Windows Is Dead – Long Live Midori? 695
parvenu74 writes "A story from Infoworld is suggesting that the days of Windows are numbered and that Microsoft is preparing a web-based operating system code-named Midori as a successor. Midori is reported to be an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, an all-managed code microkernel OS which leverages a technology called software isolated processes (SIPs) to overcome the traditional inter-thread communications issues of microkernel OSes."
Thin Client? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prediction (Score:4, Insightful)
web-based == subscription model.
And quite pointless with people moving to mobile devices instead of desktops. While mobile Internet connections are increasing in availability and bandwidth, they are not mainstream enough to allow Windows to be completely replaced by the model.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it, why would I want to trust Microsoft, or anyone, with all my files?
I think I like the current model, I buy a computer and it is mine, I can put whatever I want on it, and I can use it with or without the internet.
I guess when my unreliable comcast cable modem drops offline I guess that means a worthless terminal till it comes back up. This is an improvement....how?
Windows dead? Dobut it. (Score:4, Insightful)
They can't even manage to get out a decent web based mail service and they want to have a whole OS on the web? Really?
I'm not too familiar with MS's services on the web but is there one that displays MS's competency on a web environment?
People will move to Apple. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine my mom wanting to shell out money over and over to Microsoft a la subscription just to play solitaire, check her email and play flash games, can you envision your parents wanting to do this?
Furthermore, I can't imagine my mom wanting to bother trying to set up wireless in ANY Linux distro, can you envision your grandparents doing so? My mom will likely buy an Apple, my sister & her husband will buy an Apple, everyone I know will by one instead of wanting to put up with another monthly bill. Really. Steve Jobs marketing machine will win this one.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
web-based == man in the middle attacks
Can you imagine a MITM on your OS?
Bad guys would no longer need physical access to your box,
Only access to your network.
Win8, codename Midori (Score:4, Insightful)
If MS kills Windows as we know it an replaces it with Midori, it'll take at least 5 years to happen, and Midori will still be called Windows.
MS is a slow, lumbering marketing company, not a fast, agile technology company. They'll never walk away from the Windows brand.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Information encapsulation (Score:4, Insightful)
No longer associated with BSOD? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, shut up already. These jokes are getting old and redundant. My Windows XP has not crashed a single time in months. Windows is no longer associated with BSOD.
Sorry, but Windows will always be associated with BSOD in my mind. I never forgive, and I rarely forget.
Re:No longer associated with BSOD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
All data and stuff gets placed into Microsoft server and you are using your terminal only to access it - from anywhere that you want.
I'm sorry: I trust no company with all of my data. That's why I don't use Google docs or Microsoft's current document offering. And now they want to store all of my data? I, for one, will gladly continue using Linux.
Don't Kid Yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The PC continues to be a dominant gaming platform which will never fly with a thin client OS or internet OS.
2. 9 out of 10 (my guess, might be higher) businesses out there will never consider an OS that is entirely dependent on a working internet connection. (And don't counter with "well, what about web services companies?" I mean top to bottom activities in a single company such as accounting, HR, project management, security services, legal, design, PR, etc.)
3. There will be a relative correlation between productivity and your internet speed. Not exciting.
4. Most of us would like to remain reasonably productive in environments where there is no internet connection (planes, trains, parks, beach, over seas, etc.)
5. People seem to forget that the browsers themselves as well as many of the browser features that they depend on (Flash, Movies, ActiveX, PDF, Java) all depend on some version of an OS with a "more than thin client and more than kernal" layer to begin with...
Singularity OS is a smart move (managed code, new process security measures). And you'll see a MAJOR uptick in SaaS and "cloud computing" (whatever the hell that means these days) from Microsoft, but we will not be rid of a client OS from Microsoft in this lifetime.
Re:No longer associated with BSOD? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, but Windows will always be associated with BSOD in my mind. I never forgive, and I rarely forget.
And Linux will always be associated with a very painful user experience that just isn't worth the amount of effort involved. Those that like pain love Linux. I can say that I've encountered a BSOD in XP but it must have been less than a dozen times spread across 5 years and over 80 computers. To me, Win98 was BSOD. Linux is painfully annoying. Win2000 was the first really solid MS OS. WinXP made Win2000 shiny. We've not tried Vista yet.
Linux and open source has been useful but annoyingly painful.
Doom! (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see here. I run Firefox with NoScript and CookieSafeLite, so that no-one can run scripts or drop crumbs on my system without my prior approval. I pay for secure anonymous proxies because my research sometimes leads me into strange corners of the net. I hate (and don't use) Vista because, among other reasons, I trust my own judgement of what to run on my system much more than the OS vendors'.
I despair of ever teaching my family an appropriate mistrust of the net.
And now, we have a Microsoft OS that is likely *designed* to have a big 'ol pipeline to the ISP that can only be "managed" by vendor-approved apps, and will leave a trail of user-identifying info behind it for QOS purposes.
