Windows systems set to be merged by Microsoft

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28440288

by AndrewDucker • 12 years ago

38 53 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

tinco• 12 years ago

Wasn't this the whole idea of Windows 8, why is it news now?

Touche• 12 years ago

Because now it includes phones.

louhike• 12 years ago

Windows 8 was a first step. Windows Phone 8 and the Xbox One OS (there are two in fact) were still differents OS, even if they have common parts.

dangowango• 12 years ago

first step yeah, but in wrong direction...

jiggy20114• 12 years ago

Microsoft previously had Win8 , RT and Windows Phone. The latter two needed to be distinct because they were ARM based so there would be software compatibility issues with software that was developed for Win8.

The plan here seems to be to build all Windows phones and tablets with x86 chips to eliminate that issue.

eat• 12 years ago

The plan here seems to be to build all Windows phones and tablets with x86 chips to eliminate battery life.

FTFY

personZ3• 12 years ago

The plan here seems to be to build all Windows phones and tablets with x86 chips to eliminate that issue.

That was an analyst guessing, not Microsoft setting a strategy. It is extraordinarily doubtful that Microsoft would go all in on x86 like that, and it would be somewhat archaic if they did.

I would surmise that Microsoft is speaking from a development/management perspective. If WinRT had all of the APIs available in Win32/64, for instance, whether it's ARM or MIPS or AMD64 shouldn't really matter that much for cross-targeting apps like Office (which I doubt has much assembly in it): If the compiler supports it, it's an option.

And from an internal perspective we know from a post yesterday that they laid off a Windows test engineer, probably because their plan going forward is that the major services (and obviously teams) of all of the platforms combine, which makes a lot of sense. Instead of teams forking off bits of Windows and then creating their own silos, it makes sense that the active development copy of many subsystems for all of the products is shared live.

tdsamardzhiev• 12 years ago

Great! We may finally have an <actually useful> phone OS.

chris_wot• 12 years ago

I wonder if Cortana works as well as it seems to in that video?

Rakathos• 12 years ago

As someone that has a Windows Phone and uses Cortana, yes. Everything he was doing is a pretty standard response or action from Cortana.

I mention this every time, but I think the most interesting thing about it is that developers can integrate their apps with it. For example, you could open Cortana and say "Send a Yo to John Doe" or "GenericBankingApp, transfer $25 to my checking account".

I've been meaning to sit down and build a couple small apps that take advantage of this, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

mkesper• 12 years ago

As they wanted to turn every PC into a tablet with Win8, do they want to turn it into a phone now?

rvschuilenburg• 12 years ago

I think they could use responsive design?

geertj• 12 years ago

From the article:

[It] gives developers the entire volume of Windows, which is 300 plus million units as opposed to just our 4% share of mobile in the US or 10% in some countries

Great strategy, nothing new or visionary, but something tried and tested. Use your strength in one market to enter a new one. From my (much more modest) experience at Red Hat, I know this can work.

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

Apps will still need to be modified for the smaller or bigger screens, and I doubt the APIs will be exactly the same either. Plus, this will only apply for new "WinRT apps" and only to Windows 9 devices. So maybe it won't be 4 percent, but it will be 14 percent, at most, like what they have now in "computing devices" as market share.

billpg• 12 years ago

Does "One for PCs" cover both servers and desktops?

kyllo• 12 years ago

This is a smartass comment, but it cuts right to the core of Microsoft's foolishness. They are still out fighting a battle against Apple for mobile, which they lost a long time ago, meanwhile their enterprise stronghold is under seige.

nick_riviera• 12 years ago

Do we really want unification across those platforms?

Not joking but x86 on phones doesn't work either.

More suckery to come...

Eyas2• 12 years ago

Unifying team/platform and APIs is not the same as unifying the architecture. Windows on ARM, for instance, was previously 'unified' with Windows 8 on the x86/64. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft is referring to the former.

jqm5• 12 years ago

They still are not getting it.

It's like an auto manufacturer trying to standardize controls between a corvette and a dump truck. No... both of those are different machines with different use cases. They need to have unique user interfaces.

pilsetnieks2• 12 years ago

User interface is just one part of an OS. You can have the same OS on different devices with different interfaces.

jqm5• 12 years ago

No you can't.

Sure, the kernel may be the same but you say it very clearly yourself.... "user interface is part of the OS". So you can't have the "same" OS with different interfaces.

