Microsoft Ponders Windows Successor

InfoWorldMike writes "Before Vista is even out of the gates, a Microsoft exec was talking Wednesday about Windows' replacement at a VC conference. Speaking at The Venture Forum conference, Microsoft's Bryan Barnett, a program manager for external research programs in the Microsoft Research group, said multicore architectures are of particular interest when weighing what to put in future operating systems at the company. "Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today," Barnett said. Well, with Vista in the pipeline as long as it has been, you must admit it is not surprising Microsoft is taking the long-term view. And it won't be built overnight: There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now. But early work on this effort has not yet been organized, with five or six small projects afoot in various places throughout the company, Barnett said."

Know what would be funny?

[BWJones]

Yeah, you know what would be *funny*? If Microsoft licensed OS X.......

No, seriously..... OS X runs on Intel now, and Apple is working hard on compatibility layers for multiple OSs and it is the slickest, most stable, most beautiful mainstream OS out there right now. It would be especially funny as back some years under Gil Amelio, Apple actually looked at licensing Win NT for the new OS when Copeland was in horrible shape. Thank gawd that never happened or Apple would be where SGI is now (or worse).

Hey, you know that Microsoft has used Apple as their R&D arm for years now, right? Why not just formalize it? :-)

In all fairness, I am not saying that Microsoft can't do it themselves, I'd just like to see a return to the good 'ol days when Microsoft made good, solid applications and were not trying to be all things to all people. They used to you know...... I am thinking of the early versions of Excel (Multiplan) and Word on the first Macintoshes along with Microsoft MacEnhancer, Chart and Basic.

Although one has to wonder what is going on when Microsoft's programmer team for Windows is in the several-thousands and Apple's development team for OS X is around 300.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[r00tman]

Doesn't MS still own a considerable portion of Apple?

NT architecture not even utilized

[jimmyhat3939]

What I think is odd about this is that the NT architecture has never really even been fully utilized, at least on the consumer side of Windows. In a lot of respects, NT is a pretty clever system, including highly individualizable security for files, processes, etc. It also supports multiprocessing well, contrary to the implication of the article. Point being, I'm not so sure the solution for Microsoft is to throw out NT and move on to something else (Singularity, or whatever it may be). I would suggest they instead look at the features already in place with NT and look at ways to actually enable and present them in a reasonable way in their consumer OSes. I guess this is the plan in Vista, but we'll see. The other thing I'd like to see Microsoft do is separate out the kernel-level framework (NT system, drivers, etc) from the UI framework, so that it would then be possible to treat those two elements separately, in the same way that Linux has the kernel and X/Window Manager stuff totally separated out. But, I guess that would make it harder for them to make money, so it's unlikely.

More of the same...

[freemywrld]

"Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today," Barnett said.

Maybe MS should pay attention to the fact that they have never taken full advantage of any processor's power. Most products they have put out these days just hog system resources, forcing systems to have more powerful processors, more RAM, etc. without ever really harnessing their power. The increase in power is just to make it seem like the bloat-ware is running better than it actually is.

A successor to Windows

[Phroggy]

I actually find this really interesting. Not that Microsoft is talking about a new OS after Vista, but that they're talking about it being a successor to Windows, not a new version of Windows.

Microsoft has been trying to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug themselves into for several years now, and they can't do it (i.e. fix Windows) without breaking backwards compatibility with old applications, and as long as they keep releasing new versions of Windows, they have to maintain that backwards compatibility, or word will spread quickly and people won't buy it. Besides, if you have to buy new applications when you buy your new PC with the new OS, why not buy the Mac version of those apps instead, and switch?

