Posted on 04/11/2008 6:50:11 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The researchers damn Windows in current form, urge radical changes
Calling the situation "untenable" and describing Windows as "collapsing," a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.
In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.
"For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable," said Silver and MacDonald in their prepared presentation, titled "Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve."
Among Microsoft's problems, the pair said, is Windows' rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft -- frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating -- hit the "reset" button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.
"This is a large part of the reason [why] Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements," they said. In turn, that became one of the reasons why businesses pushed back Vista deployment plans. "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."
Other analysts, including those at Gartner rival Forrester Research Inc., have highlighted the slow move toward Vista. Last month, Forrester said that by the end of 2007 only 6.3% of 50,000 enterprise computer users it surveyed were working with Vista. What gains Vista made during its first year, added Forrester, appeared to be at the expense of Windows 2000; Windows XP's share hardly budged.
The monolithic nature of Windows -- although Microsoft talks about Vista's modularity, Silver and MacDonald said it doesn't go nearly far enough -- not only makes it tough to deliver a worthwhile upgrade, but threatens Microsoft in the mid- and long-term.
Users want a smaller Windows that can run on low-priced -- and low-powered -- hardware. And increasingly, users work with "OS-agnostic applications," the two analysts said in their presentation. It takes too long for Microsoft to build the next version, the company is being beaten by others in the innovation arena, and in the future -- perhaps as soon as the next three years -- it's going to have trouble competing with Web applications and small, specialized devices.
"Apple introduced its iPhone running OS X, but Microsoft requires a different product on handhelds because Windows Vista is too large, which makes application development, support and the user experience all more difficult," according to Silver and MacDonald.
"Windows as we know it must be replaced," they said in their presentation.
Their advice to Microsoft took several forms, but one road they urged the software giant to take was virtualization. "We envision a very modular and virtualized world," said the researchers, who spelled out a future where virtualization -- specifically a hypervisor -- is standard on client as well as server versions of Windows.
"An OS, in this case Windows, will ride atop the hypervisor, but it will be much thinner, smaller and modular than it is today. Even the Win32 API set should be a module that can be deployed to maintain support for traditional Windows applications on some devices, but other[s] may not have that module installed."
Backward compatibility with older applications should also be supported via virtualization. "Backward compatibility is a losing proposition for Microsoft; while it keeps people locked into Windows, it also often keeps them from upgrading," said the analysts. "[But] using built-in virtualization, compatibility modules could be layered atop Win32, or not, as needed."
Silver and MacDonald also called on Microsoft to make it easier to move to newer versions of Windows, re-think how it licenses Windows and come up with a truly modular operating system that can grow or shrink as needed.
Microsoft has taken some new steps with Windows, although they don't necessarily match what the Gartner analysts recommended. For instance, the company recently granted Windows XP Home a reprieve from its June 30 OEM cut-off, saying it would let computer makers install the older, smaller operating system on ultra-cheap laptops through the middle of 2010.
It will also add a hypervisor to Windows -- albeit the server version -- in August, and there are signs that it will launch Windows 7, the follow-on to Vista, late next year rather than early 2010.
I agree that computer gaming is on the decline; much better to go with a game platform.
I used to game on the computer (Battlefield), but haven’t played in a while. And since I no longer game, I now use OpenSuse Linux most of the time.
My son has Xbox 360, and it’s a piece of garbage. He had it replaced under that overheating fiasco, and now he’s having some more problems with the 7 month old replacement unit, which isn’t under warranty. Microsoft is really good at one thing; driving away customers....
That card came out a year after Vista's launch. At the time of launch, few onboard graphics chips could run Vista completely.
There are people too dumb to own computers, there are people too dumb to be left in control of light switches, it’s just how it goes. Any time you start thinking there aren’t dumb people in this world go to your local hardware store and start looking at the product warnings on ladders, those are all the results of actual people actually doing that and suing because nobody told them not to. People that don’t know manure is a poor spot for an extension ladder will probably also do dumb things on a computer, and now that it’s the 21st century they probably own one.
Good point and it points out the key difference in the two.
You can’t really build your own Mac, unless you want an OS hack, which I wouldn’t recommend for the average user.
The PC is more like hot-rodding. You can build your own, mix and match, soup it up here, down here, add this, tweak that, etc.
If this is your desire or your area of expertise, or you enjoy this, then PCs have that advantage - plus as you mention you can save money on the box.
