“Windows 7 might be a massive commercial success and an undeniably rock solid piece of software, but Microsoft is apparently unwilling to rest on those soft and cozy laurels. Asked about the riskiest product bet the Redmond crew is currently developing, its fearless leader Steve Ballmer took no time in answering ‘the next release of Windows’.” Also of note in this same video interview thing: Ballmer states that Silverlight is now pretty much strictly a client, non-cross platform thing, while explicitly stating that when it comes to doing something universal, “the world’s gone HTML5”.
You know, he could have said that about Vista, so it doesn’t mean much. Longhorn was risky, and nothing came of it.
We have to be careful reading anything into Ballmer’s remarks.
He should have said that about Vista. Did nobody in the organization have the courage to point out what a leviathan it was, before it damaged the Microsoft brand?
But your point is correct. When most of the rest of the business is predicated on the Windows franchise, the next release of Windows will always be the riskiest.
Same could be said of XP for that matter.
Yes, but systems pre-installed with Windows Vista had the option to “downgrade” to Windows XP. I don’t see a correlating Windows Vista “downgrade” option for systems with Windows 7 pre-installed.
Don’t make it sound like a universal truth. It isn’t. I wish I had the option to downgrade my Amilo Xi2528 to XP. All components were pretty much bleeding edge at that time and the documentation, specs, etc., all stated explicitly that the computer was not compatible with XP. Given the speed, dual core, memory and raid storage, XP would fly on this system. Unlike Vista which has been the worst experience I’ve ever had in front of a computer. Disappointing no matter what criteria I think of, to the point that I am just waiting (and hoping) for this laptop to die. The only good point is that I could disable both their ludicrous 3D alt+tab thing and Aero.
If downgrade was an option at that time, which I didn’t know since this is the first time I read or hear about it, then fine. But not all systems sold the first year Vista was out had that option. At least not the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi2528 in western France.
Actually, the option for OEMs to offer that right has been there a long time, same as any other volume customer. The reason it was so prevalent with Vista is MS was utterly idiotic in their usage of the “Vista Capable” branding and OEMs knew it.
Microsoft lowered the Vista capable -specs for a number of reasons, mainly because Intel asked for it. Intel wanted unrealisticly low requirements so that OEMs could bundle Vista with crap hardware. Microsoft didn’t ask Fujitsu or HP to serve Vista laptops that couldn’t handle Vista, they themselves chose that road.
The OEMs knew they were selling crap and it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Not really fair the people went to court against Microsoft and not HP nor Dell nor the rest of the criminals.
Edited 2010-10-24 19:30 UTC
Nothing came of it? Windows Vista served as the foundation for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, two of Microsoft’s most successful products in recent years. If it weren’t for the changes made in Windows Vista such as the introduction of WDDM, DirectX 10, Media Foundation (to replace the spaghetti of competing decrepit API’s), kernel scalability improvements and so forth Windows 7 would have become another Windows XP falling further behind its competition.
Windows Vista if viewed from an objective stand point established a new foundation on which future Windows will be built. When we are at Windows 9 maybe then people can be a little more intellectually honest and accept that maybe Windows Vista was necessary to bring about the big changes needed to push Windows ahead. Windows Vista was to Windows what Mac OS X 10.0 was to Mac OS X – a starting point upon which better things could be built.
Edited 2010-10-24 01:08 UTC
Vista is not what Longhorn would have been. Vista is a failure born from the failure of Longhorn. A 2 years late and buggy OS without the nice Longhorn features such as WinFS or the real DWM with compiz like plugins On paper, Longhorn was better then 7 in term of features, but many of them never worked fine enough.
My short post was pretty simple, so I don’t know how you misunderstood what I said. I didn’t say that they didn’t get anything out of Vista. I said:
“Longhorn was risky, and nothing came of it.”
That being corrected, I have to say you’re wrong. There was little really new about Vista. You don’t remember anything about it? When Longhorn failed, they went back to Server 2003, I think it was, and used that, adding some features that were consumer oriented. they didn’t take enough time to get it right, so it had a lot of problems. Remember that when Win 7 came out, Ballmer held up a box of it and said that Win 7 was; “Vista done right.”
No great accomplishment there. Just treading water for 7 years.
Windows 8? Let’s please talk about product numbers that matter.