But then Microsoft bought VirtualPC, and a solution began to unfold. If they release a new OS, and don't call it Windows, then they don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with existing Win32 applications in the OS. They'll port the .Net runtime whatchamajigger, so new .Net apps will run seamlessly on either Windows XP, Windows Vista, or the new OS. Then they'll hack VirtualPC to make a stripped-down XP or Vista run transparently in the background, and run old applications inside of that (and new hardware will be fast enough that performance won't be a problem). It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago with Classic, the Mac OS 9 emulator that runs on Mac OS X. Chances are, just like Apple modified the Mac OS Toolbox, named it Carbon, implemented Carbon in the new OS and added the CarbonLib library to the old OS so Carbon apps could (sort of, in theory) run on both platforms with no modifications (it didn't actually work that well, but it did make it possible to port existing apps without rewriting the whole thing), Microsoft will probably come up with a derivative of Win32 that apps can be ported to that will run on the new OS. Meanwhile, they'll move as much as they can over to .Net.

And hey, if they move what they can to .Net and emulate Windows, then they'll have the flexibility to move to a different processor architecture if they want, without the compatibility problems that Apple is going through with that.

Flame on!

If they want to do some long term research

[mikesd81]

Bleh I'm gonna get modded down for this but oh well. If they want to do long term work, work on the stability and security of an operating system. Let's face it. Microsoft is here. Linux coming to a desktop may happen but as of now it's in pre-natal care. Microsoft does need to take some hints from *nix. Be secure. Be quick. Be able to be to customized. They need to work with the community (by that I mean other software companies like gaming companies) and make strict guidelines how it should be written to work with Windows correctly. But they also need to take input. Software companies well say, "well hey we need to do this because..." and instead of MS saying "nope" they should say "well we built the OS and know it so this won't work becasue.....but if you do this...". I started my experience using MS, I'm a linux user looking for a linux job, but at least in linux developer comminicate and things are implimated correctly. Windows is easy to use, windows is easy to fuck up, windows is hard to repair. Usually the best repair is a re-install. This need not be. Eye candy is great, but we need stability and security.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[Cyner]

OSX is based largely on BSD. Take the thickest concrete foudation you can find and add a pretty interface. What do you expect?

Is it possible?

[abscissa]

The next generation of windows, I think, will erase some of our antiquated notions about what an operating system "must" have (a boot sequence, a file system, etc.) To me, and I'm sure many other slashdotters who can remember MS-DOS, Windows XP seems like a very souped-up version of MS DOS. OS X (while it has a boot sequence, file system, etc.) just some how does not seem like MS-DOS. Every iteration of Windows so far seems to pile on more and more disguises for an elaborately dressed MS DOS. This pattern needs to stop.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[Pink Tinkletini]

Never happen. To personify the company, Microsoft's ego is too big; you ever notice how it routinely enters markets completely irrelevant to its then-current strategies, apparently only for the sake of proving to itself, once again, that it's capable of domination? Microsoft wants so badly to be the best that it can't stand the sight of another tech company being successful. This seems to stem from some sort of deep-seated insecurity.

So even if Microsoft were already licensing OS X today, you can bet it would be looking for ways to homebrew a solution of its own. Not to mention the fundamental differences in taste and approach to workplace environment between the target demographic of Windows vs. Mac OS X, but we'll not go there yet...

Re:Know what would be funny?

[Penguinoflight]

Apple got where they are by copying other people as well. Microsoft would be largely naive to license OS X, because the development team for OS X had hardly anything to do, and they didn't have to license anything to do it. What microsoft has been trying to do from day one is to avoid the ideas and basics of Unix. It worked for the first 10 years or so, but it has been failing ever since. Microsoft, for all their faults tries projects that are much harder (and more impractical) than apple. The problem with Vista too much integration with .net and C#, code that is designed for small business oriented projects being used on a huge bloated project. Microsoft may see their failure in trying to use their own code too much, but they will not likely step so low as to license a competitors OS.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[EXMSFT]

And where did NEXTSTEP come from? Mach. Where did Mach come from? That's right. BSD. That's why there's an entire BSD layer deep in the core of Mac OS X.

Re:A successor to Windows

[Osty]

And hey, if they move what they can to .Net and emulate Windows, then they'll have the flexibility to move to a different processor architecture if they want, without the compatibility problems that Apple is going through with that.

