Julie Larson-Green: Yes, MICROSOFT is going to KILL WINDOWS Microsoft's hardware chief has given the strongest indication yet that Microsoft has too many operating systems. "We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We're not going to have three," Julie Larson-Green told the audience at a UBS investor event. Larson-Green looks after the "Devices and …
As an owner of a first gen Windows Phone 7 Series Phone... phone...? it would've been nice if they'd worked this out before they spaffed a bucket of platforms up the wall. Since Microsoft figured out it needed to do something (which was long before WP7, they were running ARM ports of desktop Windows on phone hardware long before it, and there are official pictures to prove it), they've released Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 (which are incompatible with each other) Windows RT (which is incompatible with the previous two) and Windows 8 (which is compatible with RT but not necessarily welcomed on a desktop).
That's FOUR different essentially incompatible OSs, several of which look the same but aren't, and several of which share attributes but can't run each others' software. In THREE YEARS.
Fair enough, Windows 7 doesn't really do tablets very well compared to your Androids and iOSs, and Windows CE and its derivatives (Handheld PC, Windows Mobile, etc) were long in the tooth, but christ, how do you screw up a grand unification strategy THAT badly? I realise it takes time, but they could've at least been less batshit with the ground work. They knew Windows Phone 7 would be rendered incompatible and obsolete before they even started it, for example. The whole strategy seems ill-considered, slow to bear fruit and simply confusing to the people who are important: those who don't know what a kernel is or why this tablet can't run that app. What's worse, Microsoft's stance on telling people what's going on over the last few years seems to have been "go away, we don't know yet, don't tell anybody anything, it might be different tomorrow, panic panic, help!", which is unnerving at best.
I'm rambling, but Microsoft, you might wanna step up the pace and stop dallying with this half-arsed time-wasting and get your ducks in order.
I wonder what they will do when they dumb their own interface down so far that they can't even use it to create their next OS.
"Cannot find 'driver.inf', inf files are not part of the 'Valid Extensions List' that a user may search for. Would you like to Bing for more help?" -- Windows 13
NT is slowly coming back to it's original design: Processor independent.
From what I've gathered, Cutler originally wanted NT to be processor independent, meaning only the kernel and some basic low level drivers to compiled for each processor. But everything else above would be compile once, run anywhere. Complete abstraction for programs/applications.
It was abandoned in the beginning because processors weren't fast enough to make it viable, but now things are different. I'm eagerly looking forward to the new "Windows", is it's going to be rather interesting how it works out.
It was processor independent for a long time, from NT 3.1 which ran on Alpha and MIPS besides x86, via NT4 which added PowerPC support, right up to Windows 2000 which supported Alpha (at least up until RC1 where it was then abandoned) and reportedly existed for Itanium too. Then XP/Server 2003 supported Itanium, as did Server 2008 (and so by extension it should be possible to run Vista on Itanium too). Windows 7 had ARM builds, albeit only internally available, and now Windows 8 exists on ARM publically.
So really, when you look at it, Windows has almost never been confined to a single architecture. I don't have the experience necessary to talk about the compatibility of binaries between those platforms, however.
Most of the nitty gritty involved with this stuff is beyond my knowledge, but take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction#Microsoft_Windows
Essentially the HAL sits between the hardware and the rest of the OS and the software running on it, and in theory should be capable of translating between Windows' API and whatever the underlying architecture is. I don't know exactly how far this goes however, and I'm guessing you still need to recompile applications (and some of the rest of the OS itself?) using native code because it'll use architecture-specific instructions, much like ARM apps on Linux for example. Having said that, .net may render many of the concerns less important or entirely moot, but I'm not certain on that. Of course, .net didn't exist before the early 2000s, so it would've thought everything would've been native code on all of the NT versions with support for more than 2 architectures.
The more I think about it, the more I think I really have no idea how this works, but that's a good place to start looking if you're interested.
>It was abandoned in the beginning because processors weren't fast enough to make it viable
I seem to remember the reason was that MS didn't have the development maturity to develop and maintain a common source across multiple computer architectures. I suspect that with the fuss around XP and subsequent releases of Windows, MS may now have the controls etc in place to handle this.
I chuckled at her comment, "just as the mouse drove the adoption of GUIs..." which is a bit like saying that the invention of the cart required that we go looking for horses. If it were MS running things back then, we'd be using a string of pigs hitched under a pole, pushing the cart from the rear. Two boys with whips would steer it, walking alongside the pigs, with the lookout up front shouting directions.
Microsoft directions? Yeh, that about describes it.
Ah yes, Microsoft Logistics Edition. I remember it well! The home version only allowed for one pig and a cart that could carry one item but the professional version was more useful. The reason few remember it was probably because per pig licensing costs inhibited adoption amongst smaller players and the cart access licences for cart loaders and carry items became confusing and expensive if not managed properly. Being an open carry cart the security model wasn't too good but there were a lot of third party addons to try and rectify the situation. There was one major problem, once a pig was hitched then corrosion in the fittings made it almost impossible to remove. Rather than fixing this Microsoft touted it as a feature and gave preferential licensing to original equipment manufacturers that shipped carts and pigs as a single product.
