Vista the End of An Era?

mikesd81 writes "The Times Online has an article about the uncertain future of Windows. Even Microsoft, it seems is admitting that Vista will be the last OS of its kind. With the push towards a constant presence on the internet, and the churn that entails, the company has admitted that even with a two year delay 'it is not really ready'." From the article: "Security experts are acknowledging that Vista is the most secure of Windows to date. However, 'The bad guys will always target the most popular systems,' Mikko Hypponen, of F-Secure, the security group, said. 'Vista's vulnerability to phishing attacks, hackers, viruses and other malicious software will increase quickly.' But the current fear is that the Internet will kill Windows, with Google being Public Enemy No. 1: 'Microsoft is way behind Google when it comes to the internet,' Rupert Godwins, the technology editor at ZDNet, the industry website, said. 'Building Vista, Microsoft is still doing things the old way at the same time as it undergoes a big shift to catch up.'"

Not gonna happen

All of this "The Net IS the OS" stuff is just ridiculous. This kind of thing doesn't even have a chance until broadband is as ubiquitous and as reliable as electricity. I think that we're still a good 10 years out from this even beginning to happen.

Re:Not gonna happen

This ignores the reality that old OSes never die and go away. As long as older computers continue to exist, the older OSes will continue to be used. The open-source community is also proof that the traditional OS will never die.

Re:Not gonna happen

Maybe not, but you can rest assured that somewhere in my head I'll be running DOS to play Full Throttle just one more time.

Re:Not gonna happen

You intend to live that long? ;)

That's the main problem here. All this 'never' talk merely concerns our current generation. And maybe the generation after us. Do you think your grandchildren will know DOS?

What would have happened if you told the people in 1800 that in 1876 bell would invent a telephone which would make it possible to talk with everyone in the world. Would they have believed you? No. What if you told them, that only 100 years later everyone would have such a telephone, only then it would be called cellphone and you could carry it around with you and even see the person you're talking to. They would have laughed at you. Would someone have believed you in 1900 when you would have told people that in only a few years, there would be television. Soon in color. Transmitted via satellites in the sky. And small silver discs where they could fit several movies on. They would have taken you for a poor lunatic.

Do you believe people now when they say in 100 years you won't sit in front of computers anymore because they're wired into your neural system and use wireless power? Or that we will have colonized several planets? :) Probably not...

Re:Not gonna happen

So maybe the /. crowd is the exception, but thanks to your examples, we ARE willing to seriously consider what you're suggesting. The immense technological gains of the past century have shown even everyday people that many things are possible that previously were unbelievable. With a combination of breakthroughs in physics and materials science we really could be colonizing several planets by 2106. Private enterprise would be doing far more in space right now if they could just get people and cargo up there more cheaply by an order of magnitude. Then they just need a better way to get to the planets.

Re:Not gonna happen

Assuming that the human race will survive for a while... After all, dinosaurs lived on this planet for several million years:

We might not have a Enterprise or BattleStar in 80 years. But what about 2000 years? Humankind has come from arena fights with lions and bears to a super technological race in 2000 years. Or what about 50.000 years? In 50.000 years we have developed language, fire, the wheel, built houses, villages, cities. What about 100.000 years? 100.000 years is a long time. We looked like monkeys 100.000 years ago. Or half a million years. The face of the planet has changed a dozen times in the last 500.000 years. Races have emerged, others have become extinct. One million years. A timespan most of us can't even begin to imagine. Mammals exist for more than 70 million years. Round it up to 100 million years. 100.000.000 - just look at that number... It's 1000 times longer than mankind existed. And yet, considering the age of our planet, it's not much. The earth is nearly 50 times older - 4.570.000.000 years to be exact.

Now think time. What mankind did in 2000 years is pretty amazing. Think about what happens in say 1 million years from now. That's a realistic timespan. Unless we kill ourselves, mankind will probably exist in 1 million years. And even that is veeeery far from "forever". We may be able to imagine what technology will be able to do in 50 years. We may even get a few things right when we look at technology in 100 years. But from there on it's pure speculation. And probably very very far from reality.

Re:Not gonna happen

Unfortunately I would be surprised if mankind doesn't kill themselves off in the next couple of hundred years.

"I'm guessing you're one of those 'glass is half empty' kinda guys"

Re:Not gonna happen

Do you believe people now when they say in 100 years you won't sit in front of computers anymore because they're wired into your neural system and use wireless power? Or that we will have colonized several planets? :) Probably not...