Completely new graphics stack, written from scratch. Completely new audio stack, written from scratch. Completely new network stack, written from scratch. Completely new user interface. Boatloads of security-oriented features and large overhauls in the kernel. Completely new printing stack. Every major application was updated. New and very detailed power management features.
This is just a selection of new things compared to XP. Saying Vista was “nothing new” is nothing but trolling – outdated trolling, even.
Not much new when compared to what they were promising with Longhorn. Server was always a better base for Windows in general.
What kind of logic is this? You are trying REALLY hard to make anything Microsoft does look bad, right? So, you’re saying there’s nothing new in Vista because of what was promised for a product that was never released? So, all the progess Vista brought over XP is void because of promises made for an unreleased product? Does this mean Mac OS X was not a solid improvement over Mac OS 9 because of promises made about Pink and Copland, which never materialised?
Troll fail. Better luck next time.
What are you talking about? Adding “some” features… It almost makes deeply changing lots of huge and key components of Windows (kernel, video stack, GPU oflloaded UI, audio stack, per application volume management, networking stack, firewall, MAC security policy, full ASLR support, etc…) sound so trivial
.
Edited 2010-10-25 09:02 UTC
LOL While Vista may have had quite a few “improvements” it was nowhere near the jump as seen from Mac OS 9.x to Mac OS X (or Win9X to XP).
Indeed, it was a half-baked mess. It took Windows 7 to really nail it down as something usable.
Good point, Vista was a crappy Beta of what turned into a decent product. The success of future products cannot retroactively make what was a bad product, good. It is never necessary for any company to release a crappy version of a product ahead of an actually decent version.
One could say the very same thing about Mozilla Foundation and the craptastic releases of Mozilla suite – it formed the foundation for Firefox, Thunderbird, Lightening, Songbird and many other applications that use Mozilla core technology. Out of a crap piece of software came marketing leading software titles based off the foundations set by the initial crap release. I do understand from the consumer perspective Vista was a let down but if one views it from the perspective of being long term foundations for future products then it is a great move be it painful for all concerned.
Any sort of change that happens will never come smoothly; MacOS 9 to X was disruptive, I used to hear people complain about out MacOS 9 was faster, that MacOS X was a step back rather than a step forward. Now fast forward to today and Snow Leopard is rock solid and no one would ever think of going back to the bad old days of MacOS 9. Windows Vista wasn’t as big change as MacOS 9 but it was a huge leap when you consider how disruptive it was for many people. Graphics drivers had to be re-written from the ground up again for WDDM, many applications simply didn’t work because of the new stringent security, some device vendors stopped supporting their hardware altogether as to cash in and force people to upgrade their hardware. In terms of the scope of the change it was huge but like MacOS 9 to MacOS X, it laid the foundations for a great future.
It will be interesting though what Windows 8 has in store – if it means more stripping out of built in software, finishing off Media Foundation so it is a complete replacement for previous API’s, better use of Direct2D/DirectWrite then Windows Vista will re-enforce itself as the grounding of future development that pulled Microsoft forward.
Disagree. Mozilla was headed down the wrong path. Only the phenoix, which cut against the grain of Mozilla’s existing path created a decent browser. If they had had a small and light browser ( stop laughing, pheonix was small light and fast when released) in mind from the begining, then they could have made a bigger impact sooner. Those earlier big, crappy clunky Mozilla releases DID NOT have to happen.
A good example of all of this seamless transition is the one MS made from Win 98/Me to XP. They were completely different code bases, different kernels,ect. But, no one could really deny form day 1 that XP was infinitely better than win me/98.
But yes, OS X is another good example of a bad release, but they made it a little better by including the Classic environment until OS X got good enough UI wise, and most applications were updated. 10.0 had some major issues, but from 10.1 released a couple months later. IMHO 10.1 was absolutely better than OS 9, but it did lack some GUI features of 9, so I sort of understood why some crazy mac addicts were unconvinced.
In several workplaces, many people preferred to stay with Windows 2000, the XP uptake was slow there… almost Vista slow.
One of the biggest advantages XP had over Vista in overcoming its predecessor was that XP SP3 was not nearly as crappy as Windows ME was compared to its successor.
I remember XP having some HW issues, such as it not booting without unplugging a USB keyboard I had… not until it finished the installation and got some more patches.
My point was simply that windows xp transition millions of home users from an older completely different code base to a new one, with minimal problems. They didn’t have to release a terrible version that had “fundamental changes” in it to build upon in the future.