Of course there were open source carts whose design didn't have to be licensed but it was difficult to get SLA's. There were also Apple carts but there were always people attempting to upset them and Apple typically responded with the courts. No, Microsoft had a good operating environment back then. The capacity of the cart was only constrained by what you could pay – businesses were comfortable with that concept.
Piracy eventually killed the Logistics Edition, pigs were just too damn tasty.
Windows desktop has been broken beyond belief.
My system boots Linux, Windows XP, Windows 7, even OS/2 with ease in less than 30 seconds, I tried Windows 8 and 8.1 for a 15 minute boot attempt after a half day installation, would not recommend that installation again.
Windows 8.1 has done nothing to improve the startup horrors created by 8.0.
In that case there is something wrong with your machine. I've had Win8 on a couple of different devices and VMs, I've never heard anything like this, it boots by far the fastest of any Windows OS in recent times. Indeed there are no credible sources of "my machine takes freaking ages to boot" on the Internet.
What is it with supposedly highly technical people who decide that something is rubbish before they even use it then fail to have any critical thinking such as: A 15minute boot time, hmm is that likely in this day and age?
Microsoft hasn't had a coherent developer story for the last decade plus. Between Win32, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight, XAML, WinRT, and a bunch of other stupid codenames, acronyms, API sets, and boondoggles, I have no idea where they want me to start if I wanted to make software for Windows.
This means that people at Microsoft can't possibly be focused on making ONE good API/platform, and it just keeps coming back to bite them. It means developers are going to be reluctant to make software for Microsoft platforms. It means community support of APIs/platforms is fragmented. It means Microsoft's own support of their APIs/platforms is fragmented. It enables asinine business decisions like making Windows 8 LOOK like Windows Phone but it's completely different internally. Ridiculous.
Step one for recovery is for Microsoft to anoint (or invent) ONE native-accessible API to program all their OSs/devices/etc. for the next 20+ years. Some of the UI libraries will necessarily be different (touch vs. mouse) like they are in OS X, but otherwise everything should all be the same--the entire graphics stack, sound, networking, threading, IO, etc. Basically they should continue their business strategy of copying Apple, but instead of just copying the end results, copy the strategy that allowed them to achieve the results in a coherent way.
Don't forget >>
Microsoft CAN NOT release a perfect version of windows even when that was/is possible, they are not only a software house but also a marketing industry (and they did a good job with that)
The shareholders would not allow a perfect windows because it would not make money
because :
. not selling new versions
. not selling updates
. technicians without work
. sysadmins without work
. less/no income from trainings
. less/no income from roalties on computer sales
etc etc etc
just because it just works without problems
what they want are
errors, virusses, incompatible hardware, problems and more disasters
just because that makes money by resolving a PART of the problems, upgrades, new versions, technicians training and working and if possible create some more money making issues.
somebody at IBM said once a long time ago (in the OS/2 ages) :
if it works don't fix it
Microsoft change that into:
if it need to be fixed we can make (more) money.
So, if you stay with windows your future is upgrade, renew, fix and pay
You don't want that than you have to use a (more) stable alternative
"While RT is the more sophisticated API, Windows Phone appears to be winning the internal political battle, with stories suggesting it has been freed to scale up to 7-inch and 10-inch tablets."
Wasn't this sort of inter-departmental dick swinging one of the major factors that led to the demise of Nokia?
Meego vs S60 vs Some other linux whose name I can't quite recall
On the bright side however, it looks like Nokias merger with MS won't include too much of a culture shock.
Made to sound like they are coming from the mouth of a 13 year old with anger issues by using such chlidish phrases like "Microshaft" "Micro$oft" "WIndoze". They're not even original and haven't been for over a decade. Time to grow up, perhaps? Stop foaming at the mouth and judging everything outside of your particular ecoshpere as somehow less worthy than you?
And you have to remember - marketing aside, license tie-ins aside, Linux has been _freely_ available for an awful long time.
Even my old man, who is not the most techinically adept user is aware of it.
But he uses whatever version of Windows that was put on his machine at purchase time. He could change it and knows this but _he chooses_ not to because what _he_ has does what _he_ needs it to.
Most users are not necessarily techinically adept. They use Office at work on Windows. Why would they want to retrain / relearn something from scratch?
Personally I use varied OS's because each one does something I require. My storage and media server is on Suse because it's on a very low-end Neo based microserver that doesn't even require a GUI; my little SIP based PBX is on CentOS and my antispam server is on a BSD variant I can't bring to mind right now.
My day-to-day work laptop runs Windows (even though it's a Mac Book) because the tools I require to do my job are not available for other OS's
I work extensively with Citrix technologies, including XenServer their virtualisation product.
Perhaps. Just perhaps, there should be an appreciation that one tool won't always or usually be enough. But then that takes the fun out of foaming at the mouth ranting and downvoting for opinions that don't match your own. Hey ho.
Yes Outlook on my Win8 laptop takes forever to load, but I suspect part of the problem is that it first has to establish a VPN connection before connecting to the server and then sync's folders - almost forgot broadband connection is usually 1~2mbps.
So don't get too hopeful about start up getting quicker, but do keep the pressure on as getting a new laptop always feels good, just hope they put more than 2 GB of memory in the thing...
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