How MS drives the Industry Standards
I saw this interesting post by Dan Heskett in SlashDot. I've made some modifications and reposted it here because it's written pretty well. Credit goes to the original author. So here goes:
While DOS was still vogue, MS recognized that it was drastically limited, and began work on a New Technology. That was NT. They maintained both lines - improving and upgrading the technology behind NT until it could provide a consistent user experience with the legacy line.
It may not have been planned, but MS did a great job merging two completely separate code bases. The DOS/Win9x codebase merged against the NT/Win2K base under XP, and now, within 3 years, 50% of Windows users on the desktop run XP. The next 25% will be there within another year (the last 25% will probably take a decade; many will not move to XP until they are forced to by hardware failure, and that's their right).
Microsoft has already moved the majority of it's users to an operating system that is truly multitasking, has fine networking support, and is in fact the industry standard for desktop operating systems. Not that it's the best mind you - but rather the industry standard.
Let's face it, XP is good enough for just about every current Windows user. It performs fairly well, it's straightforward to install, it supports basically the entire universe of x86 hardware, it's cheap enough for OEMs to use, it's easy enough for users, powerful enough for administrators, flexible enough for developers, etc. It's certainly not perfect, but good enough.
What Longhorn is adding is not core bits needed for a modern operating system. XP has those. The fact remains that if everything stayed where they are, MS could milk XP for 10 years. But of course, what MS wants is to continue to be dominant for decades, and that's where Longhorn enters.
With Longhorn, MS is exploiting the weaknesses of the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) world, so they can continue to dominate the business, corporate, and home desktop market. What isn't FOSS good at doing? Changing rapidly. If a group of programmers get together and code some great new thing, it'd take years of flamefests and discussion to get to the majority of Linux users. Plus chances are it will fork within a few versions and the talent pool will be split. Add to this the fact that much of the really hardwork in software engineering is shunned - people want to work on the stuff they want - not the stuff that others want them to.
So this is what MS is thinking: implement the things that FOSS world can't do thanks to its red-tape laden world-view. Implement a filesystem layer (WinFS) that provides nifty functions that while aren't new, are new in this scale. Writing a similar filesystem and getting it into use in the FOSS world would not happen, or if it did, take a decade. Re-write the graphical subsystem to use strictly vectored screen elements. This is a huge boon to developers - any GUI programmer can tell you what a pain it is thinking about how your application will look at 800x600, at 1600x1200, etc. Will that panel here look funny since it will 99% empty at 1600x1200? Sure different programming environments will physically scale the interface for you, but how will it look, feel, and work?
Enter Avalon, MS's solution. Screen elements will stay the same size while you increase resolution, but your workspace will gain resolution and capability. All of the sudden you can edit a large image in Photoshop on your high-resolution monitor without all the widgets becoming microscopic. How long would it take for the FOSS world to replicate this? X is completely widget agnostic. Every application or desktop environment has it's own set of widgets with it's own code tree and it's own egos. Not only would X have to be majorly modified, but so would gtk, and qt, and then each of the applications that use it, and so on and so. Again, even if work started on this today, it couldn't be ready to go before MS release Longhorn. By the time MS releases this and the FOSS world decides it'd be a good idea to replicate it, it'll be years before a working implementation is ready to go.
Those are just two big technologies that were the primary goals in Longhorn. Now, MS has decided that they'd rather have XP & Longhorn both have this technology as an add-on.
Ohh dear. That's bad news for FOSS. Think about this. If they included WinFS and Avalon only in Longhorn, it'd be years before the huge XP user base got into Longhorn mode, and upgraded. Now it will be a patch for XP. All the sudden, MS will release this technology and instead of having to force users back on the upgrade treadmill, the user base of these new technologies will be the 75% of XP users as well as the new users of Longhorn. Ohh-ohh. Instant industry standard.
And what will the FOSS response be? We don't need no stinking new filesystem! What’s wrong with ext2, ext3? We don't need no vector graphics, what's wrong with bitmapped GUI's? And they'll be partly right. Nothing is wrong with them. They're just not the industry standard.