Another lesson that goes parallel to the one that you mentioned, however, is that the predictions that are made tend to be unrealistic and way off base. I'm still waiting for my flying car, but few people in the 1950's were talking about anything resembling the Internet. One thing that we have learned is that the technologies that we think will exist in the future probably won't, at least in the form we think they will.

You give them too little credit.

I think maybe you're not giving those folks back in centuries past too little credit. From the New York Times, December 17, 1906 [earlyradiohistory.us]:

[T]he telephone is a nuisance as well as a convenience and a blessing without which, it seems now, life would be almost impossible and business quite so. When we ourselves "call up," of course it is all right, but when others do it the rightness is often rather deeply veiled, and we resent not a few of the demands upon our time. And yet everybody "answers the 'phone," interrupting almost any occupation to do it. How will it be when we're told, not that somebody's "on the wire," but that somebody's "on the air," and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?

That statement was made an easy 80-90 years before cellphones became ubiquitous, but yet easily foresaw the convergence of two distinct and at the time emerging technologies (the telephone, just reaching critical mass at the time, and radio, relatively new).

So anyway, a bright person a century ago would probably have believed, given sufficient explanations, most of the technology we have today. Cellphones are just radios plus telephones; televisions just small movie screens; automobiles are significantly faster but still easily recognizable for what they are. It is only when you start to drill down into the underlying technology and infrastructure that enables modern devices that they truly would astound someone living a century ago.

The "futurists" of the late 19th and early 20th century predicted many of the technological developments of the past 100 years remarkably well (obviously not in detail, but conceptually in many cases they were right on). You would have to go back further than that, to eras when people were not used to continuous change -- where it was not expected that the world one grew up in would be different than the world one's children would inherit -- in order to find people who would be unable to conceive of our current state.

To be perfectly honest, I think many a person from the early 20th century would be a little disappointed if they were suddenly transported forward to the current day. Although many things have changed, a great many other things have not or are at least recognizable equivalents of devices or activities present 100 years ago. Someone who expected the rate of progress seen during the period from 1800 to 1900 to continue and increase, might find life in 2000 startlingly familiar (and sadly devoid of flying cars).

Re:Not gonna happen

For microsoft, a company that makes no money on support, but on initial licenses, those older OSes haven't just ceased to exist, they are a threat to their business model.

oh no, not again

Vista cannot be the last major OS of its type from microsoft. While it is likely that they might want to produce something significantly different, a major shift would take years to produce. A company that needs such a large team just to work on the shutdown menu isn't ready to innovate in the way they claim. Innovation is nothing more then a word they use to sound cool, they haven't managed it for years, all they do is patent minutiae

Sure, microsoft *say* it would take les time to make the next windows iteration, the plain fact is that they are no longer working from the position of having no competition. Therefore they have to do a whole lot better then just improve security, they've got to move a long way forward beyond the competition, improving everything and introducing things people can't get elsewhere. Right now Gnome is catching up with the XP interface, I think it's better in fact, and that's free. KDE I don't know about, I barely use it.

GNU/Linux, good though it is, is nowhere near ready to take on microsoft for home users. The simple reason being that in spite of its wealth of applications, it has shitbar games when compared to windows. Game producers aren't building their products in linux for a first iteration. That will be the big problem for linux for a fair few years.

Once games creators switch, or rather, produce for linux too, hardware manufacturers will start working in linux more, and mmicrosoft will see a real challenge.

Then there's Office. OpenOffice is good, but not as good as MsOffice. Well it does compare in many ways, but OpenOffice doesn't have salesmen ready to cajole existing customers and offer vast discounts. We're still at the stage were companies will mention thinking about switching just to get those discounts.

Games are the only thing that keeps windows installed on my machine, I use linux for all serious stuff, but I won't give up my games, and I'm not alone. I gave up Office a long time ago. For simple docs I use Vim, and for complex docs I use Tex.

Re:oh no, not again

If we start seeing companies go down the software as a service model, we may well see vista as a cut down but free product, with Microsoft's revenue coming from on-line productivity services. Games will be relegated to the console (where they can also be locked to the hardware or only available on-line).

This would be good for the companies that are currently seeing losses due to copyright infringement, just imagine if all your media was only available on-line - you could only rent it, it would be playable on your PC but only if the platform had sufficient technical measures in place to prevent you from copying it. You couldn't copy Office or Photoshop because its run directly from someone else's server. This would be a dream for software providers as they could charge you on a per use basis, and lock your data into their services. No more trying to sell upgrades as you wouldn't have a choice.