The reasoning I was objecting to was just that: “to release a good product, you must first release a really bad one. “
I fully agree on your Vista comments, I was one of those people with no Vista related problems even with pre-RC Vista. I only had 1 GB of RAM, 64 MB of VRAM for my trusty GeForce Go7x series, and a Core Duo CPU… Yet I was able to code with Visual Studio, Firefox, IE, VirtualPC 2007 running Windows Server 2003, and ISS running inside the guest OS all open at once
. I welcomed the more responsive GUI thanks to Aero and the per application volume manager, … Windows 7 did bring the best Taskbar out there though… It is a clone of the dock partially, but it has improved on the Dock so it is time for OS X to catchup there.
I think we are being unfair to Lion though… The only Lion exclusive piece we saw was the Launchpad, all the Mac App Store stuff is Snow Leopard compatible too and will launch in a short while.
Let’s not forget that Lion’s rollout is 1 year, from the first time it was shown to it’s release date OS X took 1 year too, but at the time they already showed us Aqua… that is true.
What is also true is the fact that it was safer to show Aqua then, with no fear of the competition catching up (which it did with Vista, technologically, several years later), than it would be showing big UI changes now… The technology in Widows 7 is far closer to what Apple has in their sleeves than it used to be IMHO.
Microsoft can secure its investment: Make Windows expire or stop releasing security updates starting, say, 2012, and people will have to “upgrade” to Windows 8. Just like Microsoft did with Windows XP
You say “Make Windows expire”. Which version of Windows are you referring to?
You may not know but Microsoft is still releasing security updates for XP SP 3. There’s another news item in the RSS feed that says Microsoft is only now denying OEMs the right to use XP in netbooks. So… the ones that have been sold last month won’t even have 18 months of security upgrades?
Anyway, I don’t think the people who are currently using XP are that worried about security upgrades. In that respect, Vista is better than XP. I’m using XP SP 3 on a laptop that’s always on, using an administrative account. Why? Because 1- the limited account is simply not usable on XP, 2- I don’t put anything sensitive on that machine and 3- even on that old machine with that limited memory space, XP is the more responsive of the two systems I own.
You mean “will do in 2014”. Sure Microsoft stops issuing patches for the OSs eventually, but 13 years is a pretty good commitment overall. If XP is anything like 2000/NT4 that deadline will be extended a couple of times as well.
For reference here is the support deadlines for XP: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173
“Mainstream support” basically means the end of sales, warranty and the help hotlines. Extended support does security updates.
Edited 2010-10-25 09:08 UTC
Actually, something did come out of it. Windows 7 (seeing that it’s Windows NT 6.1) But it’s like that when you have a major revision that rolls out. I mean, looks at Windows 95, it was risky, but from it came 98, which was miles better than 95.
This has to be the most sensible and least hyperbole of Ballmer’s interviews in like forever.
It’s great to see Steve in a more casual setting joking around with people – god knows people have turned business into an institution where fun is the forbidden word.
As for the future, Windows 8 will be a big gamble from the point of view that it will include new features but many of those features will be reliant on the cloud. It will be a challenge therefore for Microsoft to sell Windows 8 if selling the idea of cloud computing doesn’t catch on. With that being said I do think it is an over statement to claim that it is a really big gamble given the worse case scenario is they’ll still have a very good OS even without linking into the cloud.
As for Silverlight, I think the dice was already rolled a while ago when they allowed access to native code a while back. My guess is that Silverlight is being setup as the replacement to Visual Basic and other languages used for quick ‘n dirty applications – the attempt to create a ‘Flash competitor’ has given way to supporting HTML5. Silverlight has a place and for everything else there is HTML5.
What has frustrated me most about HTML5 is the length of time it is taking to get things moving along – we have to wait till 2020 before it is finalised? why not do a piecemeal standardisation rather than trying to do it all at once in a single monolithic standard? Given the work Microsoft is doing with hardware acceleration, Apple is working on bringing QuartzGL to Webkit, Google adding it to Chrome, and Firefox with OpenGL accelerated layers (Direct2D/DirectWrite on Windows) the claim of superiority that Flash once had will wane pretty quickly.
It is good to see a re-invigorated Microsoft because competition ultimately results in a better experience for all users. I have to admit given the lackluster Lion presentation that showed off pointless gimicky crap, Windows is becoming a more viable alternative each day. Within a single presentation Steve Jobs has done a fine job convincing at least one person (me) that Mac OS X doesn’t have a future in his grand plans. In the case of Windows, at least Microsoft can chew chewing gun and walk at the same time – launch a top notch mobile operating system whilst taking care of its core customer base.