While DOS was still vogue, MS recognized that it was drastically limited, and began work on a New Technology. That was NT. They maintained both lines - improving and upgrading the technology behind NT until it could provide a consistent user experience with the legacy line.
It may not have been planned, but MS did a great job merging two completely separate code bases. The DOS/Win9x codebase merged against the NT/Win2K base under XP, and now, within 3 years, 50% of Windows users on the desktop run XP. The next 25% will be there within another year (the last 25% will probably take a decade; many will not move to XP until they are forced to by hardware failure, and that's their right).
Microsoft has already moved the majority of it's users to an operating system that is truly multitasking, has fine networking support, and is in fact the industry standard for desktop operating systems. Not that it's the best mind you - but rather the industry standard.
Let's face it, XP is good enough for just about every current Windows user. It performs fairly well, it's straightforward to install, it supports basically the entire universe of x86 hardware, it's cheap enough for OEMs to use, it's easy enough for users, powerful enough for administrators, flexible enough for developers, etc. It's certainly not perfect, but good enough.
What Longhorn is adding is not core bits needed for a modern operating system. XP has those. The fact remains that if everything stayed where they are, MS could milk XP for 10 years. But of course, what MS wants is to continue to be dominant for decades, and that's where Longhorn enters.
With Longhorn, MS is exploiting the weaknesses of the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) world, so they can continue to dominate the business, corporate, and home desktop market. What isn't FOSS good at doing? Changing rapidly. If a group of programmers get together and code some great new thing, it'd take years of flamefests and discussion to get to the majority of Linux users. Plus chances are it will fork within a few versions and the talent pool will be split. Add to this the fact that much of the really hardwork in software engineering is shunned - people want to work on the stuff they want - not the stuff that others want them to.
So this is what MS is thinking: implement the things that FOSS world can't do thanks to its red-tape laden world-view. Implement a filesystem layer (WinFS) that provides nifty functions that while aren't new, are new in this scale. Writing a similar filesystem and getting it into use in the FOSS world would not happen, or if it did, take a decade. Re-write the graphical subsystem to use strictly vectored screen elements. This is a huge boon to developers - any GUI programmer can tell you what a pain it is thinking about how your application will look at 800x600, at 1600x1200, etc. Will that panel here look funny since it will 99% empty at 1600x1200? Sure different programming environments will physically scale the interface for you, but how will it look, feel, and work?
Enter Avalon, MS's solution. Screen elements will stay the same size while you increase resolution, but your workspace will gain resolution and capability. All of the sudden you can edit a large image in Photoshop on your high-resolution monitor without all the widgets becoming microscopic. How long would it take for the FOSS world to replicate this? X is completely widget agnostic. Every application or desktop environment has it's own set of widgets with it's own code tree and it's own egos. Not only would X have to be majorly modified, but so would gtk, and qt, and then each of the applications that use it, and so on and so. Again, even if work started on this today, it couldn't be ready to go before MS release Longhorn. By the time MS releases this and the FOSS world decides it'd be a good idea to replicate it, it'll be years before a working implementation is ready to go.
Those are just two big technologies that were the primary goals in Longhorn. Now, MS has decided that they'd rather have XP & Longhorn both have this technology as an add-on.
Ohh dear. That's bad news for FOSS. Think about this. If they included WinFS and Avalon only in Longhorn, it'd be years before the huge XP user base got into Longhorn mode, and upgraded. Now it will be a patch for XP. All the sudden, MS will release this technology and instead of having to force users back on the upgrade treadmill, the user base of these new technologies will be the 75% of XP users as well as the new users of Longhorn. Ohh-ohh. Instant industry standard.
And what will the FOSS response be? We don't need no stinking new filesystem! What’s wrong with ext2, ext3? We don't need no vector graphics, what's wrong with bitmapped GUI's? And they'll be partly right. Nothing is wrong with them. They're just not the industry standard.
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