Speaking of Windows, different multi-core processor architectures, Virtual PC, and .NET, have you looked at Xbox 360 lately?

• It uses a triple-core PowerPC derivative processor
• It's powered by a PPC-ported version of the Xbox operating system, which itself was a customized version of Windows 2000/XP
• It runs many Xbox games via emulation at "native" (to the original Xbox's 733MHz/64MB architecture) speed. While I assume that this is purpose-built emulation and not an Xbox 360 port of Virtual PC/Virtual Server, it's not hard to believe that the virtualization and emulation domain knowledge that came with the purchase of Connectix made this possible
• It's one of the core components of XNA [microsoft.com], which includes support for Managed DirectX (and thus, a port of .NET to Xbox 360)

As much as I love my Xbox 360, I have no illusions of it taking over all (any!) of my general-purpose computing (nor do I expect or want the PS3 to do so, Kutaragi!). However, when you look at the bullet points it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that Xbox 360 may just be an incubation project for future hardware architectures and operating systems.

Re:Is it possible?

[abscissa]

Thanks for your excellent response. Valid or not, here's why, to me, XP feels like DOS:

1. There are files everywhere in a root drive called C:\.
2. When my computer boots I see all these grey characters, bios, IDE info, etc. etc.
3. Some applications, when installed, seem to be "everywhere"... they aren't just single little entities.
4. There are thousands upon thousands of files, where you don't know what they do.

Of course, Windows has a lot of plusses -- I can't remember any time Windows XP told me I didn't have enough conventional memory. And these problems are not unique to Windows, either.

But I think my original point is that we would have to start seeing durastic changes in the way the computer works for the "next gen" operating system. Vista, IMHO, does not cut it.... in fact, it is (at least from what I have seen in the beta) the worst OS to be released since Windows 98.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[Pink Tinkletini]

Don't know if they still own those shares

They don't.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[jeswin]

Comparison between Vista and OSX are pretty subjective. Here are some counters: 1. 64-bit support in OS X is still an after thought. While it is Vista's primary target. 2. The new audio and video driver system in Vista ahead of any other OS. 3. .Net platform is now driven into the heart of the OS. If you have written code in a "managed" environment, you already know why this is better. Of course Java exists, but the depth of the integration with the OS varies. You will never write Photoshop in Java, while .Net aims to there eventually (Paint.Net?). 4. OS X sucks in developer support. The stuff they are doing with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Communication Foundation and Workflow are amazing, although I have strong reservations about platform dependency. Unless... [mono-project.com] 5. Performance? After writing this, I guess we were both trolling. :)) The discussion was about next generation Operating Systems. That is not Vista, and it is not OSX, too. Singularity [microsoft.com] might be.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[NutscrapeSucks]

I love these pointless debates. The average Windows/Mac customer couldn't tell the difference between Cocoa running on the NT kernel and Win32 running on the Apple XNU kernel. The implementation of the underlying OS has very little to do with the desirability of either product. And in reality, Apple is a lot more likely to dump Mach than MS is to dump NT.

Although one has to wonder what is going on when Microsoft's programmer team for Windows is in the several-thousands and Apple's development team for OS X is around 300.

Server software, tablets, media center, 64-bit support ... Apple customers often forget there's more to computing than iMacs.

There is no timetable for a Windows successor...

[l3v1]

There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now.

:D :D :D

This is the best joke I've heard in a long while :))

They kept pushing and postponing Vista's dates and continuously dropping features for how long now ? Right. Now what can you read above: no timetable for the one following Vista. Ok.

I can of course understand that for a company it is very important to show that they have long term plans. And they need to tell that convincingly. Right now, I'm not convinced about neither.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[xwipeoutx]

What they really can't afford, is another Longhorn

Whoa, you just blew my mind.

Microsoft. Longhorn.

