dependencies, even cleaning up the API files so you do not need to pull in everything under the sun for simple things. IOW, they have compartmentalized Windows such that it is now getting to be rather maintainable by actually paying attention to how things inter-relate.
That said, they are far behind the competition in terms of scalability. Mac (being BSD-based) and Linux (by design) scale from small, ancient processors to the massive mega-super computers. Windows doesn’t scale. Sure, you can put it on a Super Computer but you lose a ton of capabilities due to the overhead of the system – for GUI, etc – in environments where those components are not necessary. Granted, MS has come along way with the internal project MinWin that no user will ever see, and Server Core (which you can get, but still requires a GUI !!!). Until they realize that there are environments where the weight of the GUI is a negative – e.g. Super Computers, Embedded – and make a version that doesn’t require it then it will never scale properly.
And, btw, they’ve had it on ARM for years internally. Just like MIPS and PPC, etc. So no surprise its running there. It will be a big surprise though if they could actually make something useful for the non-PC environments – and no, WP7 is not it.
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although they did re-write it eventually. They had office applications, pre Office, which were dreadful. They had decent compilers, which got better when Borland pushed them, but those days are long gone.
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