The only thing that stands in the way of that is a decent and mostly feature complete open code base, something that would allow you to do what you want with your computer, your "Intellectual Property" and the media you buy, or already own. We are seeing the end of the huge revenue streams for those people who provide a product that is easily reproduced. Those providers are looking for ways to re-generate those revenue streams, and I dont think the scenario I have outlined above is too outlandish for them to consider.

Re:oh no, not again

...we may well see vista as a cut down but free product, with Microsoft's revenue coming from on-line productivity services.

I can see it now: "Oh, you want to right-click? That's a $15 add-on feature. Can I interest you in a bundle that includes right-click, scroll bars, the Start button, and Excel for $150?... I'm sorry; the Start button is only available with the Excel productivity bundle."

Re:oh no, not again

When Microsoft got started, two guys wiht a Basic were pedalling wears to hobbyists. Two other guys ina guarage we building a computer to runt h 1st two guys basic. None of these guys had an R&D budget. Today, Microsotft like most companies, feel that a huge R&D budget will inovate them out of their self dug hole. Look how well PARC servered Xerox after all....

Linux is a superb gaming platform.

GNU/Linux, good though it is, is nowhere near ready to take on microsoft for home users. The simple reason being that in spite of its wealth of applications, it has shitbar games when compared to windows.

First, most computer users don't care about games in the way that you care about games; second, Linux has the games that a vast majority of users care about; third, even if Linux had the sort of games that you care about, it won't see widespread adoption on home desktops in rich countries.

Most computer users don't care about big budget games. They're too complex. They take too long to learn. They're too expensive. I know multitudes of computer users. None of them play big budget games like Half Life, Neverwinter Nights, WoW, or even the Sims. I don't play any of them either.

When eliminating the big budget games that appeal to a small subset of users, Linux has great games. KDE and GNOME both come with the sorts of little puzzle games that people whittle away at for a few minutes each day. They are the analog to Solitare, probably the most popular Windows app of all time. My dad had never used Linux before in his life, but he sat down at my Gentoo box and within minutes had discovered one of the GNOME games on his own. Furthermore, lots of people pass the time at online games at places like Yahoo Games. These run just fine on Linux right inside Firefox.

But, let's set aside the fact that Linux is an excellent gaming platform for the majority of people who just like a simple game every now and again. Even if Linux had a perfect port of every single bloated, big-budget, proprietary computer game out there, we still won't see widespread desktop Linux adoption on home desktops in rich countries. People in rich countries can afford Windows, and they see no compelling reason to switch away. Linux won't provide a compelling reason for most users to switch. They'll switch to Mac before they switch to Linux.

In short, the lack of Linux desktop adoption has absolutely nothing to do with game availability.

Can't lead when you're hell-bent on following.

But, let's set aside the fact that Linux is an excellent gaming platform for the majority of people who just like a simple game every now and again. Even if Linux had a perfect port of every single bloated, big-budget, proprietary computer game out there, we still won't see widespread desktop Linux adoption on home desktops in rich countries. People in rich countries can afford Windows, and they see no compelling reason to switch away. Linux won't provide a compelling reason for most users to switch. They'll switch to Mac before they switch to Linux.

Ding ding ding! Seriously, you should get a prize or something.

You can't replace Windows with Linux, when a lot of Linux development seems to be centered around making Linux as much like Windows as possible. As bloated and generally inelegant as Windows is, most people just don't have a very compelling reason to switch away from it. And cost isn't a big factor, since most people don't 'see' the cost of Windows in any direct fashion anyway. (And the people who do see the cost directly -- principally barebones builders -- can just pirate it and always will.)

As long as Linux is trying to 'catch up' to Windows, it can't ever surpass it and provide any convincing reasons for people to switch.

Apple, over the past 5+ years, has done a good job of giving users reasons to switch to their platform, and they didn't do it by trying to emulate the market leader. They picked a few things that they thought they could do better (multimedia, "digital hub" functions, ease of use) and concentrated their effort there. When you use a Mac, you know you're using a Mac -- they don't attempt to 'out-Windows' Windows, and that's what I see a lot of Linux distros trying to do. (Look at KDE's default skin and tell me that's not the out-of-wedlock child of Windows 98 and XP.) The Mac OS, love it or hate it, makes a stand and seems proud to not be Windows-y; many Linux distros seem embarrassed and suffering an identity crisis by comparison.

