Microsoft launches long-awaited updates

TalkBack 125 of 126:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

Adherence to legalism cannot be the only factor

behind the lack of progress. Either they have been working on something in the back-stage and they want to surprise and amaze the rest of us, or they have simply given up any serious and concerted effort to evolve their platform.

Their long history of brushes with the legal system and their subsequent getting off with minor punishment cannot have make them more legally conscious than before, and unfortunately maybe the opposite.

If you look at the bigger picture, MS has ONLY put together a PC "os" and an office s/w suite. They have never produced anything of higher sophistication or any break-through. Worse yet, their os is still ravaged by all the security vulnerabilities and instabilities that stem form inherent design flaws and bad developement practices.

As a matter of fact, only MS office went through some significant code development. But office has remained largely unchanged since the 2000 era. Nothing at least to explain a 5-6 year delay.

I have two explanations.

1) They finally decided to rewrite the ms windows kernel from scratch after it became clear that the capacity and security limitations cannot be remedied by yet another layer of middleware. They have been talking about longhorn for many years now, so many that only a complete OS rewirte is justified. I believe they realized that h/w has moved to the 64-bit and the low end SMP and they definitely have to develop their os to take advantage of it sooner than later. Otherwise the little Linux, OpenSolaris, etc. will quickly fill in the big gap. As a matter of fact, Solaris 10 on x86-64 is already a very attractive platform. SUN has started selling some very mean x86-64 systems.

They have realized that Linux is an oncomming platform which even though has taken the market by storm, it is steadily encroaching in MS's territories. Linus also has been improving constantly. Remember that lins with different slopes intersect somewhere at some point. The rate in inprovement in Linux is definitely >> the same in ms windows.

As a matter of fact, 64-bit Linux (RH and Suse) already runs on big iron (Altix and Power4 / 5 etc) and has shown decent behavior in supporting high end HPC or business workloads. If MS wants to enter the high-end data center has to evolve its OS to be one on par with Solaris 10, AIX 5L, HP-UX 11i, etc. ms windows is currently way behind.

In summary I thin they are trying to built the OS infrastructure to meet the demands of (a) latest 64-bit h/w and (b) large date center workloads.



2) The other explanation of their lack of apparent progress is that they already have SO much cash individually and they do not care to grow more. As a matter of fact going the route of 1) above is very time consumming, and requires long term investment in human and other resources. It maybe the case that they decided that they can still stay around for many years even if they simply continue the know path of making cosmetic changes and re-selling the same s/w over and over.

In the meantime everybody else is growing at a faster or slower pace. Let's not forget that long-term investements pay off in the long-run. Other have already done this since long time ago (UNIX infrastructure). MS never did anything for the long-run. It must be very hard now to start doing this.

--m

Posted by: michael_t   Posted on: 11/10/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
• Busting the myths about QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions and IBM Smart Business IBM So you already know there aren't actually any alligators in the New York ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now