Macs have the advantage for folks who don’t like working on “cars” and want to use the computer with the minimal amount of time spent working on the computer itself.
thanks for your reply..
Buy a recent lightly-used laptop and put ubuntu linux on it.
Of course if you’re putting Windows on it don’t be too much of a hot-rodder. I learned this over the years, the more you tweak with Windows the less stable it gets. When I hot-rodded my Windows scrubs and re-installs were at best a quarterly event, when I finally realized that wasn’t very fun and kept my tweaking to low impact UI type stuff and maybe the occasional video or RAM upgrade scrubs and re-installs became basically a thing of the past.
PCs themselves can definitely be like your cousin’s Camaro, but Windows is a towncar OS. Tweak lots on your initial purchase, and when the OS goes on stop screwing with it. That is the path to being a happy Windows user. If constant tweaking is in your blood learn ‘Nix.
That’s because onboard graphics usually suck. ATI and NVidia have been doing great work on it ever since.
Dell builds obsolescence into every model it sells. Cheap power supplies and loaded memory slots are just the beginning. I wish i had a dime for every Dell user who wanted to upgrade to a “gaming video card” and found out they needed a new power supply.
Luckily parts are cheap these days.
Much of Vista was copying OS X Tiger, and Apple still found ways to add significant value in Leopard (Cover Flow, Quick Look, Time Machine, Core Animation, etc.).
Another good reason to avoid them. Really Dell is just all around annoying. Which is probably why all the Mac people love to compare their products with Dell, I’m a died in the wool PC guy but if Dell became my only PC choice I’d either walk away from computers entirely or go Mac.
I spend too much time with computer neophytes and 99.9% of their problems are inherent Windows problems. They catch a trojan or click a bad link or get a bad update. I would love to take one of them and put them on Linux. Here is your browser, here is your email and here is your word processor. Done.
But I know Cousin Lenny will forward a Word document that it can’t open and there will be Hell to pay.
Funny thing is, Dell has for all intents and purposes become almost as proprietary in it’s architecture as Apple. lol
That’s why I build my own. I can pick my parts and support is free ( http://www.techimo.com )
A new motherboard and processor is about $100 for me. Try pricing that at the Geek Squad. My new project is a Micro Tower.
I’m too lazy to build them on my own anymore, but I’ve found good local boys to my dirty work for me. I pretty much only use the big boys for their websites, they’re a great way to spec out the computer I want, print it, then go to the guys I’m going to buy from.
I love putting them together. I love the roar of the heatsink and the smell of the thermal paste.
Check it out. $1.99 fan $6 shipping
When the hardware supports it, a 32-bit OS can access 4 GB (any extensions aside). Due to legacy reasons, Windows limits the usable memory because the space above 3.5 GB was reserved back when Microsoft thought nobody would have 4 GB of memory.
32-bit Windows also limits the memory available to applications to 2 GB (the other two reserved for Windows) unless you use the /3GB switch at boot, but programs have to be modified to take advantage of that.
Virtualization is your friend. MS can virtualize XP and Vista within the new OS and crank up the VM behind the scenes when those programs are run. Apple built in automatic processor emulation for the transition from PowerPC to Intel.
The reasons for the popularity of Windows have nothing to do with quality or ease of use.
Apple installers do this and make things painless. You know the app needs access to install, so you have to type in your password into a dialog that pops up. They have to make the machine easy to use, they have to make it so people can install software easily.
That doesn't mean all software apps should be able to write anywhere on the disk. Maybe a user should be able to install a software app locally that won't affect other users if it blows up. Maybe there should be an administrative task that backs up data to an area of the filesystem that isn't accessible to a user-level app.
Microsoft has many smart people. They could architect themselves out of their security problem if they weren't hampered with backward compatibility.
Linux doesn’t have that burden, then again, that’s one of the reasons that Linux hasn’t taken off as a real competitor to MS in the home user market.
Linux needs only one thing: hardware support. If you install Linux and it doesn't recognize a device, you're screwed. The vendors don't support Linux, and marginal hardware is everywhere. Linux already has every app a home user needs. It has a wow-factor with compiz/beryl. It has an easy to use GUI (more than 2 actually). It has good development software. It's easy to install apps in most distros now. There is really no features holding Linux back.
Back then the problem wasn't the large market share, but how Microsoft bullied everyone to make sure that large market share didn't get threatened. Monopolies are legal, abuse of monopoly power isn't.
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