“Windows as We Know It Must Be Replaced.” Well, There’s a Truism if I Ever Heard One
by John Paczkowski
Posted on April 11, 2008 at 6:44 AM PT
“Windows is too monolithic.” So says Gartner (IT) analyst Michael Silver who, with colleague Neil MacDonald, told attendees of a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas that Microsoft’s (MSFT) ubiquitous operating system is “collapsing” under the weight of 20 years of legacy code.
Silver and MacDonald argued that the operating system’s evolution is hamstrung by a vast and unwieldy code base that hampers meaningful change. “This is a large part of the reason Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements,” they said. “Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.”
“Windows as we know it must be replaced,” said the two.
OK. But replaced with what?
It should be replaced with a smaller OS, the two analysts said. A thinner, more robust, more modular OS. One that makes application development, support and, above all, the user experience easier, more pleasant. An elegant OS that encourages users to upgrade, rather than desperately cling to older versions.
You mean an OS like … like Mac OS X (AAPL)? Isn’t Microsoft already working on something like that?
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Comments
Back when MS first stole, and subsequently purchased VMS and it’s authors from DEC, Windows ran on several hardware platforms. In fact it was a trade show where I saw Windows NT running on an IBM laptop with an early version PowerPC in it that I decided Windows was worth considering as a serious OS. Even IBM at the time was preparing (or at least they said they were) to run some server version of Windows on their mainframes. War over.
I’ve yet to figure out, short of some illegal back-room nod-and-wink deal, why it was in Microsoft’s interest to so quickly go from there to Intel-only.
Since then, MS and Intel have played a profitable version of Pong with their customers with each new version of Windows needing exactly the latest level of hardware from Intel to work properly, forcing users to upgrade perfectly good hardware to remain on a supported OS.
Fortunately, that game is coming to an end, no thanks to enforcement of US laws, but rather to a world economy that doesn’t want to be held similarly hostage to the whims of these two companies who have sucked the air out of the room when it comes to US innovation.
Posted by Mac Beach at April 11th, 2008 at 11:19 am