I'll end with one small anecdote: the most consistently impressive way I've found to show Linux to Windows diehards, is to show them a MythTV/Knoppmyth box. Why is it so impressive? Because it's something that their Windows PC just can't do (admittedly, I suppose MCE+SnapStream is close, but most people have never heard of it). You're not going to win admiration and envy by showing a Linux machine running OpenOffice and editing a spreadsheet; acting proud of that just makes Linux look like a joke. (Again, it's somewhat cool that it's all free, but not that impressive to most people.) But when you show a Linux machine doing something that most people's Windows desktops are just never going to do, and suddenly it looks a lot more interesting. And at that point, you can just drop in "oh yeah, it does all that Office-type stuff, too."

Re:Not gonna happen

So let's just file this story in the same folder with our nuclear-powered flying car promises, and get back to the real question: How is Microsoft going to follow Vista?

Simple, complete and ship everything that slipped from Vistas release.

Re:Not gonna happen

How is the free software/open source community dealing with the changing landscape?

Sorry I'm only going to respond to this small part of your post :) . The open source community has the advantage that at present everything is much much more modular than in the world of windows. there is no requirement for any of the disto's to maintain the entire code base that their distro relies upon. Further more the producers and providers Open Source code are generally not looking at their product in terms of monetary value. Debian don't have to include features to entice SUSE or Red Hat users over to their distro, nor do they have to worry about Ubuntu using their code base and passing it off as something else entirely.

In my opinion the open source landscape is so different from that which Microsoft inhabits that the issues facing Microsoft will simply not figure on the OSS radar. There will certainly be other issues to contend with (such as driver support, copyright and patents) but most of these are also issues for Microsoft. So in short, how is the FOSS community dealing with the changing landscape? well it deals with it in an asymetric way, it is made up of a huge number of small cells, each one more able to adapt to change than the monolith that is Microsoft. (Just realised that that makes the FOSS community sound like an insurgent / Terrorist group, but that may infact be more accurate than I would have thought.)

Re:Not gonna happen

How is the free software/open source community dealing with the changing landscape? (Is e.g. Linux heading into the same problems as Windows?)

Well, F/OSS grew up with the internet, for us the landscape isn't changing, rather it is tending to validate the whole approach as being essentially correct. Microsoft have always had a problem with the way they design software, as monolithic intertwined, horrendously complex packages. In the past, the marketing (and black-ops?) departments at Microsoft were enough to gloss over these problems, but as the complexity of all software systems increases, the Microsoft approach must become unworkable. The stupid car analogy would be trying to build a modern hybrid by progressively adding bits onto a model-T until it looks, to an outside observer, like a Prius.

Due to its essentially distributed nature, F/OSS software is inherently modular. This is its greatest strength, but also a problem as everyone can (and does!) choose their own slightly different way of integrating all of the parts together.

What is the future of free/open source software in a world with more and more advertisement financed, huge server based services?

Hmm, there may be a few such large servers around, but are they really going to dominate the industry? What is stopping a proliferation of home users running their own servers? 3 things: NAT, poor security, and asymmetric connections with poor upload rates. The solutions to this are, respectively, IPv6, anything-other-than-Microsoft, and customer pressure on ISP's (and to some extent technology will solve this problem anyway, as broadband rates improve generally the class of services that can be run on the bandwidth of a basic connection will increase).

Don't you think that the fact that all search engines are proprietary and closed source is as bad as the situation in the OS-sector before Linux?

Yes, it is unfortunate. It would be great if google's searching stuff was all Free Software. Imagine, instead of linking to a google.com search on your website, just use a mod_google extension to the webserver to automatically keep an up-to-date index of your website stored locally. But the history of Free Software suggests that eventually, someone will write a free replacement and, eventually, it will come to work better than the proprietary alternatives. But it isn't clear that something like a distributed database replacement for google is even technically possible, although in niche areas it surely is (for example: scholar.google.com is pretty good for searching journal articles - but this is something a consortium of universities could get together and provide themselves).

MS is searching new ways, but what are the visions of the FOSS community?

F/OSS doesn't need a vision. While programmers scratch their itch and write code, artists and designers improve the look and usability, and end-users give feedback, F/OSS will grow. It isn't any more complicated than that.

Re:Not gonna happen

I think what you, and the others who are saying things like you, are missing, is what the conversation is all about.

