Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Being a big corporation means anytime you go to sit down, you sit on your hand, because the heavily centralized structure hasn’t gotten around to moving it yet. It also means you rename key packages to have names other than what people use to find them, baffling your users.

Windows XP Resource Kit Tools

These Windows XP Resource Kit Tools are also known as Windows Support Tools. Although they’re not installed on Windows XP by default, they are built into Vista, because these little gadgets make the most of some simple administrator tasks that can really slow you down. Even if you’re not an administrator, they can make your life easier, even just with simple tools like RoboCopy.

More common task crushers are here. I hope it makes your day easier.

Hot air is the one commodity in our society unaffected by scarcity, because it is never scarce. I don’t know how many people make their money by talking up products, but there’s an equal and opposite reaction from the scaremonger crowd, whose job it is to proclaim the end of anything the instant it changes. When Google switches fonts, it’s the beginning of the end. They predict failures and doom constantly, and like the proverbial broken clock, a time will come in each case when they’re finally correct.

For now, though, I want to look at a company in the grip of naysayers. This is Microsoft, which despite all the flak hype has the enviable position of being its own most aggressive competitor, and still the purveyor of the operating system most of us use. Like any big outfit, it tries to be everything to everyone, and so there’s always plenty to criticize, although lately some of the critique has hit critical mass. When we look at the bigger picture, it becomes clear that this is temporary and there is a plan in the works. Microsoft’s media flaks should pay attention to their audience, because the people who buy Microsoft products as power users (which means they’re the people the rest of us will emulate) are those who do want a company to have a plan, or they’re not going to be excited to support it.

Before I go further, I want to state that I’m agnostic on the anti- or pro-Microsoft hype. There was a need in the late 1980s for someone to come in, standardize the hardware, and drive it to new levels. Microsoft did that by getting us all running DOS, and hacking DOS to the point where it was not only mostly workable but often quite flexible, and then letting the hardware needs of Windows 3.1 drive hardware to the point where it could run a UNIX operating system if need be. Don’t forget that the hardware needs to go from DOS to Windows 3.1 were proportionately greater than those required to go from XP to Vista. Also remember that before the Microsoft standardization, hardware advanced slowly because our energy went into upkeep of divergent standards, not picking one and hacking the hell out of it so that it could be moved forward, even over the objections of standards bodies who would gladly have us running CGA still today.

Microsoft is what it is, which is a large entity shaped by market forces. In that sentence are both the good and the bad of Microsoft from an end user’s point of view. As you can tell, I’m also agnostic on the corporations pro/con but will tell you that the larger an organization gets, the more sluggish it becomes, and the more it needs really dynamic leadership to keep afloat, which translates into moving forward toward achievable business goals. One reason for the sudden flood of Microsoft critique is that with longtime mascot Bill Gates stepping down, there is a perceived leadership void, even though Gates has stuffed the staff with some of the best minds in business and technology.

Let’s look at our first tidbit here, dealing with the question of what the next Microsoft OS will look like:

MinWin is 25 MB on disk; Vista is 4 GB, Traut said. (The slimmed-down Windows Server 2008 core is still 1.5 GB in size.) The MinWin kernel does not include a graphics subsystem in its current build, but does incorporate a “very simple HTTP server,” Traut said. The MinWin core is 100 files total, while all of Windows is 5,000 files in size.

While the Windows team has been working for years on reducing the dependencies in Windows which have made the operating system increasingly bloated and difficult to maintain and upgrade, it’s only been recently that the team has been able to create a separate, usuable new core.^{^}

No mystery here. Microsoft knows that its software is bloated, and that a lot of this comes from the need to support every feature and internal function it has implemented for the last three decades. They’ve been building on the NT core for fifteen years now, and the kernel is now a mesh of tissue created by business decisions of the past and the need to compensate for them. Everyone in the know in the industry is expecting them to come out with a new slimline OS, and to run the older stuff in virtualization, possibly through a complete copy of Windows XP included with the OS.

