Prompt's TechBlog
Microsoft out of the window?
05 August 2008
Posted by Dave Wilby
Sometimes I feel more cyborg than human after twelve hours slumped in front of this screen. Am I alone? With the internet doing all my thinking for me, my fading laptop keyboard and beleaguered mouse tapping and clicking away like autonomous extensions of an increasingly bedraggled sedentary body mass, my adopted electrical brain still insists on continually bleating: "Windows has encountered a problem..." And yet unfathomably this all remains somewhat acceptable. It's just how it is. All of which makes me wonder if my blinking reaction to this week's news of Microsoft's leaked future plans for its operating system are typical or skewed by my tragic computer dependence.
Internal Microsoft documents which somehow fell into the hands of editors at Software Development Times revealed plans for a new modular operation system project codenamed Midori. According to the leaked information, the new OS would be developed from the ground up to be internet-centric, service-oriented, and geared towards highly connected users, distributed computing, shared resources and mixed environments.
Looking for positives, I'd say that re-engineering something so pretty but fatally flawed as Vista as soon as possible could only be 'a good thing'. No matter how much processor power, memory or patching I throw at the thing, it remains horribly slow and clunky, riddled with error messages and incompatibilities, and bizarrely deskbound in a tech world long dominated by connectivity and internet content. On the downside, each time Microsoft decides to revamp its operating system, I find it an enormous upheaval that also usually results in me wanting other revamped things too - like new laptops, service providers, desks, a house...
Perhaps it's not surprising in a way. Like many people I plug myself in - literally I guess taking into account my headset - every weekday morning after coffee, and apart from necessary 'bio-breaks' I'm still there or thereabouts until bedtime. It's only natural then that this sudden news of my 17-inch widescreen immersive world changing - perhaps radically, perhaps disappointingly - is a little daunting. How will all my other hardware and software bits and bobs react? Will we all still get along?
Moreover, if Microsoft does go ahead with its roadmap of OS alterations, does this mean we will all have to shell out a hundred pounds or more for upgrades or standalone installations every few years (or worse if we all get tetchy and buy new pre-installed laptops)?
Discussing this in my office this morning, one of my colleagues chipped in helpfully with: "Linux! Linux! Linux! Linux!" A compelling argument well put, but a call I've resisted to date. I've flirted with dual-boot a couple of times, but deep down although I proclaim to hate Microsoft on an almost hourly basis, I do ultimately trust it more than any other OS manufacturer to hook-up easily with my array of peripherals and support all the various software tools and doodads I now have hanging around on my home network.
Although it has just about managed to skirt on the legal side of monopoly, any layman will tell you that Microsoft does, really, actually, utterly dominate the operating system space in any sense that is meaningful. Fortunately, its desire and stated intent to move away from its deskbound comfort space into wider web waters will certainly put it up against more formidable competition than Linux can currently provide, notably in the shape of Google, but inevitably also with myriad newcomers and upstarts eager to show off innovation and grab a slice of Microsoft's pie.
At this stage, news of Microsoft's Midori research project roadmap all pretty much stems from those leaked internal documents. It will prove useful to the market as a whole, as analysts and developers gauge public reaction through online discussion. The problem as I see it over the longer term will be the sheer diversity of those reactions.
How blind is loyalty to Microsoft, despite the heartache and tribulation it frequently puts its users through? Will this news boost or deflate the Linux and open source community? Where does this leave Apple and its pile of pleasing gadgets in terms of OS provision? Can Google really win hearts and minds in the operating system world as easily as it has won eyes online? Is Microsoft being remarkably astute in laying out its plans for a more flexible internet based platform this far ahead of realisation, or is it playing in to the hands of its rivals? Should I budget for a new laptop, or simply get out more?
Please chip in with your own thoughts - I'm sure to be online somewhere to read them - Vista permitting.
Labels: Linux, microsoft, Midori, operating systems, vista, Windows
Comments:
My love affair with Microsoft is coming to an end. But I fear the unknown of Linux. I've slowly been replacing my Windows applications with the Open Source equivalent - Thunderbird, Open Office etc but when I'll make the bold move to a Linux OS, I can't say. Maybe I never will. Maybe I should just take the plunge... scary!
: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 11:37:00 AM
Microsoft gets a lot of bad press and I really hated them for all the bugs in Windows 95 when I had to use that every day. But XP is really good and stable - I have very rarely had a problem with it. I guess the only way for them to grow was to break it by turning it into Vista and forcing people to buy another licence, but if you can pick up XP, you'll find it can probably handle your needs for some time yet.
XP is certainly pretty stable, if more than a little prone to security vulnerabilities and subject to constant patching by Microsoft. I still use it on a desktop and it does the job just fine with scheduled updates here and there. The old advice used to be to adopt every other MS OS, after all, so maybe Vista was one to leapfrog. But there remains a growing argument that all the current and previous generations of operating systems are simply too focused on local resources, with networking and internet connected tools bundled, but only really as seperate applications or options. If the next generation of operating systems from all vendors, including Microsoft, is indeed going to be component based, individually threaded and intuitively internet-centric, how will Microsoft maintain its level of OS dominance? Perhaps it doesn't even intend to. Midori will inevitably have to be open to a certain degree of multi-vendor interoperability at quite a fundamental level if it is going to truly adopt that 'componentized' approach mooted in SDT succesfully.
Midori sounds cool, but I'm not sold on the idea or utility of a cloud-based operating system. As we've seen with Google and to a lesser extent, Amazon, the cloud can stop working for periods of time. What happens then, if your critical documents are inaccessible? Or, if your entire operating system was? The operating system may be feasible for desktops that are connected to the internet with ethernet cable, but those are becoming a rare sight. I see it more as a thinking exercise for Microsoft than something viable.
Vista does have a lot of problems, which is surprising for a company that focuses on the user interface so much. Linux, though stable, just doesn't have the same usability that even Vista does.
I'm personally excited to see what Windows 7 will be, though, because as you said, that's next after skipping Vista.
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