

Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch - nreece
http://www.sdtimes.com/MICROSOFT_S_PLANS_FOR_POST_WINDOWS_OS_REVEALED/About_CLOUDCOMPUTING_and_MOBILEDEVELOPMENT_and_NET_and_SOASAAS_and_SOFTWAREDEVELOPMENT_and_WINDOWS_and_MICROSOFT/32627

======
kogir
Sigh... Most of you didn't even read the article.

Not one of the "base it on Linux or BSD" comments gets it. This whole thing is
MSR saying, "look, we got it wrong, and so did everyone else. It's not just
about one computer anymore."

Sure, they're fixing up the way system resources are exposed and planning to
make the whole OS more fault tolerant, but the key takeaway is that the whole
OS is network aware. Apps can discover storage, processors, memory, and other
resources on the local trusted network, and use them without caring at all
that they might be on different machines.

Try getting a single apache or IIS instance to run on 50 servers in a cluster,
without writing all of the distribution logic in the application. Sure you
_could_ separately configure a local instance on each node, and set up file
syncronization or network storage, and...

Why federate your database when you could just add another node to the OS
cluster, thereby increasing the resources available to the single DB instance?

The goal is to get all the infrastucture work for free.

I hope someone, anyone, can pull this off. As a developer of a distributed
app, let me tell you, the bar right now is WAY too high, and current operating
systems, be they Windows or Linux are not up to the task.

[Edit: slashes caused unintentional italics]

~~~
ambition
To be fair the article wasn't a light read.

It sounds to me like they're taking Erlang concepts to the next level and
baking them into the fundamental architecture of the OS.

~~~
scott_s
This is Hacker News. I expect every article to not be "a light read."

~~~
Raphael
I tend to expect the same from the comments.

------
kylec
Forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

Vista took 6 years starting out as a "complete rewrite" with ambitious
features that were pared away one by one to leave little more than a facelift
for Windows XP. Don't get me wrong - I hope Microsoft is able to pull this off
- but I don't hold out high hopes.

~~~
cypress-hill
why do you "hope they pull it off"? their time has passed. none of their own
users at home or in business are even interested in products past xp. they
don't represent a positive force in the market, they continue to cling to dead
ideas like drm...i'm not sure at all why anyone other than employees or
shareholders would be cheering for them.

~~~
jordyhoyt
please stop flame-baiting on news.yc, almost all of your seven posts in this
thread have been of that nature. i come here to avoid flamewars. thanks!

~~~
mroman
Wait a minute, why do you accuse the poster of flamebaiting? I just read all
his posts - he's speaking his mind using logic. Please quote him on what you
consider flamebait within his posts, otherwise YOU are the one flaming now . .
.

------
smakz
Reminds me of a discussion I read a while back about a power struggle in
Microsoft between the 'backwards compatible' group mentality and the 'reinvent
the wheel to be better at whatever cost' group mentality.

It seems to me the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' is
winning (and indeed during that discussion they were in the early stages of
winning), but that Microsoft's reputation as a whole keeps going down since
that time.

People used to like windows because it just worked, and ran all their favorite
software. The more they make it harder for people to do that, the more Apple
and Linux will continue to eat their lunch.

~~~
mattmaroon
Well, I think until fairly recently the backwards compatible group had it
right. Windows had way too much going on in the corporate world to even
consider it. But now in the era of (relatively) good virtualization and lots
of cool web apps running on a nearly ubiquitous internet, the other group's
argument has gotten a lot stronger. That's sort of the catch-22 for Microsoft
though, because the exact same arguments make OSX an option for more users.

I think MS is a little behind on this, but only a little. Still I hope they
don't ditch the Windows brand name, it's clearly one of the most successful of
all time. Isn't midori a watermelon liqueur?

~~~
cypress-hill
who needs virtualization anyway? salesforce is doing just fine...most of
msft's bread and butter apps are moving to the web

~~~
mattmaroon
That remains to be seen. Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming,
both in terms of quality and uptake, and nobody's sure what if anything MSFT
is doing there. It's a fallacy (though a very common one among the tech-savvy)
to act as if web-based Offices pose any threat at all. They may, of course,
but there's no sign of that yet.

Also virtualization isn't about Microsoft's products, they'll just write new
ones for any new OSes. It's about the legacy code businesses everywhere run
on.

