Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month. On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user's privileges on all of the company's recent operating systems, including Vista. Update by Thom: Ars thinks the situation is hot air, mostly, something I agree with (a cracker already has to have login credentials for the flaws to be of any use).
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Member since:2005-10-14
What MS should have done was to write a base, highly efficient OS which could run on very low spec hardware (even 386's) and allow users to add whatever they want as modules. So if they want to have some mega fancy interface then they could install it over then net). Or they could choose to simpler but faster interface for lower spec machines - think how much companies would love that because of saved hardware upgrade costs.
And they could have made the OS free - this would maintain a monopoly position and also dominate the new emerging markets. Money could be easily made from supplying support/setup/upgrade contracts to corporations and companies. After all, these companies want someone to turn to for support of SQL servers and VSS as well as the OS.
And if they made the source code available on the net they they would have fixes for vulnerabilities coming in before exploits are written - so security would almost be perfect.
And - thinking about it - if the source code was available then other software companies would be able to compete for the support contracts and this would be *good for the consumer* as competion would mean the best would rise and prices would be fair.
I'm sure that MS as the premium software company on the planet would positively welcome competition and would be able to stand on its own two feet with no problems.
Member since:2005-07-10
bailey86 - I agree with you on the technical part like efficient smaller OS but disagree on the political agenda of free OS or Open Source.
I don't think MS should open source their OS or free it. It is their Intellectual Property and they should earn money from it.
Tomorrow you will ask hardware should be free etc etc.
Sorry buddy, you have to buy food to eat and so do software engineers. Many GPL or Open source engineers like the Gentoo lead eventually abandoned their projects because of lack of money in open source.
Edited 2006-12-27 20:17
Member since:
2005-07-10
This is what happens when you try to remain backward compatible with the versions developed 10 years back.
Windows is becoming overly complex because Windows maintain backward compatibility and provides new features as well.
The best example is Windows network stack in Vista. It has a new specification but there are multiple translation layers to support drivers written for older versions.
This adds so much complexity that no matter how many testers you put, in limited amount of time, you can't test all the edge cases.
Things like this are causing longer development times in Windows with diminishing returns.
Microsoft needs to run Windows in a Virtual Machine and develop a new smaller, faster base OS. This way they can enhance the base OS and still maintain the compatibility by running older versions in VM.