Fresh Air For Windows?

jmcbain writes "The NY Times has an opinion piece on how the next Windows could be designed (even through Microsoft has already laid plans for Windows 7). The author suggests 'A monolithic operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete design. We don't need to load up our machines with bloated layers we won't use.' He also brings up the example of Apple breaking ties with its legacy OS when OS X was built. Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"

heh, normal version

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/technology/29digi.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=technology&pagewanted=print [nytimes.com]

Short answer: no

Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?

Based on past performance: No.

This has been another edition of Short Answers to Stupid Quesitons.

Re:Short answer: no

The wise answer is "maybe". There are only two companies that have done something similar. Apple, tried doing it from scratch and basically killed itself in the process, had to adapt already written NeXT. Even that took forever and sucked for a couple of years before they got everything right. Microsoft did something similar with windows NT: a ground up modern rewrite that was mostly compatible with the existing windows, but there was a lot of time that passed between win NT 3.50 and win xp. So if they started right now from scratch, maybe in ten years they could have something that would be decent.

Re:Short answer: no

It could be done... in a sense. If they used their new virtualization technology (which actually isn't half bad, the beta even lets you take multiple snapshots, unlike vmware server), they could theoretically build in a "compatibility" model that could be enabled/disabled but could run older windows applications even if they new OS is radically different in how it handles such things.

Re:Short answer: no

It could be done... in a sense. If they used their new virtualization technology (which actually isn't half bad, the beta even lets you take multiple snapshots, unlike vmware server), they could theoretically build in a "compatibility" model that could be enabled/disabled but could run older windows applications even if they new OS is radically different in how it handles such things.

Sort of like what Apple did with OS 9/OS X?

If so, the trouble with that might be that the legacy OS (Win XP or Vista) is so large that the legacy OS portion would double the size of the installation. If I recall correctly, the OS 9 support in OS X only added 400 MB to the installation, as OS 9 itself wasn't that large. What was really nice about it was that it could easily be removed if you didn't need the legacy support.

(I may be wrong in my size estimates or misunderstand the OS 9 legacy support, as I moved from Windows XP to OS X when Tiger was released and have little experience with OS 9.)

Time to Get Rid of The Gates Borg Icon

Now that Bill Gates is retired from Microsoft, the editors should get with the times and lose that dated, painfully unfunny logo they use for Microsoft.

Most people probably wouldn't get the Borg reference to begin with, and now Bill Gates era at MS is officially in the past.

Only MS gets this ridiculous logo..now its finally the time they get rid of it.

Re:Time to Get Rid of The Gates Borg Icon

I vote for a chair breaking a Window :D

No, I'm serious. Get a picture from the Microsoft Headquarters, and from a building, add a chair breaking a window and falling to the floor. Cartoonize it, and you're done! :)

Re:Time to Get Rid of The Gates Borg Icon

If anyone doesn't get the Borg reference, they don't belong here, they should be at the geek office turning in their geek card (or educating themselves, whichever they prefer).

The "7" refers to nothing in particular

Actually it stands for Windows NT 7.0. Here's a quick run-down:
NT 3.1
NT 3.5
NT 3.51
NT 4.0
NT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000)
NT 5.1 (aka Windows XP)
NT 5.2 (aka Windows 2003)
NT 6.0 (aka Windows Vista/2008)

No

Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?

As someone who started developing applications for Windows in 1991 and stopped around 1999, I doubt it. Better let legacy applications (and the whole x86 mess too, BTW) fade away, they have gone far beyond their useful life.

Not gonna work / we already have it

Apple could do that because they were much smaller than Microsoft, and had a small but relatively loyal customer base, and their rewrite did pay off, as people are generally very happy with OS X and don't care about the incompatibility with OS 9 and older anymore.

Microsoft has a huge userbase with much less loyalty, and generally a huge existing investment in software.

We don't need a MS Windows rewrite, we've already got Ubuntu, because that's essentially what the article author wants: an operating system that Just Works[tm], even at the expense of compatibility. That's a pretty good description of any popular Linux distribution.

Re:Not gonna work / we already have it

I would add that Apple did not do a full rewrite but, instead, adopted a stable, mature and very sophisticated OS from NeXT. Apart from that, OSX is very different from the classic MacOS and deeply incompatible. Any compatibility had to be bolted on its top.

Microsoft has nothing like it and will not buy an OS outside.

Or they could just grab any flavor of BSD, close it, build a Win32 susbsystem on top of it and sell it as Windows 8. They already did that with a TCP/IP stack.

Windows done right from the ground up

WinCE. Pity about the name, though.