This isn’t a new strategy. Apple did it with hardware, allowing their Mac LCs to contain complete Apple //es. Over the last five years, server technology has at the hands of web enterprise needs moved to depend heavily on virtualization. Our desktop machines are like mid-level servers with low internal bandwidth, so it’s no surprise it’s moving toward them there. The question, as Apple faced with getting its BSD/Mach hybrid OS X to run old apps, is how to emulate hardware and/or software (anyone want off x86 yet?) without wrecking the new operating system or making the emulation such a pain in the neck that no user will want to do it among their routine tasks.

If the company does build Windows 7 on top of MinWin — the stripped-down Windows core — as it sounds as if it is planning to do, that will help reduce some problems Microsoft and its partners have encountered, in terms of Windows dependencies. There’s been talk Microsoft plans to include a hypervisor as part of Windows 7, enabling users to run applications virtually to prevent incompatibilities. And there’s always the mysterious “StrongBox” feature that allegedly is part of Windows 7. Perhaps StrongBox provides some kind of isolation from lower-level Windows changes?^{^}

They basically spit out the plan here:

That virtualization reference is intriguing. Might Microsoft be planning an OS that uses a virtual machine to ensure backwards compatibility? That might allow the company to build a smaller, more stable and more secure Windows core, but still not break older applications. It might even go a long way to fixing the broken Windows ecosystem. ^{^}

They need backward compatibility; the circuitous win32 code to maintain that bogs down their operating systems. You do the obvious, as Amiga users were doing back in 1987 with Mac and PC code: you run virtual machines for compatibility, and you update the OS so it’s not backward compatible.

They’re also trying to leverage this with the “new plan,” which is to accomodate a post-2000 internet in which advertising is the real revenue generator. To do that, they need people working on some kind of subscription model which keeps them coming back through Microsoft content providers. It used to be they could do this by installing their browser, with its own creepily borgish MSDN start page, but now, they’re going to have to plan for multiple browsers and multiple operating systems.

They’re tossing around a number of ideas, like the “cloud” operating system, but something tells me this is impractical for the same reason that running thin clients on rented AOL mainframes was. More likely, they’re going to strip down the operating system, sell you a subscription plan that installs updates automatically and adds features as you need them (for a fee, of course). This subscription plan will be ambitious in that it will, in addition to getting you software that comes with your subscription to Windows, including security updates, get you new software components and will sell you third-party software. It’ll be like an Amazon.com for software.

Their goal in doing this will be to get you visiting their information nexus frequently. They might even sell other products. They know they need to be a media hub, and their analysts, who aren’t dumb, know that while search is a big business now, it’s top-heavy, in that even Google’s vaunted algorithms aren’t keeping out the spammy sites and unintentially low-content websites. The traffic that doesn’t get measured as search engine related tends to be to familiar, everyday resources, like online shopping, news services, banking and social networks. That’s what the Softies are going to target, and they’ll do it by providing you a single stop for your software and computer needs.

And Linux and Macintosh, where are they? Linux is going to continue to appeal to two groups. The first are those who work in technology and work on UNIX machines, so would like to extend their toolset to home. The second are those who are running smaller machines like the Asus Eee or smartphones, and they want a light and free OS that thanks to new window managers and distributions Linux can be. Macs will continue to appeal to a small group of people desperate for a reason to be elitist, and while they’ll make some gains, they can’t overcome two factors. People run Windows because it’s easy and works with what everyone else is doing. And, most Mac users are stereotypically the type of hiply smug people that the average person wants to punch out, not emulate.

We know Microsoft has been experimenting with highly modular, micro-kernel, hypervisor-enabled operating systems. This would follow Vista and Windows 7, which will likely be a leaner, more modular version of Vista. As many are quick to point out, Vista is not yet popular because it is new, large, and has some glitches. The first and last of those traits are to be expected from any operating system; the “large” part is possibly Microsoft’s fault, but could also be a reflection of the impossibility of developing the Windows NT franchise any further without a total redesign, which Vista was originally going to be until internal problems made it difficult.

