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Windows 7: Windows Vista Lite?

This content is 15 years old and may not reflect reality today nor the author’s current opinion. Please keep its age in mind as you read it.

There’s no denying that Vista was a failure. A complete and utter disappointment. An unmitigated disaster. Microsoft have even essentially admitted it themselves, finally accepting what users, reviewers and wary businesses have been saying since before it even hit the shelves. It just didn’t bring enough benefit for its significant cost (early estimates were talking about $5k per seat to upgrade by the time you deliver new hardware, support it and train users), users hated it and some have even called it the most serious technical misstep in computing history. The fluff (transparent windows et al) exacted a heavy toll on the hardware and the delicate minimum requirements ‘balance’ was way off – set it too high and nobody can afford your software; too low and those who do complain about inadequate performance. Plus the long overdue security system was invasive and yet still largely ineffective.

The reality is that while XP has been ‘good enough’ for most users, Google and friends have been quietly the playing field from the corpse littered battlefields of operating systems and file formats to (now) mostly standardised browsers. It simply doesn’t matter now what your operating system is, and between Firefox’s rise to fame and so many heterogeneous mobile devices converging on the Internet it’s long since been impossible for webmasters to deny admittance to non-IE (and therefore non-Windows) clients.

In arriving at this point Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) has proven itself a truly disruptive force. Without it there would be no Google and no Amazon Web Services (and quite possibly no Amazon!). While Linux on the desktop may be a pipe dream, it’s carved a large slice out of the server market (powering the vast majority of cloud computing infrastructure) and its adoption is steadily rising on connected devices from mobiles and netbooks to television sets. There are multiple open source browsers, multiple open source scripting engines (to power web based applications), a new breed of client architecture emerging (thanks in no small part to Google Chrome) and even Microsoft are now talking about unleashing IE on the open source community (for better or worse).

So how did we get to Windows 7 (and back onto a sensible version numbering scheme) anyway? Here’s a look from an architecture point of view:

  • Windows 1/2: Rudimentary text based environment, didn’t introduce mouse/arrow keys until 2.x. Something like XTree Gold (which was my preference environment at the time).
  • Windows 3: A revolutionary step and the first version of Windows that didn’t suck and that most people are likely to remember.
  • Windows 95/98/ME: Evolution of 3.x and the first real mainstream version of Windows.
  • Windows NT 3.5x/4.0: Another revolutionary step with the introduction of the vastly superior NT (‘New Technologies’) kernel.
  • Windows 2000/XP: Refinement of NT and the result of recombining separate development streams for business and home users.
  • Windows Vista: Bloat, bloat and more bloat. Available in at least half a dozen different (expensive and equally annoying) versions, but many (most?) of its sales were for downgrade rights to XP.
  • Windows 7: Tommorow’s Windows. Vista revisited.

Before I explain why Windows 7 is to Vista what Windows Millennium Edition (WinMe) was to Windows 98 (and why that isn’t necessarily such a bad thing), let’s talk quickly about the Microsoft’s MinWin project. Giving credit where credit is due, the NT kernel is really quite elegant and was far ahead of its time when unleashed on the world over a dozen years ago. It’s stable, extensible, performant and secure (when implemented properly). It’s also been steadily improved through 3.51, 4.0, 2000, XP and Vista releases. It must be quite annoying for the bearded boffins to see their baby struggling under the load heaped on it by their fellow developers, and therein lies the problem.

That’s why the MinWin project (which seeks to deliver the minimum set of dependencies for a running system, albeit without even a graphics interface) is interesting both from a client, and especially from a cloud computing point of view. While MinWin weighs in at forty-something megabytes, Vista is well over a thousand (and usually a few gigabytes), but the point is that Microsoft now know how to be slim when they need to be.

Now that the market has spoken with its feet Microsoft are paying attention and Windows 7 lies somewhere on the Vista side of the MinWin to Vista bloat scale. The interface is a significant departure from Vista, borrowing much from other wildly successful operating systems like OS X, and like OS X it will be simpler, faster and easier to use. This is very similar to Windows ME’s notoriously unsuccessful bolting of the Windows 2000 interface onto Windows 98, only this time rather than putting a silk shirt on a pig we should end up with a product actually worth having. This is good news, especially for business users who by this time will have already been waiting too long to move on from XP.

Conversely, Azure (their forthcoming cloud computing OS) is on the MinWin side of the bloat scale. It is almost certainly heavily based on the Windows 2008 Server Core (which follows Novell’s example by evicting the unwanted GUI from the server), needing to do little more than migrate the management functions to a service oriented architecture. If (and only if) they get the management functions right then they will have a serious contender in the cloud computing space. That means sensible, scalable protocols which follow Amazon and Google’s examples (where machines are largely independent, talking to their peers for state information) rather than simply a layer on top of the existing APIs. Unfortunately Microsoft Online Services (MOS) feels currently more like the latter (even falling back to the old school web management tools for some products), but with any luck this will improve with time.

Provided they find the right balance for both products, this is good for IT architects (like myself), good for Microsoft, and most importantly, good for users. Perhaps the delay was their strategy all along, and why not when you can extract another year or two of revenue from the golden goose of proprietary software? In any case we’re at the dawn of a new era, and it looks like Microsoft will be coming to the party after all.