It’s possible that what will happen is the major players (MS, Apple, Google) will just move ahead with implementing the most obvious features and perhaps a few they WISH would be standardized on… creating some schisms but at least providing most of the functionality even before the standard is finalized.
Hopefully that is the case because fucked if I know why there are non-browser vendors in W3C who keep holding up stuff – Adobe blocking any sort of standardisation because it would undermine their near monopoly status. Personally they need to develop a body that only has browser vendors and excludes everyone else – the browser vendors agree on something then everyone else has to catch up to those standards.
I am a big OS X fan and have been for ages (well, since the beta) so read this with a grain of salt…
I also thought the presentation for Lion was unimpressive to say the least, but I think there is going to be a lot more to Lion than a UI update. I think you’ll find a lot of very interesting additions to it. Maybe I’m just hoping, but I think the name gives away a lot of what they are doing.
Lions are traditionally the “King” of the jungle, so to create a mediocre release and call it Lion is not something they would do. I base this on the fact that Snow Leopard didn’t offer than much new, so they basically said it was still Leopard, but with a bit of snow thrown in for good measure 🙂
I think for a start it will use the cores under the hood much more efficiently, ie. all the work they did for Snow Leopard will start to pay off.
I think Finder will finally be updated to a modern tab based thing with access to the cloud (I hate that term) and so on (maybe cut will be added to copy when moving files, but I won’t hold my breath – LOL).
I think the OS will also support flash memory a lot better than it currently does.
And so on…
I think Jobs did the simple presentation just to let us know that something is coming and to give it a name and a launch date. Other than that, there wasn’t that much to show. I do like the new launcher though, kind of iPad meets OS X, very nice. I thought the swipping between full screens was nice, but didn’t seem to work that well on the mouse – LOL…
However, this is about Ballmer. I have not been a fan of Ballmer since forever, I find him to be as technically sound as most of the bosses I have ever worked for, which is not saying much 😉
But… This is one of the first times I have been encouraged by what he is saying. Basically, Silverlight won’t continue to be pushed as an alternative to HTML (just as Flash is also losing interest). The fact that Ballmer sees HTML in a similar way as Jobs and others do is very encouraging. Maybe there is hope for MS after all!
I’m sure as I am writing this, Ballmer is off somewhere being quoted saying something mind numbingly stupid again (as is his want) – LOL…
Well, there’s already iDisk…
Are you not giving too much importance to the name?
lol….and here I thought it was just me. Lion apparently is just fanboy filler.
Well, for people who just like to dislike Apple, I guess you would think that way, but as usual, MS will now be struggling to try and match the feature set, and overdo it.
and in an article last week Thom you sang Windows 7 praises. Do you think its that good? Without trying to deny some of the significance of Vista, UAC,WDDM etc. Vista was appalling and I am surprised that from the foundations of Vista MS has made something better than acceptable with Windows 7.
But fantastic I think not, the print management is still horrid, networking less than intuitive, still too many wizards to do simple things, driver support isn’t great, boots up quickly enough (though Haiku it isn’t) but shutdown takes an age, Why does it have to turn visual effects off when you watch a film? and backwards compatibility with windows software including MS software isn’t fantastic.
Personally I prefer Linux and it seems that many have moved to Apple.
But fantastic I think not, the print management is still horrid, networking less than intuitive, still too many wizards to do simple things, driver support isn’t great, boots up quickly enough (though Haiku it isn’t) but shutdown takes an age, Why does it have to turn visual effects off when you watch a film?
I don’t really take a stance on the other things, but I find driver support in 7 actually pretty great; as long as I get it to connect to network it finds and downloads all the drivers I could possibly need from Windows Update automatically. I nowadays have a rather large cache of gadgets and whatnot and it has installed every single one of them without a hitch so far. I find it a really, really welcome change from previous Windows versions and I hope Microsoft will continue to hone Windows Update to include other software too.
Maybe I’m just a cheapskate – but My old Soundblaster that even worked in Haiku wouldn’t work in Windows 7 Vista drivers don’t work, (I eventually found a funny opensource driver that kind of worked.) I’ve stuck in about three different (admittedly old) wifi cards and had problems with drivers. It seems the Windows 7 is OK with drivers as long as the hardware is new.