Vista is not popular for a different reason, which is that the end user cannot see the advantages to running a less-stable, less-widely accepted operating system over Windows XP, which is consistent with my observation that the reasons for running Windows Vista are all in the internals. Yeah, sure, the GUI is better, and the visuals are prettier, but most users do not need that, although they’ll accept it and enjoy it if it comes with what it needs. Most people don’t perceive they need Vista because the applications that will take advantage of Vista’s features are not yet here. Even more, while Vista is a big step forward, it’s not big enough to qualify as a “new paradigm” that power users will adopt for its flexibility, as it might have been had Vista been the database-driven, completely customizable public object OS it was originally slated to be. But that might have been a jump too far for the consumer.

Instead, Vista is the bridge between the past and the present. It upgrades the functional Windows XP internals from their 1980s underpinnings, taking advantage of a future in which hyperthreading and thread message passing are more important than raw throughput, and will transition people to developing for these new paradigms so that they can be passed on to Windows 7, which will probably be Vista and XP SP2-compatible, but run everything else in a virtual machine. That in turn will bring us to the new Microsoft marketing strategy, which is going to be to sell you the subscription to this new OS, and then sell you features and digital content through micropayments, probably including those products from other companies so Microsoft can skim off the top.

How does this compare to Google? Google will do fine in the search engine category, but the future of search is going to include a lot more niche searching, and unlike the category-based searches mostly featured in that article, much of it will be topical niches. Today, the topical niche field is filled by blogs we recognize as experts in their fields and go muck around on them for information; ironically, a good example is search engine watch. As a result, Google’s strategy that put them aggressively on top and now has them expanding into other areas is going to come under assault. It’ll be interesting to see how they respond.

Microsoft’s drive, in the meantime, will be to leverage a post-search, post-social networking market by looking back to what has always worked on the internet, which is selling products with little or no physical component. They’re thinking iTunes, Amazon.com, Netflix and Adobe for their future, and they will leverage whatever sales nexus they create much like Amazon did to expand into different areas. Google has followed the same strategy as well, because anyone with any net savvy knows that the real value is in having people see advertising and buy products, and it doesn’t matter how or why they came to see that advertising as long as it’s consistent. In the same way, governments realize it doesn’t matter whether you motivate people with dollars (carrot) or machine guns (stick), it’s that they do the tasks necessary to keep a state running that keeps it in power.

As I mentioned above, I’m agnostic about Microsoft. I’m thankful for what they do right, and knowing how well humans interact these days, I’m impressed when any large corporate entity does something 60% right or more, especially if it’s vital stuff that reaches over more than a decade (listening, Apple?). My hope is that this new way of doing business will mean a more interesting field of technology, which is only going to happen if people stop listening to the pos/neg hype and start focusing on how the market is changing.

It seems that last year, a measly 210 youngsters applied to study computer science at Cambridge, and disgusted profs were forced to accept 70 of them. They prefer to reject a higher proportion; in 2000, back in the good old days, 500 applied and 400 were turned down.

“We want potential students to know that the burst of the bubble is well and truly over,” said Professor Andy Hopper, head of the Cambridge computer lab.

“There is a shortage of computer scientists in this country, jobs to be filled and the chance to get rich.”^{^}

If it’s such a good job, these big lapses in finding people to fill it could be the problem. I believe the answer is quite honestly that most people know how computer scientists are at the beck and call of industry and a somewhat reckless management, so they’re often working late hours around under-socialized people on products that are less than useful. This is why given a chance between an MBA and a CS degree, more people are choosing the former.

From what I’ve seen in the industry here, the real shortage is of competent project managers. We’re importing most of our coders, except for a few grizzled veterans who are kept around as knowledge repositories, but the lack of product and project managers who can get a quality job done on time is what sinks projects more than an inability to find programmers, because whether foreign or native-born, we’re awash in those.