Gartner, whose business it is to write lines like “For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable,” believes that “for Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable.” Essentially they find that Windows is so full of junk code and accreted features that it will soon collapse under its own weight. For example, while working on Vista they dropped most of their work and used Windows Server 2003 instead, completely scrapping their work. That’s why Vista is stable and pretty yet still a dog for most people.
Is Windows really collapsing? Not really, but it’s nice to say so. MS needs to completely rewrite Windows from scratch, much like Apple did with OS 9, and go from there. Or go completely online and make every machine a dumb terminal. Either way, they’ve got to move but the situation is definitely not untenable.
7 is (supposedly) a complete rewrite… and it’s microkernel has even been (somewhat) successfully used in a Vista compile (recompile?).
The cloud as only means to deliver software? Yeah, i cannot even get decent 1Mbps from my crappy ISP (not US, you guys have your own troubles i know), so am i supposed to maybe do my work because maybe the Internet will behave correctly today?… If that is the case, i will go and get Linux or stay tied to XP thank you very much.
They really need to rethink ALL! If 7 is really the “OMG we cool again” OS that Longhorn was supposed to be… Then maybe. But, as we speak, Ubuntu comes to version 8.04… It is not that it is better than Vista (or less if that is what you thought)… It is that, once it’s out there, it will a real alternative to Vista.
If the guys from, say, Adobe… were to either help to develop Wine (a program that lets you run Windows apps under Linux) or ported their software to Linux… Tons of people would think twice…
An OS that runs all it’s apps from the cloud? Morphix Kiosk (just runs enough linux to get Firefox started… you could bundle codecs, plugins and flash and java support).
Yeah, ’cause Apple sat down and wrote OS X from scratch, in the sense that “from scratch” means “not from scratch.”
What? OS X was the system re-write, not OS 9.
@Fred: Yes, Apple used NextStep as the basis for OS X, but the OS was a complete rewrite by definition. MS has never even attempted anything as crazy as Jobs did with OS X…