The biggest takeaway Microsoft is hoping to deliver this week, sources say, is that Windows 10 is built on a single, common “core” (known internally as “OneCore”) that will work across a variety of devices, from phones, tablets, PCs, large-screen displays like the company’s Perceptive Pixel multitouch-screen devices, and ultimately, Xbox.
OneCore implies more than just the common kernel that Microsoft touted as part of its Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 stories. In addition to the OS kernel, OneCore also includes the dynamic link libraries (DLLs), application platform layer and other pieces of the operating system. Microsoft’s pitch to developers with Windows 10 will be they can target the same core environment with their apps, and those “Universal” apps will work across a range of screen sizes. These apps will be available in a single store, rather than separate Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox stores.
Microsoft has been hinting about all this for years now, but they’ve never managed to pull it off. If they do pull it off tomorrow, they’ll be the first to have a completely unified platform on all consumer-oriented device types. Apple has both iOS and OS X, and Google has Android and Chrome OS – and both of them seem to be taking steps towards unification, albeit in different ways.
Whether or not this is actually what will turn things around for Windows in mobile is a whole different girl scout cookie.
Awesome if they can pull it off.
It required them some 20 years since Windows 95 to get a coherent software and system architecture, going through miserable failures such Me or Vista, messing 8’s UI.
I can understand they had some legacy stuff not to break, but in the end, what have they done since UAC and some other things ?
Breaking legacy and telling devs to just STFU and follow the recommended good practices (see why Windows 9 have been renamed 10 in a hurry).
Does that mean that cell phones will also need 20GB of install space? Lol.
Nope, there’s not all the fancy animations and loads of helps for everything. They even adopted ‘flat design’ to limit color count and be able to compress graphics further. That’s why Windows 8 is slimmer than Windows 2000. Isn’t it ?
Not sure about Windows 8 being overall slimmer than any past version of Windows, other than in appearance. Windows 8.x installation DVD is roughly 3.6-GB vs 400-MB for Windows 2000 Pro CD. Several generations of hardware advances help Windows 8.1 run faster, along with Microsoft using hibernation-style shutdown.
Silverlight was supposed to work everywhere. MS killed it. It used to be the case that betting on a Microsoft technology was a safe bet. DirectX, .Net, etc. Now they seem to change direction weekly, and the list of abandoned technologies is a giant warning sign to developers to watch for the rug being pulled out from under them at the worst possible moment.
You’re worried that Silverlight, which came out in 2007 and is supported until 2021, is “pulling the rug out”? Thats quite some support cycle in my view!
Lets be honest, its competing against a product that wilted and died in the mobile era (Flash). If you are seriously starting a new project in silverlight, maybe you should start looking very closely at HTML5.
My mate just sent me a post over Google Wave about his new PowerPC video processing application done with QTKit, with garbage collection enabled.
The application allows integration with the Netflix’s API for download of video samples.
Thankfully, not all companies are like Microsoft.
MS has never been able to deliver on any of its bold claims. It barely delivers a functional OS. Its extended ecosystem of products are mostly junk, and the developer story for all of these things is a nightmare.
We require twice as many Windows devs as we do other platforms, and they take twice as long. Not because they are bad programmers, but because of the mass of garbage they have to wade through.
ALL operating systems from the big 3 are junk. iOS and Android have wifi issues and performance issues, and as for OS X, look some articles below. Windows has the “failure configuring updates…” problem and also the problem of services like the search indexer occasionally getting “stuck” consuming CPU resources.
Why? Because there is no warranty on software even if you ‘ve paid for it. A seller’s dream and a customer’s nightmare. Customers are paying beta testers. Some OS vendors will actually call some of the OS apps “beta”, which replace non-beta versions, as an in-your-face move.
As long as there is no warranty, aka “fix my issue or give me my monies back” this is going to get a lot worse. Only hardware will get serviced by the warranty departments, and maybe they ‘ll offer to factory reset the software, without solving the issue of course.
PS: And please don’t mention Desktop Linux. It has it’s fair share of problems (PulseAudio, X.org, gpu video encoding), and also cares much less about back compat.
Edited 2015-01-20 17:08 UTC
kurkosdr,
It’s funny you say this, I just posted a rant in a different thread about how terrible support has become even for physical products, even when they are sold with a warranty.
http://www.osnews.com/thread?603553
Those were very recent, but going back over the years I’ve experienced similar things elsewhere even with a warranty! AOC tried to charge me to fix my new monitor that died under warranty, trying to blame me for defects in the monitor. I fought with them for many days until they caved and admitted that the problem was faulty components. In the end at least they did the right thing, but it was the intention of their RMA department to blame me and deny coverage.
One would hope things would work themselves out in the free market, however in the back of my mind I wonder if the companies (like Apple Honda and VisionTek from my earlier post) have carefully run the numbers and determined that denying warranty coverage is more profitable even after factoring in customer resentment and lawsuits. After all, assuming failure rates are well less than 50%, most customers will never file a claim. Most of those that do won’t hire a lawyer or take time off work to go fight in a court that has jurisdiction over the company. And if they do go to small claims court, there’s no punitive damages. With nothing on the line beyond the original claim under warranty, it might well make economic sense for a company to wrongfully deny claims up front. The worst case scenario for them is that they are forced to honor their warranty.
Edited 2015-01-20 18:57 UTC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolo_Machiavelli
was a founder of modern political science, and more specifically political ethics.
