Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Server division, in an interview last week discussed the road map for future operating system releases, the competitive threat posed by Linux and the promise of 64-bit computing. Part 1 of the interview is here.
Microsoft executive on Linux, 64-bit computing
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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There is no reason why Microsoft can’t ship their product line running ontop of the Linux platform. At least not a technical reason.
Except that it ould be inferior. Better yet, they could ship their products on top of BSD!
It’s all about sales. Linux is much more popular, and let’s just say that you won the big race, you are the winner, there is no competition because you are the king. Is that any fun after a while. Linux is open source. Can’t the king give anybody the chance to challenge him.
…oh, and there is something there in Linux, and I have yet to hear anyone find it. Nobody seems to know.
OK, I’m as much an OSS Zealot as anybody, but Windows (NT) used the TCP/IP subsystem from BSD, not the entire core.
(That’s my understanding anyway, if someone has done detailed research, feel free to tell me where I’m wrong)
As for the article, it’s very clear that Microsoft is defines itself as a ‘run your entire company our intergrated systems’ company. From an end-user point of view, I personally think this is a bad idea. Vendor dependancy/lock-in come to mind.
Personally, I prefer Linux because it’s not all intergrated, it’s open standards instead – but that’s just me. If you have open standards, like you do with say, DHCP and DNS (as the article stated) you can mix and match. If you don’t have standards, you are forced to use a particular companies ‘standards’ thus leaving you wide open to vendor lock-in. From Microsoft’s point of view, this is a good thing.
I do not believe that Microsoft ships Windows with anything more than a small handful of BSD derived command line utilities these days. I’m sure that the entire set of networking components that originally contained BSD code have been replaced with Microsoft grown versions.
I am not an OSS zealot (although I do favor BSD in general, and DragonFly in particular), I use both open and closed source apps and OSs, as well as free and proprietary ones. I prefer non-proprietary OSS, but I am not going to put any needless and arbitrary restrictions on myself concerning what I will or will not use.
Like they say, open standards are more importnat than open source.
Open standards are NOT as important as open source, LOL. You people are insane!
personally i think longhorn represents the best opportunity for m$ to ditch legacy, and write longhorn for x86-64 bit technology only, much as os/2 would not run on 8088. not only will the additional registers help with performance, but by ditching legacy, it opens to opportunity for better stability and performance. it will also force people to upgrade.
Some of our competitors, IBM most notably, are predominantly a consulting company. And for them, complexity is a benefit, because it allows them to sell consulting services.
Doesn’t the above phrase remind you of Scott McNeally and his comments in regards to IBM? the “big sucking sound” as he described it in relation to money being sucked out of a business?
Quite empty PR noise. I would have preferred questions like :
– Why does MS is so much late comparing with Linux on x86-64bits ? Intel involved ?
– Will MS drop Itanium support ?
– Does MS really expect everyone to move to 64bits quickly ? Will MS impose it on customers ( by progressive dropping of 32bits support ) ?
I can help.
>>Why does MS is so much late comparing with Linux on x86-64bits ? Intel involved ?
Demand, mainly. 64 bit computing helps when your crunching numbers and doing database type of work – not needed for most applications that are in heavy use like mail servers or other types of application servers.
People who needed heavy duty computing were already on unix/mainframes like as/400 so this is a market (2000 server and beyond) thats moving upmarket, not downmarket. They need to grow that demand.
>>Does MS really expect everyone to move to 64bits quickly ? Will MS impose it on customers ( by progressive dropping of 32bits support ) ?
Databases are moving to 64 bit, AMD is moving us to 64 bit, studies have shown that 32 bit apps do have improvemnet on 64 bit systems (8% I think in the article) so we are definately going that way. Corporations arn’t going to stick with 32 bit if their competition is already moving along.
Cheers,
Microsoft Fan