Nor for that matter can the apps be the same. They would work differently.

Edit: I didn't catch the user interface would differ among devices in the article, so I suppose my original complaint about user interface has been addressed. Developers still have to address how people will interact in different ways with their applications among platforms however... even if the binaries compile on all.

popeshoe• 12 years ago

Sounds like they're really doubling down on their devices that could never have succeeded because they were too late.

I kinda wish I could have been in the meeting where they decided that windows 8 should be the same for all their different devices, it sounds kind of appealing at first, 'One experience for mobile, tablet and desktop' until you think about it for a second.

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

When you have to "double down" on something, it usually means you're doing to wrong thing.

ayi• 12 years ago

I know microsoft bashing is all the rage but something has been lost in translation here. What Satya Nadella meant was Microsoft will ship windows on different form factors (tablets, phones, PCs, servers etc) from the same code-base.

The OS kernel will more or less be the same. However the UI experience will be vastly different as you can image.

Mary Jo Foley explains it well here - http://www.zdnet.com/what-one-windows-really-means-and-doesn...

_delirium• 12 years ago

That makes some sense; that's what Apple has been doing as well. Both OSX and iOS use the Darwin kernel and base, along with some shared user libraries, but then each has considerably different UI on top.

jqm5• 12 years ago

Just an idea here...

Maybe complaining about some of Microsoft's decisions has more to do with user frustration and less to do with being "all the rage"?

equoid• 12 years ago

But it will only be the same code base to a manager or bean-counter. There will so much conditional code and special casing that maintenance will be a nightmare. Fix things for system, break the others. (Or "same code base" just means all stored with in the same repository.)

Same old Microsoft, same old mistakes.

keithwarren• 12 years ago

Have you actually built a universal app? There is actually quite a good pattern for the separation of concerns here, you should check it out.

spoiler: It is not like what you are thinking, quite clean actually.

pjmlp• 12 years ago

No different than targeting POSIX across multiple UNIXes, iOS vs Mac OS X and many other "almost like" systems.

yulaow2• 12 years ago

I just fear that the dimension of the full os once installed will be absurd. Win8 is already 13-15 gb alone... If they try to put on the new windows also all the features needed for phones the situation can become really bad.

At that point can be needed at least 24gb of intern memory on the phones to just run wp

pilsetnieks2• 12 years ago

There is probably a lot of ancient cruft in Windows you could cut from a tablet or phone version while still having the same OS.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 12 years ago

I don't think that's how it will work at all. Android phones run on a Linux kernel, does that mean that an android phone needs to install a full linux distribution comparable to Ubuntu or Debian? No.

yulaow2• 12 years ago

In that case the title of the article is wrong. Are we talking about have a single kernel on all platform or a single os on all platform?

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

Yet that's basically how it worked for Windows RT, which was 90 percent the size of desktop Windows.

BigChiefSmokem• 12 years ago

With the delays to x86 (Broadwell, Skylake) I don't see how they can completely abandon ARM. Is Microsoft really doubling down on Intel now? Do we really think x86 will ever overtake ARM as the de facto mobile platform? Just because Microsoft's ARM-based products are all flops doesn't mean ARM is dead for other manufacturers and software makers.

Anyone care to fill in some blanks for me as to why Microsoft is so embolden now? What is Intel up to?

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

So now Windows phones will require tons of storage just for itself, and a high powered Intel processor, too?

el_duderino• 12 years ago

I just hope they do away with the stupid ass start screen for their Server OS. It doesn't belong there no matter what any one says. It belongs on PC (I guess) systems and touchscreen devices.

And before you jump on me about "use server core you moron", that's not feasible in my environment. We have users who cannot solely rely on powershell to do most of their day to day work flows.

caruana• 12 years ago

What i'm really hoping to see is a phone that can have a keyboard, mouse and monitor attached to it. When that happens then Windows Phone UX turns into Windows Desktop UX on the monitor. Or a laptop with a dock for my phone ... ???

sp332• 12 years ago

What's stopping you from using a keyboard, mouse, and external monitor with your phone now?

WorldWideWayne2• 12 years ago

Connecting the keyboard, mouse and monitor was only the first part. The second part had to do with the Desktop UX becoming available on the external monitor.

Those peripherals are not as useful with any mobile OS as they would be with full Windows.

Windows systems set to be merged by Microsoft

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