Becoming a paying beta tester is like kidnapping, but hey if you like the subject matter, you can pretend you’re volunteering. )-:
Welcome to the modern world, where the operating system is politics.
cpiral,
That’s an insightful point. Sometimes doing the wrong thing can get you ahead, and Niccolo studied this in great detail. The question, is whether we as a society should view Machiavellianism as a legitimate means of getting ahead. We see this trait in ruthless business leaders. It makes life worse for victims, no doubt, but being selfish and exploiting others can never the less get you ahead. Do they teach Machiavellianism in modern business schools?
Many scholars now consider The Prince to be clever satire of Lorenzo Medici whom the book was dedicated to.
Seems to me that .Net should be their ‘common core’.
KDE has multi-device support from the same exact code-base and even run-times with the KDE Frameworks 5, and Plasma5 environment; something they started with KDE4 which can target tablet/mobile/desktop similarly, but not as well as KDE5 does. Needless to say, this work was way ahead of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
That said, this “Core” functionality will be, like the open sourced .NET functionality, the minimal stuff. Any GUI won’t translate well since most GUIs on Windows are not written for scalability beyond allowing the user to resize the application window, and even then many developers take the easy way out and disable that too.
This could be helpful for writing Windows Services (aka Headless, Daemon Applications), but not much beyond that.
Even if MS succeeds, what reason would developers have to flock to Windows? OneCore? So, freakin’ what? Developers are going to go where the u$er-ba$e i$, and users aren’t going to give a jolly-god-d-mn about “Onecore Vision” if the “DE” doesn’t offer any advantages over Android or IOS? Consumers could care less.
Does MS think that if developers come, users will follow? It’s the chicken & egg conundrum.
Seems to me that MS has much bigger problems. MS should know, of all companies, that you can build an empire on third-rate software. It’s not the software that matters (or making developers happy — just ask Apple). It strikes me as a combination of being in the right place at the right time (Google smartly created Android as THE alternative to IOS when MS was still “visionlessly” dithering over tablets and their usefulness) and familiarity. MS missed their opening. Too bad for MS. I think they’ve just got to hope there’s another hardware revolution and that they have the wits and brains to recognize it.
Also, it seems to me that MS should give up on Windows OS as a sell-able “product”. When Google is giving away their OS (ChromeOS & Android); and Apple isn’t charging for upgrades and that sort of thing, MS is a fool to think it can keep rifling through consumers’ wallets with each new upgrade. That model is toast. They need to give away their OS and make money the new-fangled way – IMHO.
Edited 2015-01-20 19:09 UTC
vtpoet,
I agree. Developers and Consumers are highly correlated, however it’s the users that CAUSE developers to come rather than the other way around. Any platform with lots of users will draw in developers, but not necessarily the other way around.
I don’t think the paid software model is toast necessarily, business/consumers will still pay for software that they need. But the problem for MS is that the needs of PC consumers are evolving slower than MS’s desire to sell us new stuff. Why pay again for something that doesn’t really work that much better than what we already have? Businesses are holding off because they don’t see the need to buy upgrades just for the sake of having the latest and greatest eye candy. It’s not the same pace of improvements we had years ago.
Well, this new initiative does have one advantage for both users and developers – write one app, perhaps with some UI tweaks for each platform, that runs natively on desktop, phone, tablet, and I suppose console as well.
So you ask, ‘Why the HELL would I want to run tablet apps on a desktop?’ Well, you wouldn’t really, but it is kind of the lesser of two evils. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but virtually nobody is writing native desktop apps anymore. Devs write a web app and just call that the desktop app. So you either have a choice to run tablet apps on a desktop or web apps.
Personally, I don’t want to have a web browser with 20 different tabs open all day, just waiting for it to freeze and have to give it the three finger salute and open everything again. It’s like running Windows 3.1 all over again. Plus, you never really own web apps either, which I’m sure doesn’t make the FOSS crowd very happy.
Granted, MS failed miserably at their first attempt at a desktop/tablet hybrid in Windows 8, and I’m not sure they’re going to do any better in Windows 10. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt until they screw it up yet again.
Edited 2015-01-21 02:43 UTC
It just depend on how well Microsoft will tie consumers with their new platform, hence attract developers (developers, developers, … *singing and jumping*) in the long run.
See how they tied consumers to Windows with Office. See how other companies ties consumers with their pathetic version upgrade scheme (Labview, Teststand, Solidworks, …) preventing people from opening files saved with older versions of the software even if nothing justify it.
Don’t even doubt about their creativeness in this domain. They will screw both the consumers and the developers, they will increase their profit share no matter what.
I’ve frequently commented that Microsoft had no “Ecosystem”, just an archipelago.
All their pieces required a different environment, devkit, or something.
This is the fundamental step in fixing it.
The next step is to use it across the board – the Xbox, Phones, (whatever the update to) Zune, Tablets.
The third step is top open things up completely – remove the barriers to entry and communication.
This means operating with iCloud and the Google cloud offerings. Bill Gates gave Netscape users “a jarring experience”, Google is following karma with Outlook and YouTube. A wildcard might be Amazon (they are nearby each other).
A good sign is the cloud services and apps on “other people’s platoforms”.
Even iOS and OSX are somewhat disjoint. Google doesn’t have all the types of devices.
The game is different now, and Microsoft has an opportunity. Its competitors are getting larger and slower, but have not OSsified quite yet – like Microsoft has.
But they also need to find a way to differentiate themselves. One is to beat iCloud so that saving things on MS’s cloud is encrypted so MS can’t break it (I’m already assuming the phones will be only user-decryptable). The Lumia’s camera was great, but it was and is still part of the archipelago.
AltaVista was before Google. You can find other examples where “the second mouse gets the cheese”.
Sounds like they push everything into virtualized runtime. That’s not going to fly for high end applications anyway, at least not until mobile hardware will reach the computational power of modern desktops.
Edited 2015-01-21 03:42 UTC
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