Vista is finally starting to ship and already people are discussing what the next version of Windows will offer. It is an intriguing question.
From a technical perspective, the modular and time-tested UNIX model is far superior to Windows. Spend three months using the MacOS and you will find the increased stabiilty and security (as well as increased productivity and time saved in control panels and driver updates) as proof.
Life After Vista: Can Microsoft Retool for Web?
Wall Street Journal
November 27, 2006
In another shift, the company is trying to make its software more flexible by breaking it into individual components, work that started while developing Vista. After two years of development, the software became so big and unwieldy that in 2004 Microsoft started the effort over, trying to rework Windows so it could be structured as individual pieces that could be changed or removed without disturbing the rest of the software.
Microsoft is likely to offer more components in the future. To try to stay in step with Google, for example, Microsoft could release search software for finding data on a PC over the Web without having to wait until the next major release of Windows. "We still have more opportunities to be even more componentized," Mr. Ballmer says.
What the UNIX model is not better at is making money.
Microsoft, Windows is still its largest business unit, contributing $13 billion in revenue and profits of $10 billion in its most recent full fiscal year.
Who knows what the next Windows will look like but the question seems pretty remote for us consumers. We will be learning about what Vista has to offer for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, Microsoft insiders are likely to be arguing the merits of technology versus profit and what the vision of a "personal computer operating system" should be.
Few of these details have been decided, Microsoft insiders say, but how the Windows development is carried out will be largely up to Steven Sinofsky, a senior vice president that Mr. Ballmer tapped this year to manage Windows development.
But he has already put his stamp on the division, last summer quietly cleaning house of an old guard that managed the troubled Vista project. Mr. Ballmer has given Mr. Sinofsky wide latitude in choosing how to structure Windows in the future, say people familiar with the situation.
Meanwhile, a cadre of respected Microsoft computer scientists and programmers formed a group under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to start building software that could be a critical piece of what Windows might become, say people familiar with the work. That group, says a person familiar with the matter, sees the future of Windows as much more as an Internet service than software that runs on a PC.
Some people familiar with the situation see the possibility of tensions between Mr. Sinofsky's group and efforts like the one under Mr. Ozzie. In a similar tug of war in the late 1990s, one internal faction lobbied to use Microsoft's Internet browser software to radically retool Windows for the Internet. But that faction lost out to a more PC-centric view of the Windows mission -- an outcome that some Microsoft insiders say is one reason the company fell behind in the Internet services Google and others now lead.