Micro soft
Long horn

Wonder how subtle that was...(there was a penis joke earlier)

Re:Child of my Child?

[NutscrapeSucks]

You know, I remember testing "Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2", and the desktop could barely draw itself, there were loads of icons missing, you couldn't run MS Office, the admin tools would bluescreen the box, and it took about 30 seconds to open the start menu. And I was thinking "They spent 4 years building THIS?" And that turned out to be Windows 2000, widely considered to be the least crap version of Windows ever.

There's the real possiblity that Vista might turn out to be a unusable crap heap, but its way to early to make that call. I'm kinda suprised that they had a public beta with 6 months (plus 3 more once it gets pushed again) to go.

Microsoft Singularity might come to the fore

[Heir Of The Mess]

Micorsoft singularity http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/ [microsoft.com] has been going on for a while. Has some interesting things about it that make it more multicore friendly, although completely infriendly in the current environment. For example it doesn't allow DLLs, but rather your libraries load up as seperate processes, and use pipes to communicate with each other.

It also has the goal of being a fully managed operating system, so it should be possible to host it on a variety of devices.

When it comes to a point where they have to abandon the windows code-base or sink under the weight of it, I wonder if they will turn to Singularity?

Re:Know what would be funny?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Apple had a pretty massive ego before Copland cratered, too.
MS has just been through the biggest development project failure ever in the private sector
MS has two choices: cut a deal with SJ, or try to turn Solaris into a viable desktop system.


Copland was a technology failure -- the old MacOS just couldn't be "modernized" without breaking applications / using too much memory / etc. There was just no way to add SMP and memory protection to the thing.

Vista is a management failure. Rather than shorter release cycles with incremental improvments, MS put it on themselves to do it all in one big release. Nobody was asking them to do this -- it was just arrogance on their part. People want better security and search functionality in Windows, they don't want it rewritten in C# and they don't want shoot-the-moon features like WinFS. They don't even necessarily want transparent windows.

If there was an XP2004 and an XP2006 released, you wouldn't see the bitching. XP's biggest problem at this point is just that it's old and clunky.

So, different problems, different solutions. Apple had critical technical problems and had to buy a new OS to fix it. Microsoft has a project management problem .. Buying Solaris or OS X is only going to make the management problems worse, not better. They really just need to clean house of whomever is setting these development targets, and it looks like they've already started with the Chief Architect.

Re:Know what would be funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "half our money"?

Odd thought just occurred: to "free market" people, consumers benefit because the cost of goods becomes the marginal cost of production. So, MS shows that the free market doesn't exist, since they are making 85% profit margins on OS and Office. Slightly over marginal cost...

Re:Vapour?

[DrSkwid]

At the OS level, a decent scheduler and not using giant locking will get you most of the way.

To get the most out of it though, the applications need to be multi-threaded and multi-threaded programming in (standard) C/C++ is not straight forward, in fact it can be almost downright impossible to debug.

Other programming languages are much more suited to multi threaded programming, particularly those that use the CSP [usingcsp.com] model.

Construction of Concurrent Systems Software
http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/lec1.pdf [herpolhode.com]
http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/lec3.pdf [herpolhode.com]
http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/lec5.pdf [herpolhode.com]

My favourite, of course, is Limbo [vitanuova.com] but I only know of one environment where that is implemented : Inferno [vitanuova.com]

here's another discussion on a similar theme

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164547&cid= 13736089 [slashdot.org]

Re:Child of my Child?

[baadger]

Driver issues are most likely to blame for your poor Vista experience.

I have a AMD64 3500, 960MB of RAM (integrated 64MB graphics) and can just about scrape a 'performance rating' of 3. I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB of RAM YESTERDAY and the difference it made to Vista is like comparing apples to goats.

