In this New York Times article, a business professor discusses one of the major issues he thinks Windows faces.
My Summary: Windows is a piece-meal, monothilic OS based on 60s and 70s code dogma. It’s a Frankenstein OS. It’s basically 30 years of patching and unfinished quilt-work.
His recommendation as a business professor to a business – the new Windows must be built from the ground up from scratch.
My recommendation as a consumer to other consumers – switch operating systems.
[Update: Matthew Mullins has a good comment on this that is well worth reading. Make sure you check it out.]
I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I think the argument proceeds in the wrong direction. Almost every fault that he mentions for Microsoft’s OS goes for Linux as well. Linux is based on a design architecture that came about in the ’60s and hit the market for the first time in 1969. If you can navigate the terminal window in your Ubuntu installation, then you would probably feel comfortable using SysV which came out in 1983. Linux, like the Windows 9x series and almost all unix like systems, uses a monolithic kernel. NT-Vista, like BeOS, use a Hybrid/Macro kernel that is a cross between micro and mono. The micro/mono debate for Linux was hashed out in the early ’90s. The funny thing is that the author gets it wrong when he talks of OS X using micro kernel tech, well it does use some of the technology, but in it’s hybrid kernel XNU! I could go on but the simple point is that, yes Microsoft’s Vista certainly has problems as did its previous incarnations, but this author has failed to identify the source of the problems.
Umm, I’m not sure what’s harder to understand: philosophy speak or computer speak. For example, I have no idea what this means:
The funny thing is that the author gets it wrong when he talks of OS X using micro kernel tech, well it does use some of the technology, but in it’s hybrid kernel XNU!
Also, is this use of “funny” like the hippies use of “self-evident” in the post about marijuana legalization?