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I've left it to the last minute (as Microsoft are shutting off access to the Windows 7 Beta tomorrow) but I am as I write downloading the Beta of Windows 7. Microsoft Windows 7 is the successor to the largely unsuccessful Microsoft Windows Vista which has failed to take the business desktop by storm (see 71% of business pc's still running XP). This has got me thinking - what do we expect from an operating system?
In the early days of computing a computer was just hardware. The application had to include routines to read in programs and data and output results. Early pc's had simple operating systems based on CP/M which handled functionality such as disc and file management and usually a form of run-time basic which allowed programs to be written in a symbolic language, but business pc applications such as Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3 (the dominant Word-processor and Spreadsheet applications of the early pc era) had to include their own display and printer drivers, and the drivers had to be specific to the hardware you were using. It was a major step forward when operating systems started to look after the details of driving the hardware, presenting a common high level interface for applications to use.
Things have changed since then and what we now think of as an operating system, i.e. Windows Vista or Windows 7, come bundled with a complete set of integrated applications - often displacing commercial equivalents (remember how the inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows put Netscape out of business).
Its my view that things have now gone too far, way too far, and that companies like Microsoft have forgotten what it is we expect of an operating system. What I expect at least is a software platform that sits between the computer hardware and the application and handles all the housekeeping associated with running an application quickly, efficiently and securely. It is the applications that are important, not the operating system. Increasingly applications are being delivered via the browser for all sorts of very good reasons, so is it fair to argue that all we want from an operating system is something that will run a browser?
Things are getting even more absurd with Windows 7 from what I can tell. One of the objections to Windows Vista has been hardware and software compatibility. A significant number of users have either found that existing hardware and software, representing significant investments, don't work properly with Vista, or they can't afford the risk that applications might not work. To get round this problem Microsoft suggest deploying "legacy" applications in Virtual machines running the original O/S (eg Windows XP). The Microsft Enterprise Desktop Virtiualisation website says this ...
The challenge of legacy applications
Incompatibility
of legacy applications with newer versions of Microsoft Windows can
often delay enterprise upgrades to the latest version of Windows.
Testing and migrating applications can be time consuming, and meanwhile
users are unable to take advantage of the new capabilities and
enhancements offered by the new OS. By delivering applications in a
Virtual PC that runs a previous version of the OS (e.g., Windows XP or
Windows 2000), administrators can remove the barriers to OS upgrades,
and deal with testing and migration of incompatible applications after
the OS upgrade.
So, if we are going to be running our applications, the really important bit, in a virtual machine why should we run it on Windows 7? After all you can quite happily run Windows XP as a VM on Linux or Apple Mac, or just on it's own as most businesses are continuing to do.
I'm not just getting at Microsoft here by the way, some Linux distributions include everything but the kitchen sink and some even throw the sink in as well. Why bundle Open Office with a desktop Linux distribution (as SUSE does) - if I want OpenOffice I know where to go and get it, but if I'm installing Suse I am installing it because I have a machine that needs an operating system.
Back to Windows 7, which will still be using the NTFS file system from NT / Windows 2000 days with it's crude (in my view) access control and rights management - and why do we still have to defrag? It's things like this that lead me to think Microsoft has forgotten what an operating system is really for, maybe when I've had a look at the beta of Windows 7 I'll change my mind.
UPDATE: On the Windows 7 beta. Tried to install it on a free partition on a Toshiba laptop but after about an hour of copying and decompressing files the installation just gave up without any proper explanation or failure message. I've run Vista on this laptop before in a similar configuration but Windows 7 beta doesn't look happy.
Update: 26/03/09 Turning Windows Features on and off
As if in response to my comments above (if only I had that much influence) it has emerged in the last few weeks that Windows 7 will have considerably improved ability to turn features on and off (more details here). Windows has always has the ability to "add remove components" including the ability to turn off Internet Explorer which at one point become was set to become an intrinsic part of the windows operating system. Windows 7 enhances this capability by extending the list of controllable components over Windows Vista. It has to be noted though that in Windows 7 unused components are not uninstaled, they are "staged" - available for re-installation without recourse to the installation media. Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your point of view. If you want to make Windows 7 "light" this won't help very much, but switched off components and services won't be loaded at startup which reduces the run time memory requirement and "attack surface" for the security conscious.
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