Out of the box Vista surps up 300-400MB of RAM on a fresh boot (I haven't taken an exact measurement).
My Gnome/Linux desktop uses about 115-140MB and XP x64 is about 165MB (Gnome starts lower than XP x64 but generally increases with a little use of the UI, I think it loads more stuff into RAM on demand than Windows Explorer). I would hope this huge memory requirement is reduced when Redmond cannabalise Vista Ultimate into it's various flavours but I doubt it. There seems to be alot of processes and services running out of the box in Beta 2, but I haven't had time to see what they are all about.

I noticed my boot time in Vista is very slow, but the performance control panel applet reports this is due to a bad driver.

Interestingly the full Aero interface is more responsive than Windows Classic! It's a shame it's so damn ugly...

My experience with Vista is therefore best summarised as: It's just as responsive as XP but guzzles more RAM, it's ugly and has alot of bugs and driver issues to work out before it goes RTM, personally haven't seen enough yet to turn me back from Linux but I think Vista will be a success.

Re:Child of my Child?

[hysonmb]

I've got to say, it seems that a lot of people still haven't grasped the fact that this is Beta software. There have been changes since the public beta went live already that have increased performance / fixed reported issues. Does anyone remember the first few builds of Longhorn? You could barely get it to install. I honestly don't think that MS should have put out a public beta, not yet at least, too many people are acting as if it's the final code and condemning it.

By the way, the rating issue is something that has already been addressed and MS is working on changing it to make it more reflective of the systems that exist today. I have a x64 3500+ and it's showing a 5 for performance rating.

Just keep an open mind that Betas historically are released with the intent of getting feedback and fixing it before the Release Candidates (where MS should have started the public releases) are out.

Re:Child of my Child?

[ElephanTS]

Was I the only one having the eery deja vu feeling when beta-testing Vista? Feeling like it's 2000, and you are beta-testing Apple's OS X.

Ha ha! I thought it was just me!

Now imagine, OSX didn't get primetime ready until 10.3 (released 2004 I think, or was it 2003?), so there's realistically a chance that Vista won't come into its own for another 3-4 years. As you say, they are too late, and I agree, it's possibly fatal.

Re:Is it possible?

[cskrat]

1. Is C:\ any worse than /dev/sda1 ? OSX still sees devices as files as per its *NIX heritage. Personally I like the idea of discrete drive letters as opposed to the mount point scheme since I like to be able to walk up to any computer that I'm working on and immediately know what physical disk something is on and whether it will be there or not if I unplug said disk and move it to another machine.

2. A sibling post covered this already but I'll reiterate. The grey characters are just the verbose ramblings of the BIOS initialization. Basically the machine has to detect and initialize vital componenents prior to using them. On a PC this means first identifying and starting the main processor, then the RAM. After that it can identify the components attached to the PCI/PCI-E busses, find a disk controller and figure out what boot devices are available. From there it goes down its boot order list until it find something that it likes and loads it into memory. At this point, control is handed over to the CPU and the BIOS walks away saying "call me if you need me again." All of this can be hidden behind a splash screen and many current BIOSes do just that. I would argue to say that this particular aestetic issue has already found its balancing point in that most box systems (Dell, Compaq/HP, etc.) use a spash screen since their users don't want to be bombarded with information that they don't understand or care about, while mainboards sold as separate components can go either way since people who build their own systems often need that information to make sure everthing is working correctly even before they install or attempt to install an OS.

3. Again a sibling has already covered this but it's late and I must type more. This is really an area where Windows NT has diverged from DOS. In DOS, every program lived in its own little directory and strayed no further. In Windows 3.x you had the same thing but with the addition of shortcuts in the GUI to start the programs. In Windows 9x/ME you see the emergence of the registry and the "My Documents" folder which were initially ignored as being mere suggestions but eventually you started seeing 3rd party developers use them correctly. Windows NT 4.0 was also at the mercy of application developers but made a much stronger case by using the whole different logon=different user=different files idea. We are currently in Windows 5.x (I use 5.2.3790) and nearly all major software developers know what the registry is and how to use it as well as why it's important to read system variables to figure out where the user home directories are and whether to use \Program Files\ or \Program Files(x86)\. Technically any developer can still cruise the hard disk and dump its bits and pieces in C:\foobar\ but very few do this anymore and the few that do either have some compelling reason to do so or are just amateurish homebrew titles that figure "best practices" lists as being constraints for other programmers to follow.