They should make a concerted effort to drop legacy

Keeping 'legacy' support has always been a nice excuse for not significantly upgrading the OS (or spring cleaning). Having tried to run many older programs under the promised legacy support (including the options to emulate previous versions of windows.) I can say that I've had small successes in keeping old software running on Windows.

To me it's always been an excuse to keep windows bloated, and not actually any effort to keep old software functional.

Yes, it's been done before

Windows NT had an emulation layer that handled 16-bit apps. OS X had Rosetta and the Classic environments. And Microsoft now owns Virtual PC.

They have the technology to make Windows a clean OS with emulation errors for doing whatever legacy OS you want. They just seem too lazy to do it.

Fluff piece

He really doesn't know anything about the internals of the Windows kernel or the Mach kernel, he's just assuming that since the NT kernel is "monolithic" and the Mach kernel is a "microkernel" then the latter must be better, and the reason it's better is it is "smaller."

If you want to know where the real problems with Windows lie, they're in the API and the shell, not the kernel. The NT kernel is perfectly fine. See this Ars write-up by someone knowlegeable:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars [arstechnica.com]

I'd like to point out that Microsoft employs one of the original authors of the Mach kernel, Rick Rashid. He runs Microsoft Research. Look it up.

Re:Fluff piece

I'd like to point out that Microsoft employs one of the original authors of the Mach kernel, Rick Rashid. He runs Microsoft Research. Look it up.

Being put in MS 'Research' is the kiss of death if you want to make something that MS will ship. They seem to hire those brilliant people and give them massive funding only to keep them happy and prevent them from working for a competitor who might want to actually SHIP something brilliant they would come up with. Rather like IBM, only substitute incompetence in place of amorality as motivation.

Re:Fluff piece

The Ars Technica piece is interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical about this whole idea of making radical changes in Windows and breaking backward-compatibility.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that there's a huge downside for the user when you break backward-compatibility. Apple actually did an amazing job of maintaining backward-compatibility when they made the switch from 68000 to powerpc, but when they brought out MacOS X, the backward compatibility was lousy. You could still run classic apps on X, but they typically worked very poorly -- some features wouldn't work, apps would crash, and it took a really long time to start up the classic environment. Essentially Apple expected you to buy all new applications. Then Apple kept on bringing out frequent point-upgrades to MacOS X, and every single one cost a significant amount of money. My wife bought one of the early lamp-shaped iMacs, and we stayed on the upgrade treadmill for a while, but it really got old spending money every six months or so for a new version of the OS, so at this point we're still running an old version of MacOS on that (expensive) machine. Now we basically can't run any new software, because it only works on newer versions of MacOS X.

It's also worth looking at it from MS's point of view. They're a monopoly, and their interest is in keeping users sucking at the tit. Maintaining backward compatibility has worked very well for them. One of the main things keeping Windows users from jumping ship for another OS is that they know their apps will continue to work. It's actually kind of amazing. I tech at a community college, and some of my colleagues are still using an old DOS shareware planetarium app. It still runs on Windows XP.

Sure they can!

Just switch to Mac and get parallels :P

Yeah, I know, not very funny. But does every comment have to be great?

Die Monkey Boy

There was a time when a much leaner Microsoft highly respected and rewarded employees who could write good code. These were the people who rose to positions of responsibility. Today, Microsoft is run by Sales and Marketing and coders are viewed as an expense. Until this situation reverses itself, don't expect any improvement in the product they create. They are too stupid to realize their product is the code. Ballmer being from sales only reinforces this problem. Perhaps he should be moved to a chair throwing division that does the monkey boy dance, and someone who can both create great code themselves and manage coders should be brought in as CEO.

Re:Die Monkey Boy

Precisely. Other OSes are designed to be used, while Windows is designed to be sold.

Re:Wine?

WINE just provides a reverse-engineered implementation of the Win32 API. Microsoft has the real original code.

Re:Wine?

the windows NT kernel is fine. Moving to BSD or linux, or QNX etc won't improve it. OS X wasn't just a move to BSD, it was also a move to OO via Cocoa. The toolbox/Carbon is/was strictly procedural, much like the Win32 api. DotNet is OO, but so was MFC.

Re:frist pawst

I would argue that the New York Times is better qualified to write an OS than Microsoft is...

Re:Existing legacy support. Wait, what?

Any software that was created in the past few years which vista 'broke' were most likely poorly designed or were associated with managing or doing the functions expected of the OS itself (with a few exceptions.)

Vista really isn't that 'buggy.' It is top heavy and uses way too much resources if you are only using it for limited things, but as a general purpose OS it really isn't that bad. I would still prefer Windows XP on new computers simply because I can get away with more power with a smaller investment in hardware, but I'm not necessarily 'against' Vista.