Edited 2010-10-24 09:31 UTC
It seems the Windows 7 is OK with drivers as long as the hardware is new.
Hmm, I have a few somewhat old devices working fine, but yeah, I guess the older the device is the less of a chance it’ll download drivers for it. That’s actually a plus for Linux, though: even hardware from the freaking stone age has big chances of working fine, not that even very recent hardware has much issues either.
Office 2000 (see cheapskate – still does what I want no awful ribbon) Doesn’t work without a bit of playing finding dlls etc. actually easier to get it working with crossover in Linux.
Not suggesting one should but Outlook 2000 wont work with Vista or Windows 7.
Uhhh…what don’t work? Maybe you have a different version than me (I was running Office 2K Pro on Windows 7 X64) but the big four (PPT, Word, Excel, Access) installed and ran without a lick of trouble. No fiddling, no .dlls, just installed as admin and all was gravy. Once installed it never asked for admin again and all has worked beautifully.
I’d fire it up and take some caps, but after 3 months of my oldest bugging the heck out of me I finally broke down and installed Office 2K7. His college classes have a lot of homework, and most of it is in the new .x format which even with the converter old Office 2K just don’t handle well. It is taking this old greybeard awhile but the ribbon ain’t too bad once you get used to it, and having it autohide to maximize screen space is a nice touch.
PLUGIN.OCX
ICMFILTER.DLL
Come to mind
If you have the 64 bit version installed you will have a much harder time finding drivers for it than the 32 bit version, so that is a factor too
I do have the 64 bit – but I was planning on keeping it for a while.
I am not a supporter of any cult-like technology. I use what is useful. I care to leave a comment on the metainformation in the statements of Ballmer.
It is pretty obvious that Microsoft is losing at the moment (in terms of gradients). The market it created is being pulled underneath its feet by an amalgamation of technological advances.
Interestingly enough, however, Apple is grateful and is vehemently twisting the knife. But there is something ominous in the painting. I think Apple will realize it one way or another. To subdue is to care for. An oxymoron or not, if Apple wants to be king they will have to be the servant as well. They are not doing that; however wounded the sluggish bureaucratic behemoth Microsoft is, it is fighting for survival.
Apple on the other hand like the new kid on “teh” block strides and strolls. Pride – galore! Cult – galore! Shouts – galore! But in the same time a cul-de-sac of required technological imbecility on behalf of the consumer is the direction.
Funny times are ahead. Take popcorn and start building on your hardware skills.
Apologies for my lyrical expressionism ;-).
That’s a very strange, and almost meaningless post. It started out ok, but then dissolved into silliness..
Somehow I think I actually understand what you said there.
Did you mean that if you want to be the market leader you have to do what the market wants (as Microsoft do), rather than insisting on doing your own thing to your own standards (as Apple do). If so that’s quite possibly true, but what’s that got to do with this story?
I think Microsoft will deliver. They have the capacity they needed the motivation.
… but I have the characteristic of being called silly 😉
Gates said they were “betting the farm” on .Net.
They didn’t.
.NET hasn’t exactly failed.
would be modular and scalable. As a result it would support
* embedded systems
* mobile Phones
* tablets
* desktops
* servers
It would just have a minimal hardware abstraction layer. This HAL only would cover CPU, busses and memory. Only this tiny HAL and a small VM “bootloader” would be CPU Architecture dependend. The VM runtime “bootloader” is a simple interpreter. It’s only purpose is to bootload an optimizing VM runtime utilizing JIT technics. Everything else even the optimizing VM runtime itself would run on the optimizing VM runtime. This would include device drivers like graphic card, NIC or SATA drivers. As a result it would support several processor architectures. IMHO at least x86, x86-64, ARM Cortex Mx and Ax and MIPS 32bit and 64bit should be supported.
Also the OS itself the schedulers — I think of schedules as “plugins” –, filesystems, etc. would run on the VM runtime.
It would optionally offer a remote shell, a GUI optimized for handheld devices or a GUI optimized for desktops. The desktop optimzed GUI would support remote access.
Microsoft has the .NET infrastructure on which such an OS could be based. Well, it has to be supported at least 5 years in parallel with the “classical” Microsoft Windows OSes to allow develpopers to provide applications and customers to migrate.
Just dreaming,
pica
Part of the problem is that there are huge C++ codebases that were started before .NET and it would take billions to convert them all. Win32 support could be provided in a VM but it has to be there.