We're all doomed.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem with this model: Windows is a hidden cost (Score:5, Insightful)
For a significant number of people Windows is a hidden cost in the total price of buying a computer. They aren't used to having to pay for their OS directly and suddenly having to do so may prove to be a psychological barrier to a lot of them. Just something to consider.
Re:Not Web Based (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No longer associated with BSOD? (Score:3, Insightful)
I never forgive, and I rarely forget.
That is a sure way to live a sad, lonely, disgruntled life.
Re:No longer associated with BSOD? (Score:1, Insightful)
Those who hate Microsoft enough to run linux will accept the faults of whatever linux distribution they choose, yet continue flaming Microsoft.
"At least it's not M$"
Hypocrites.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry: I trust no company with all of my data
I see this a lot on Slashdot, and I wonder... where do you keep your money? Banks are companies, as are brokerages. If you bought a house, there is a stunning amount of personal data stored with your realtor and title agency. Schools contain your entire academic record. Hell, the big 3 credit agencies have records that are very easy to access.
Why a mistrust for Google, but not these other services that people use so regularly? Or is everyone here just universally paranoid? :)
Re:No longer associated with BSOD? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can say that I've encountered a BSOD in XP but it must have been less than a dozen times spread across 5 years and over 80 computers.
Agreed and in my case it can almost always be invariably traced back to either:
1) bad network drivers, particularly wifi
2) bad video drivers
3) faulty ram
4) faulty hard drive
I've had linux kernel panics about as often, and for generally the same reasons.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Banks are covered by specific laws.
Online services are barely covered and privacy policies are wobbly at best. (They can't even statuate if EULAs are binding contracts for fuck's sake)
Re:Prediction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to push the Office-as-a-service idea though, it would be simple enough to do it by taking something like splashtop and put in a VNC, NX, or SSH client, then connect to a grid of application publishing servers. Very simple, pretty clean, and dead cheap to develop. No need for a new OS. The connectivity requirements would be pretty steep, but they always are for systems like this, which (IMHO) is why most people don't use them.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Not apples and oranges. The bank doesn't just have your money. They have information in bucketloads about you... they know everyone you've ever written a check to, everyone you've ever paid electronically, and how much money you make and spend.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm talking about personal data. The "whole IT team" is me alone. And I still would rather do it myself.
Besides, letting somebody else deal with it also offloads a good bit of liability.
Tell that to your customers if they ever sue you. One thing I've learned from handling sensitive information in the workplace is that if you collect it, you are responsible for it no matter where you store it/send it.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
You obviously don't remember the days of Xterms running over 10baseT from a Sun server. Fully graphical workstations playing xtank and so on remotely on less bandwidth than high speed wireless.
You do realize that even 10BaseT is faster than most cable modems in the US, right? In fact, the situation is even worse than you'd expect, seeing as how most Internet connections in the US are set up to give downloads more throughput than uploads. A heavyweight application like Office would require a much more symmetric connection than users have today.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Want Windows? Cool! Just $10 / month!
Word? Excel? Outlook? No prob, just another $10 / month.
Project? Access? PowerPoint? No sweat, just pull out another $20 / month each.
You want SharePoint? Exchange? Easy, just $5 / month per seat!
Want each of those? Microsoft is making $90 / month off a single person. For the amount of functionality it provides, plenty of people would pay that. That's over $1000 / year. And no one can save money by sticking to old versions! As software ages and settles, more people are satisfied with old software. A subscription model erases this problem for Microsoft, who sees that trend as probably the most dangerous possible roadblock to growth.
Re:Wireless? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe not in your business, but in my industry wireless is the only option. Between forklift operators, runners, and other misc. warehouse crew, there is no way to run cable.
We do have wired phones, wired servers, etc. But the core of the business is warehouse distribution, and in order to track product our warehouse employees need wireless.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, money is fungible. Put dollars in, get dollars out. There's no real problem provided that the bank doesn't do anything to improperly endanger the "get dollars out" part. But your data can be read and put to use by app provider and you'd never know.
Re:People will move to Apple. (Score:3, Insightful)
my main gripe with Network Manager is precisely its simplicity. It doesn't tell me when a connection to some wifi network failed. E.g., I tell it to connect to a given network (clicking its entry in the applet's popup)... it then tries something (it doesn't tell me what it is doing) and fails silently. I just fucking hate this. I have switched to using just iwconfig, and having a couple of scripts for the networks I access the most. Just works.
So far, I haven't seen a perfect wifi network GUI. I'd go for a larger dialog, showing me the available networks in a list and a console-like box telling me what is going on when it attempts to connect.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
If I had a website that offered full MS Office functionality and compatibility for $10/month... wanna bet I'd have some takers?
Interesting thought...
