Tevanian: Does Microsoft have the guts to slim down Windows?

The lean version of Windows XP already exists, it's called Windows FLP (Fundamentals for Legacy PCs): It is a version of XP which is stripped down of all superfluous stuff, so that it runs in old machines (as old as 233MHz with 64MB of RAM).

Microsoft doesn't make much publicity of it though, they want people with old machines to upgrade them. But FLP sure exists, check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Fundamentals_for_Legacy_PCs

The cloud will be the end of m$.

You guys are funny. At least in a colloquial kind of way.

There is an atmosphere of desperation over in Redmond all right. The cash cows are stuck because of backward compatibility issues that have already been discussed in the comments. Office and Windows are about to be replaced alright, but not by a quirky cool OS from Apple or a hodgepodge collection of smart hacks from Finland.

The cloud is what will make Windows and Office irrelevant. It'll do the same thing for Mac OS X and desktop Linux as well. This will happen sooner than you think. Unless Apple has more up it's sleeve than they've shown of Mobile Me so far they are in more trouble than Microsoft. It's iPhone and the internet device strategy that will keep Apple afloat and maybe prospering over the next decade.

Microsoft is rushing quietly to cloud right now. They have the capital, platform knowhow and flat out data center space to pull it off. It remains to be seen whether they have the balls to successfully reinvent themselves again but there is no doubt that they're doing it.

Well, I'm not a hardcore gamer, and I switched to Vista. And, neither is my wife, and she switched to it as well. So, the previous assertion is without any merit.

As for as large corporations being hesitate to switch to Vista; those entities are usually more conservative it their approach to OS migration. So, I'm not too surprised about their stance. XP is fine as a workstation OS in a corporate environment. And, if I was an IT manager at a large corp I wouldn't migrate my workstations to Vista anytime soon either.

And, again, I'll say this: Microsoft isn't in a position to do a radical overhaul of the Windows NT line, which Vista is a part of, for reasons I've already stated. However, they are in a position to develop a new OS in parallel to NT. Whether they chose to go this route in the future, I don't know.

As for Vista not being able to be trimmed down to a mobile OS, it was never intended to be one; Windows Mobile is for that.

Vista can be trimmed to to far less than 1 GB. The latest VLite can trim it down to 670MB installed. As for a Vlited Vista not be supported by Microsoft, I'll believe that will I see it stated by Microsoft themselves. One gets a lot of misinformation on third party tech forums, from people who think they know what they're talking about, when they actually don't.

I wish that last comment in the article, "Our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista," didn't exist!

-D

A bit off topic, but still worth reading. Here's an interesting e-mail from mr. Gates himself, dating from 2003, where he writes down his frustration on downloading and installing software on Windows: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Hi Mac fanboy.

"Hello, Windows Me 2.0.", well, "but I was wrong (as I frequently am)".

The biggest problem with Vista was that at release many of the features from Longhorn was gone. And Microsoft had been able to hype it up to a level that it could never live up to.

The only time I have had to call support is to Microsoft because of the Genuine (blip) that said I had installed it to much. After XP SP2, I have never had a single virus or other _ware problem. And thats was easy.

Im on a Mac because of the hardware, and the reason I log into MacOS is the temporary safety of websurfing.
Now I run both, I get both software developers handywork and thus the best of both worlds.

I like Vista myself and I don't really care what some ex Apple engineer and tech jornalist has to say about it. To me all that talk is just second guessing, hyperbole and marketing. If either of these people think they can do better then they should start their own company and do so - in other words, put your money where your mouth is.

Apple could do what it did with OSX because of it's smaller user base. Microsoft can not and will not do this as it would effect billions of systems and users worldwide. So, it took the incremental approach instead of a radical redesign.

Also, there are third party utilities that will trim Vista done to it's bare essentials if one wishes to go that route.

I thought Vista was built from scratch... I hate bloated software.

microsoft: "let's add new code for new feathres, and new code to fix he bad code"

Apple: "let's ad new code for new features, and let's remove and rewrite the bad code, and make it more efficient"