Nobodies seriously arguing that "OS'es don't matter," or that OS'es will somehow magically, poof, up and disappear, somehow. If you think that's what the message is, you're almost certainly misinterpreting.

There will always be stuff that people will only entrust to their own computer, and run on an OS, and so on. Like the fellow who replied to you first said: "I don't want to authenticate, just to edit a word document." Quite right.

What they're saying, or one of the things they're saying, (since "they" are quite large and nebulous,) is that the era of the super-important dominance of the OS is at an end.

That is, that software developers, around the world, are never going to go back to the heady days of 1995, where every new platform change to Windows or Apple was the compelling subject of the magazines.

It's sort of like in Linux. Who cares what happens to the kernel anymore? It's all about the desktop efforts.

Sure, the old stuff never went away: There are still innovations in the Linux Kernel, and, there are communities of people who keep up with what's happening in kernels and so on, and the myriad activities and so on. Even exciting things still happening there. But it isn't the focus of the discussion.

The primary discussion, the things businesses and users and developers and so on are concerned about, is something different.

So, this is the context in which you interpret: "The net is the OS."

They mean something very big and complex, but when you put a message into the political sphere, it's gotta be short. You have to apply the context to decipher the message.

Re:MS needs a change.

I'm not a MS fan, or really anti-MS - (read my other posts) but Microsoft are stuck here, they cant simply adopt a radical new operating system (even with virtualisation) and throw out all legacy support. They have gone as far as they can with Vista (which really isn't a re-write, its a mash up and an attempt to address some of their major problems). With legacy support they will continue to have the same security problems that have plagued them since the inception of windows.

The reasoning is simple, if Microsoft adopted a *nix like kernel and re-wrote everything then they would have an OS with little or no software support, little or no Hardware support, and they would find themselves competing directly with Linux / Solaris / BSD etc...without the benefit of already having a huge installed user base with a clear upgrade path. There would be one additional exception, their offering would not be free (unless they would simultaneously go down the software as a service route and make their OS free.. which throws up even more issues see My other post [slashdot.org])

.Microsoft wont change their core OS not because they cant, but because if they do they are committing suicide. Even with coercion of hardware and software vendors, there will be a point when the Hardware and software vendors will simply have to decide whether it is cheaper for them to try and port / support the new Microsoft OS (which would be completely new, untested and unproven) or put the effort of supporting Microsoft's new offering into supporting a *nix, which already has all the features of this new Microsoft OS, and much longer pedigree and larger user base (assuming the initial Microsoft user base as 0 after all).

"Last of its kind"? Fooey

If by that they mean software-as-a-service, well, good luck to them. I have no desire whatsoever to be forced into downloading their product whenever I need it, or authenticating myself to Redmond when I want to open a spreadsheet.

I have a hard time believing claims like this

I have a really hard time believing any claims like this. As far as I can remember everyone (on both sides) has claimed that this one will be different. That it will either be the greatest windows release ever or the worst. And everytime it's somewhere in the middle. Every release of windows since windows 95 has been marginally better. Tack on service packs and updates. Release next version that's marginally better and different than the last service pack of the previous release. The next version of windows probably will be more modular, but I don't think it will be radically different than the final service pack of Vista.

Re:I have a hard time believing claims like this

Every release of windows since windows 95 has been marginally better.

What about Windows ME?

I think you'd find a lot of people disagreeing with you on that one.

millions of lines of code?

Vista's 50 million lines of code have cost an estimated $7.5 billion to assemble. I think that this is getting to a point where as the number of lines grow, there's a limit to the manpower that can be applied to make it secure, or even write it in the first place that is still profitable to the company.

I don't see an internet OS as the future

There's a lot that Microsoft can learn from Google, but I just don't see Google competing with Microsoft at the OS level, especially with an OS based off the internet. Ulimately you need code executing on a local processor and here there are already several established competitors. Even if most applications are pulled from the network, there still are issues of performance, latency, and security. Plus not every system is always connected to a network. I can see Google possibly competing sucessfully with MS Office products, but not as an OS.

After Vista, Windows will die

Not even Microsoft has the resources to continue the desktop Windows line. The costs are ballooning.

Re:After Vista, Windows will die

I'll accept your analogy when the company that owns all the source to KDE goes under and takes the source with it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that's somewhat unlikely.

(Don't debate with analogies. A single relevant difference is enough to invalidate your argument. And this single relevant difference was a doozie. Also, it was obvious.)