4. Modern operating systems are complex. OSX still has thousands of files that seem full of strange gibberish to the lay person. Just pop open the command line and "ls -R /etc". Personally, I also see this as being an area with room for improvement. If Daemon tools can mount an ISO as a virtual drive and VMware/VirtualPC can create virtual disks as files on the host OS, why can't the OS use a virtual file system to hold its components in one nice solid package? Such a thing is possible and may show up in future operating systems but there may be many issues with performance, maintainability and stability that stand in the way. Furthermore, the current system works well enough that there isn't really a push to consolidate the thousands upon thousands of .dll .cfg .ini files that reside in the directories where you shouldn't be playing around in unless you know what you're doing.

From my best reconing, the drive letter convention is about the only thing in Windows XP th

Re:Is it possible?

[VTBassMatt]

Not to be too snarky about it, but OS X's GUI isn't "a program running in X". I believe SystemUIServer is what you're looking for. Here, I'll show ya:


PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
1 ?? S<s 0:07.69 /sbin/launchd
23 ?? Ss 0:00.01 /sbin/dynamic_pager -F /private/var/vm/swapfile
27 ?? Ss 0:02.75 kextd
31 ?? Ss 0:00.04 /usr/sbin/KernelEventAgent
32 ?? Ss 0:08.39 /usr/sbin/mDNSResponder -launchdaemon
33 ?? Ss 0:02.71 /usr/sbin/netinfod -s local
34 ?? Ss 0:00.54 /usr/sbin/syslogd
35 ?? Ss 0:00.64 /usr/sbin/cron
36 ?? Ss 12:01.23 /usr/sbin/configd
37 ?? Ss 0:05.81 /usr/sbin/coreaudiod
38 ?? Ss 0:03.59 /usr/sbin/diskarbitrationd
39 ?? Ss 0:00.09 /usr/sbin/memberd -x
40 ?? Ss 0:01.77 /usr/sbin/securityd
42 ?? Ss 0:01.31 /usr/sbin/notifyd
43 ?? Ss 0:06.03 /usr/sbin/distnoted
44 ?? Ss 0:02.31 /usr/sbin/DirectoryService
50 ?? S 0:00.32 /usr/sbin/blued
51 ?? Ss 0:27.38 /System/Library/CoreServices/coreservicesd
56 ?? Ss 7:09.75 /usr/sbin/update
62 ?? Ss 67:49.33 /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.fra mew
64 ?? Ss 0:55.78 /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.fra mew
65 ?? Ss 0:07.20 /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Conte nts
74 ?? Ss 0:01.05 /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs
79 ?? S 0:26.11 /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Mac OS/
80 ?? S 0:02.45 aped
81 ?? S 0:41.75 /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Co nte
83 ?? S 4:40.97 /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/M acO
86 ?? S 1:01.77 /Library/PreferencePanes/Growl.prefPane/Contents/R eso
87 ?? S 0:04.04 /Applications/XShelf.app/Contents/MacOS/XShelf -psn_0
88 ?? S 0:06.59 /Applications/Stickies.app/Contents/MacOS/Stickies -p
92 ?? S 1:19.13 /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quick sil
93 ?? S 0:01.99 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/iCalAlar mSc
94 ?? S 0:10.59 /Applications/iScrobbler.app/Contents/MacOS/iScrob ble
95 ?? S 0:00.97 /Library/Application Support/Logitech/LCCDaemon.app/C
128 ?? Ss 0:00.00 /usr/libexec/crashreporterd
129 ?? Z 0:00.00 (crashdump)
131 ?? Ss 0:05.09 /usr/local/sbin/dyndnsd daemon
154