~~~
cypress-hill
_Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming_

time and the trends are on their side. google docs shows the possibility. once
web systems evolve to better handle these type of apps, the advantage will
play to them more and more

~~~
mattmaroon
Yeah, that's what everyone's been saying for about 3 years now. It's what a
lot of people say about every technology, including the 99% that don't catch
on. It's so cliche as to be meaningless.

I'm not sure what you mean by "web systems", but if you mean
browsers/standards they're moving at far too slow pace to assume any impact at
all on anything ever. And even if they advance, there's a lag until people
adopt them. A large percentage of people still use IE6, so any business model
built on "web systems" unavailable until IE9 is so far off as to be not worth
discussing.

~~~
cypress-hill
_Yeah, that's what everyone's been saying for about 3 years now. It's what a
lot of people say about every technology, including the 99% that don't catch
on. It's so cliche as to be meaningless._

its not a cliche. people are making real money. microsoft should be concerned

~~~
mattmaroon
The only people making real money off of web-based Office products are the
founders who sold their startups to Google or Adobe.

~~~
sutro
Not true. Zoho is cleaning up.

~~~
mattmaroon
Source?

~~~
sutro
$40m/yr revenue, $1m/month profit, and 100% bootstrapped as of 5 1/2 months
ago when this article was written:

[http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-
india...](http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india-tech-
inter-cx_sm_0222mitra.html)

It's probably doing even better today.

------
mlinsey
The article seems to indicate that this is something being done by Microsoft
Research (MSR). In that case, there's no telling when it will be done, or if
it is, whether it will even be used for a commercial version of Windows. MSR
works more or less independently from the business divisions of the company.

Of course, if things turn out really well and there is a strong business case
then there is every reason to think it would be adopted. But what clearly
won't happen is what people are prediction (hoping?) elsewhere in this thread,
that work will be poured into this and the ambitiousness of this project will
cause Windows to be delayed. If this never sees the light of day than the
actual Windows team will just keep on chugging along at whatever their plan A
is.

------
13ren
Note: unix also began as a skunkworks within a monopoly...

~~~
tornadoteddy
Yes, but I believe that was back in the 50s.

Much has changed since then.

~~~
davidw
Instead of "believing", it's pretty easy to look up:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix>

Started in 1969. Even Multics wasn't started until 1964.

------
sachinag
I think they'll do it this time. They'll get the legacy stuff in a "blue box"
(or was it yellow box) the same way that Mac OSX did. If they can make Office
work, that's game, set, and match.

Look, the OSVs only choices are Windows and Ubuntu. Ain't no one going to try
to sell Ubuntu to Enterprise Rent A Car (pick your old school, massive install
of choice).

~~~
kschrader
This is exactly what they're going to do.

I think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might
be. Microsoft has a bunch of really smart people sitting in Research working
on this stuff.

Just think how cool this will be if they make a jump like the one that Apple
made from OS 9 to OS X, and Apple made that jump with far less resources.

~~~
mtts
I personally don't see a desktop OS being "game changing" at this point
anymore. We've pretty much figured out what we're going to be using desktop
and laptop computers for by now.

But you're right in so far that Microsoft's all-important "legacy" stuff is by
now so old it can easily be run in virtualization or even in emulation, so
they're probably on the right track.

~~~
thebigshane
Are you implying that there isn't any game-changing areas of an OS anymore?

What about the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface?

What about cloud computing (as stated in the article)?

What about the future of the internet (call it web 3.0 or whatever)?

Looking at the timeline of operating systems and "game changing" improvements,
I would imagine that it will continue to grow exponentially as it has been for
the last ~30 years. Microsoft, Apple and Linux all have a great chance in
contributing to these advances.

~~~
cypress-hill
_What about the WIMP_

do i need to buy win7 to use this?

 _What about cloud computing_

plays to the strengths of linux, not windows

 _What about the future of the internet_

MOBILE. steve jobs is right on this one and msft will end up having an even
larger "skunk works" project to try to catch the iphone

------
pragmatic
It's easy to think all companies rely on apache on Linix as you do. However,
in the "real world" a bazillion companies depend on Windows to run stuff. And
a lot of those companies depend on the software that was built for windows
3.1, NT, 2000 and XP. Not the latest and greatest. As such, MSFT has to
maintain backward compatibility. If they start screwing with corporate
customers and backwards compatibility they're going to have the department of
justice so far up their asses...well you get the picture.

Windows runs the world. I'm sorry I know the internet is hosted on a lot of
Linix servers but in small, medium and large businesses there a LOT of windows
servers keeping everything running.

------
tornadoteddy
The wisdom of the day at MS is as follows.

Please keep dreaming happy dreams. In our great nation this is still something
that's legal.