On the other hand, Google is making their on-line office utils more and more capable every day. Think there might be a price war? How do you undercut free?
Also, companies will feel pretty queasy about their highly sensitive data being hosted on some MS server somewhere...
Re:Prediction (Score:4, Insightful)
If I have to be connected to the internet in order to use the MS Office functionality... no thanks.
In fact, I've got MS Office functionality, whether I'm connected or not, for FREE, because I use OpenOffice.org. That's a better price than $10/month, although I'm sure that there are marketers that can convince people that it's better to pay $120/year than $0/year. Maybe if you use pictures of hip young people paying $10/month and dancing in a groovy way to hip music, you might have a lot of twenty-somethings lining up to give you $10/month, even if all you give them is a laugh behind their backs.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
> As software ages and settles, more people are satisfied with old software.
Exactly. It's true for operating systems, applications, and hardware. The biggest aids to the growth of the PC were it's weaknesses. OS bugs. Application issues. Hardware inadequacies. You needed the next incremental upgrade because this one doesn't work worth a crap. And the one after that when that one didn't do the job either.
At some point, the hardware gets fast enough for the average bloke, and hardware sales start to slump. Office tools get good enough, and sales fall off. The OS gets good enough, why upgrade? The companies who became giant players on this growth paradigm will need to adopt new business models. And probably be a lot smaller.
Mind you, I can see a continued although reduced need for bleeding edge hardware. There will always be gamers and others who are pushing the envelope. How fast does my video need to render? As fast as I can conveniently afford.
But I am having a more difficult time seeing an overriding need for another version of Windows, and I just can't make myself believe we need yet another version of Office. To most of my peers, Office 2000 still works fine, thank you very much.
It occurred to me the other day that I was writing a document in a version of Office that just had it's eighth birthday, on a machine built in 2003, using an OS from 2001. And I said to myself "Cool. I am finally spending more time using my PC than I am upgrading it." And that is as it should be. We are over the technology hump, and no amount of marketing can call that back.
Even the guaranteed vendor pipeline, where nearly all new PCs run whatever latest OS managed to escape from Redmond, has to eventually slump, for the simple reason that whatever is currently on your desk meets your needs. (Imagine that?)
Given all that, what, exactly, does Microsoft have to sell? Or, more accurately, how the heck do they maintain explosive growth in a mature market? It's got to be preying on someone's mind.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
.
Why the hell would they want to do that?
Sun has spent almost ten years and two or three hundred million dollars trying to hammer Star Office and OpenOffice.org into a plausible alternative to MS Office.
Microsoft just keeps moving the goal posts.
The mix will vary depending on the target audience - but there will always be one or two pieces that FOSS doesn't have - at least not in so mature and accessible a form.
The student gets OneNote, the church gets Outlook and Publisher.
The geek always underestimates Microsoft's willingness to compete on price. Microsoft sold MS-DOS for $44 in 1980. Two hundred dollars below the price of CP/M 86.
There are by some estimates a billion Windows users on the planet.
Microsoft doesn't need a $1000/yr/user to maintain its current revenues - it only needs $60/yr. $5/mo.
Think about those numbers and ask yourself how many FOSS developers have a reasonable prospect of extracting $5 a month from their mass-market user base - -
which one hopes that - when you past the marque projects like Firefox and Frozen Bubble -
is not an oxymoron.
Re:Prediction (Score:2, Insightful)
If the replacement rate for a desktop computer is 3 years, and everyone buys for $250 and Windows for $130 - that's less than $400 over 3 years... or just over $10 monthly.
But alas - the replacementrate for a desktopcomputer seldom is only 3 years - and especially office-software sees an even longer time of use.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
By getting there first? Yes there's linux now, but MS had DOS out the decade before. People knew the name Microsoft before the Linux kernel was even a single line of code. MS also talk corporate. I recently visited one of my first corporate level clients, and simple they don't care at all (exagerating slightly; it's definitely lower down on their priority list) about which is technically better, they care about what happens if you die, a machine breaks, a supplier drops out; are there any potential non-redundant parts to what you provide that they shouldn't rely on. They wanna see financial reports, know you have a roadmap, know there's at least two people who can do any one job. It's one of those self perpetuating reverse-of-a-catch-22 things; Microsoft are successful because they're successful. So many people will pay them money because they're going to be around for quite some time because so many people will pay them money etc etc. Like money, the only reason everyone wants it is because everyone wants it. (don't say "I don't!" cuz you so know what my point is!) :-)
Oh, and they put their product in schools so when kids grow up, that's what they know how to use, that's what they're comfortable with.
Trust? (Score:3, Insightful)
Web based OS?
Look, we can argue back and forth about thin clients and whatever - but let's look at something important: security.
All your stuff goes over the web. Do you trust your ISP? Your gouverment? Microsoft? With all your data? Yes?
I don't.