7 Repeats Sins of Past.

Tuesday 27 May, 2008

At first it seemed as though Windows 7 would be a radical departure from the current bloat that is rife within Redmond, with a pint-sized kernel promising minuscule size, modularity and the performance gains inherent in such a design. Sadly, that isn’t to be.

And it all started out so well, with such great promise.

October 2007

“While Taut stressed that MinWin was an internal-only project which “you won’t see us productising, but you could imagine this being used as the basis for products in the future.” He later elaborated that “we’ll be using (MinWin) internally to build all the products based on Windows. It’s not just the OS that’s running on many laptops in this room, it’s also the OS used for media centres, for servers, for small embedded devices.” #

Bloat is out, minimal is in, check out our bespoke new kernel.

December 2007

“We do know that the next generation of Windows will be built around a stripped-back ‘microkernel’ codenamed MinWin. As previously reported, MinWin has been described as “the Windows 7 source-code base”.” #

Minimal is still in, we think, not sure about the bloat factor — we’ll get back to you.

May 2008

“Another question we often get asked is whether Windows 7 is a major release. The answer is “yes” — it’s hard to describe any product that is used by millions of people and worked on by thousands of engineers as anything else. That said, the long-term architectural investments we introduced in Windows Vista and then refined for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will carry forward in Windows 7.” #

Minimal? We meant “modular”.. and bloat will be available in more versions than you can possibly imagine.

Interestingly (hindsight is a powerful history filter) we’re told that previous comments were actually based on a false premise, which it seems where assumption based on comments that “we’re definitely going to be using this internally” doesn’t actually mean it’ll be used at all because they “don’t have any productization plans for it”.

This, despite reasonably clear comments back in 2007 that MinWin was in vogue and that it would be used practically everywhere. As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Despite the initial excitement Redmond has had for MinWin, as expressed above, it’s back to business as usual from the software giant:

“Contrary to some speculation, Microsoft is not creating a new kernel for Windows 7.” — Chris Flores.

MinWin is, then, an experiment in simplicity. A “what if” and perhaps, a direction that Microsoft would like to head off in, if it did not have to be concerned with the 500 pound gorilla that is the legacy NT architecture strapped to it’s back. Changing the kernel radically means that software vendors may have to start from scratch and that’s a risk that Microsoft are clearly not yet ready to commit to. Vista’s development costs cannot be ignored either and that ensures we’ll have yet more life squeezed from the NT base.

At least Apple new when to stop flogging a dead horse and migrate to a platform with a future, despite the obvious hurdles such a radical shift presented — it was a ballsy move that many pundits suggested could even mark the end of Apple. Their continued growth has virtually silenced any such claims that the end was at hand.

So, despite partial admittance that Vista, XP and 2000 before it are all bloated to a greater or lesser extend and that perhaps a clean break really is due, Windows 7 will ultimately be what Vista might have (some might say should have) been. It is a re-affirmation that unlike Apple, Redmond just isn’t ready to let the old NT based architecture — first launched in 1993 with NT 3.1 — go, at least, not without a fight.

It’s also clear that ‘7’ will be targeted squarely at the Enterprise, where Vista adoption has been far slower than retail — further, with potentially hundreds of different modular options available, the Enterprise market could order an Operating System entirely to spec — further entrenching Microsoft’s position.

And it’s also the market sector that resists change most. They are the people Microsoft want to woo, because Vista just isn’t opening doors — it’s just not business friendly. Every other week there is yet another report of how the corporate space is waiting for the successor to Vista as corporations eye up the eventual extinction of XP support.

7 is Microsoft’s response.

Ultimately then, Microsoft intends to modularise a spruced up, stabilised Vista, re-brand it as whatever ‘Windows 7’ launches as, and sell it piecemeal — the 9 different flavours of Vista currently available are but a first taste of what is to come, namely newer covers for an old and very familiar nag.