------
allenbrunson
in theory, this sounds pretty good. a from-the-ground-up os rewrite could be
really good, taking the realities of the current computing landscape into
account. nobody has greater resources to make this happen than microsoft.

alas, this _is_ microsoft we're talking about. so the first version will be
called "my little operating system" or something, and they'll find plenty of
ways to screw it up.

~~~
cypress-hill
but what is the problem they are solving ?? the network stack of freebsd (for
example) is perfectly adequate for saturating any modern outbound connection
under heavy concurrent load. unless you grow the pipe bigger than the device
can fill it, better networking software is just an academic exercise. and its
not like freebsd is standing still.

if i were msft, i would just take freebsd7, graft a win32 managed runtime on
to it, call it mibdori and ship it

~~~
allenbrunson
c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this
were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative
publicity would kill them.

the problem they are solving is that windows, as it currently exists, is
dragging around 20 years of cruft. the weight of all that cruft is slowly
strangling microsoft to death. they can do it now, or they can do it later,
but sooner or later, windows will have to be scrapped and replaced with
something else altogether.

look what a great move it was for apple. painful in the short-term, big win in
the long-term.

~~~
Tamerlin
There's been an internal war of sorts within MS for years about this. They
have had a long history of patching their own libraries and their own SO to
fix bugs in software like SimCity... yes, they put special-case custom code in
their own software to fix bugs in other companies' software. It was all in the
interest of backward compatibility.

It was also short-sighted; that's not a sustainable way to go forward, because
every one of those custom patches increases the maintenance overhead of your
code, and it's not already stellar quality code, you're going to be in
trouble... and MS was the epitome of the sweatshop, so there's no way that
they had much if any good code floating around there.

Lately however, the other side has been gaining ground, leading to things like
dotNET. They've willingly sacrificed backward compatibility in so far limited
ways, which is a start in the right direction, IMO.

Since this project is in MS Research, it has a shot, but I suspect that if it
were part of the standard development process at MS, it would take 90+ years,
based on the story of the guy that wrote the start menu for Vista...

I think you're right; no matter what they do with the brand, I agree about
windows. I don't think that they have as much time as they'd like, especially
if Apple decides to get aggressive and teams up with Dell or PowerNotebooks or
Boxx and starts expanding its OS marketing to take on Vista directly...

------
cypress-hill
music to my ears as a free software zealot. microsoft is going off to build an
os "done right"...where have we heard that before??

wait for the concessions and half-baked reversals. they're obsessing with a
whole new kernel, that will likely be the first decision to get dumped as they
watch MSFT drift down to 18 with no new product on deck to rally sales.

then having ditched the "rewrite" plan, they will spend a year spinning their
wheels trying to locate the best two or three ideas from midori to graft on to
vista, people might just jump to mobile platforms full-time, or the console
market might start seriously eating into pc sales, or everyday people start
using ubuntu, etc etc etc.

the market just isn't going to stand still for five years while microsoft
tries to relearn how to build big systems. microsoft is chasing google, they
are chasing apple, they are chasing oracle, they are chasing nintendo, they
are chasing linux....

its going to be fun watching this company feign relevance while going the way
of DEC

~~~
william42
Oh, this isn't a regular Microsoft product. It's Microsoft Research.

------
whycombinator
I live in San Diego! Go... Padres (is it?)

~~~
whycombinator
... I didn't realize SD could stand for something else.

------
chris_l
I predict it's going to suck as much as Windows XP (maybe not as much as
Windows ME)

------
compay
Personally I think it's surprising they haven't decided to build on top of
FreeBSD or Linux yet. Apple saved _so_ much time and and resources by doing
this with OS X.

Of course at some point someone is going to invent something better than Unix.
Who knows, maybe it will be Microsoft (haha... you never know). But I think
they would ultimately stand to be more successful if they didn't have to keep
reinventing TCP/IP stacks and filesystems and could focus on something a
little higher level.

~~~
nickb
Well, the biggest misconception about MacOS X is that it was built on top of
FreeBSD. It's actually built on top of Mach that they perfected at NeXT (Avie
Tevanian was one of the creators of Mach at CMU). FreeBSD was added as one of
the sublayers.

------
tx
They need to hurry up, otherwise there won't be any developers left to try the
new thingie out, only 60+ old ex-taxi drivers who position their monitors
facing a corner, fire up an anti-virus in "perpetual disk scan mode" and fall
asleep in front of "SQL Query Designer" inside of Visual Studio awaiting for
5:00PM to go home.