Yes, I know. And I do not have the resources to change this. Look at the JNode project, which is quite similar to what I suggest. They simple do not have the resources to compete.
That’s why it is just a dream 🙁
pica
Okay, until there I follow you. Sounds like a microkernel.
There I’m lost. It sounds like you would like to write almost all of this OS in interpreted code. This basically means recompiling most of the OS at every boot (except is JITed code is cached in some way). Performance would be horrible. Apart from technological achievement, what’s the point of using this instead of platform-independent compiled languages like C and C++ ?
Again, why not a microkernel and high-level components written in platform-independents component languages instead ? What’s the added benefit ?
Couldn’t a properly done GUI infrastructure optimize for both ? (I’m thinking about this in my own OS project, but I’m not there yet so I can’t tell about it being doable in practice)
Edited 2010-10-25 13:47 UTC
… that even closed source components (e.g. some graphic card drivers are closed source) are available on all hardware platforms.
The part up to the optimizing VM runtime can be provided be the hardware vendor.
The OS vendor provides the running on that runtime OS. Here is another benefit: The OS vendor only has to provide a single image. Has to patch only each issue once.
pica
1/Graphic card drivers are generally linked to a single hardware platform, so how do they benefit from that interpreted ecosystem, knowing that they’ll include a large amount of bus-specific code anyway ?
2/The vendor does have to provide some kind of source code (as opposed to platform-dependent binary) if we want the program to be compiled/interpreted on multiple platforms. If he does not want it to be human-readable, the best he can do is using an automated code obfuscation system like the one offered by Java…
Wrong, he must provide several images, since as you said a (tiny but necessary) part of the OS has to be hardware-dependent. Moreover, if the code has been properly written, the OS vendor generally only has to patch it once too. The extra step is to recompile it once for each supported platform, but if he doesn’t do it, someone will have to do it at his place.
You can see it this way : either the OS vendor compiles one image per platform, or each user, on each platform, will have to compile an image in real-time at first boot and experience the sluggish Gentoo-style first impression that this leads to.
Edited 2010-10-25 16:18 UTC
The busses are abstracted by the HAL. Card specific native code could be uploaded to the card. But card specific code is not hardware platform specific.
That is exactly my point. The human-readable code is obfuscated by a compiler which emits VM runtime specific code.
No, the OS I dream of does not have any platform dependent code. Device depend (e.g. firmware for a NIC) maybe, but no platform dependent code at all.
Netbeans for example has a identical code base for all hardware platforms. You can copy the installation directory tree from one platform to another. I “migrated” a Netbeans installation from Solaris 9 SPARC64 to RHEL on x86. It works. Just tar the directory tree on one platform and untar it on the other.
Yes, the installation routine requires a burn in script to be run. Also patches need a burn in script.
Well, yesterday I updated my private Windows XP system. Hey it took almost 1 1/2 hours until the updater has determined which patches are required. Even on a Solaris system patching may take hours. So, if you take the Debian apt-get mechanism instead of the Windows or Solaris update mechanisms you have a lot of time saved, which could be used to run the burn in 😉
pica
PS I am home now. So, till tomorrow.
Well, sounds like this would require a bit of help from the hardware (eg at loading time, for the loading process to be platform-independent). Personally, I think that an hybrid solution where a compilable source (obfuscated if vendors want) AND binary images for the main target platforms are provided would be better as far as performance is concerned, but we agree when it comes to saying that the hardware-dependent part of an OS should be kept minimal…
About netbeans, it works so because it’s coded in Java. This cannot work for a kernel since to run java programs you need the JVM and the standard Java library, and implementing that basically requires one to code a whole OS whose sole role is to be a JVM (as has been done in research projects some times).
Edited 2010-10-25 16:58 UTC
you gave the answer yourself: native code caching would do the trick.
Maybe also a burn in script to initially fill the native code cache(s) would help.
pica
I guess you people don’t realize that the only way one version of windows becomes successful is when Microsoft stops selling previous versions.
People don’t upgrade their Windows OS – they just buy their next PC or laptop and it just comes with what-ever is the current windoze version.
The adoption of each new windoze version is driven by new hardware sales – nothing more. And Vista was a dog, btw, and Vista/Seven do nothing really new or different for the end-user besides give a new-look destop and start-menu bar and re-arrange things compared to XP.