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Makes no practical or business sense? How many engineers does Microsoft have working on the Windows kernel? A kernel that, from a business standpoint, is adding
by taylodl 6y ago
Makes no practical or business sense? How many engineers does Microsoft have working on the Windows kernel? A kernel that, from a business standpoint, is adding little value to Microsoft?
Obviously Windows isn't going away - but how many of Microsoft's customers would know that their kernel has been swapped out when the UI and all the applets look identical? As far as they're concerned the switch could have already happened! All they care is the look-and-feel is the same and their applications still run. They don't care about the kernel.
It's not a matter of better, it's a matter of good enough and saving on expenses. Presumably those engineers could be better utilized somewhere that's generating more revenue.
That's the bottom line.
- dmitriid 6y ago> A kernel that, from a business standpoint, is adding little value to Microsoft? > Obviously Windows isn't going away - but how many of Microsoft's customers would know that their kernel has been swapped out when the UI and all the applets look identical Right. Because it's just a simple switch to flip when changing kernels, and all of the Windows software will just go on working as it before.
- treis 6y agoThey're not going to get there tomorrow, but 20 years from now? I can see it happening. Computers are trending towards being things that just run web browsers. Applications are headed to the cloud. And Windows lost the mobile war and is increasingly losing the laptop war. On the flip side as Azure becomes more significant for MS the role of Linux becomes more significant. At some point the cost of working on two kernels is going to outweigh the benefit of transitioning Windows over to Linux. Or maybe not. It's hard to predict things. Especially about the future.
- freeone3000 6y agoThe main thing that will happen to software that's twenty years old in twenty years is for the software to be forty years old. Large legacy systems do not get replaced.
- treis 6y agoDon't tell that to the people that pay me to replace large legacy systems.
- konjin 6y agoThe kernel has little to do with how software is run. Wine already has better support for windows 98 apps than does current windows.
- anticensor 6y agoWindows kernel has more security primitives and is more versatile. The problem lies within Win32 userland.
- guenthert 6y agoDon't dismiss that there are more than technical aspects involved when making a business decision. We had customers who purchased our file serving product using CIFS because it wasn't based on Samba. Likewise I fully expect that there are people who will avoid buying a product based on Linux if they can.
- tlamponi 6y ago> Makes no practical or business sense? How many engineers does Microsoft have working on the Windows kernel? This is really anecdotal, as I sadly did not find the article I have this information from, but IIRC, the core NT Kernel team isn't as big as one would expect, about a dozen to two dozens maximum (big emphasis on "if I recall correctly").
- taylodl 6y agoThat points to another issue: sustainability. If the group is that small, and presumably aging, then how do you ensure you have enough in the pipeline to ensure you can support and enhance the Windows kernel for years to come?
- yoshuaw 6y agoWhy do you presume that group is aging and not regularly rotating people? A dozen people sounds like a standard team size to me, which seems mostly indicative of the scope (not importance) of the work. Also I believe Microsoft employs somewhere around 50.000 engineers, a good amount of whom work on and maintain low-level systems. I find it unlikely they'd have a shortage of sourcing talent for one of their core projects.
- bobajeff 6y agoI imagine maintaining the kernel is very important. As that can be (and is) a major source of vulnerabilities. Also, it largely determines what hardware Windows can run on and what features it can have/support. If the NT kernel is in maintenance mode that might be because they are planning on replacing it.
- OrderlyTiamat 6y agoI recall Linus saying the same thing about waning numbers of linux kernel developers, so it seems like that is a problem affecting both kernels.
- Bedon292 6y agoHow many more engineers would Microsoft then hire to maintain the Linux kernel? My guess is it would be approximately equivalent to what they already have now. And, there a definite feature differences in how the kernels behave, so they will have to rewrite major sections of Windows to fall in line with the Linux way of doing things. And on top of that they will have to support Wine, or their own equivalent of it. In order to make decades of Windows only applications work. Sure Wine works pretty decently now, but not at an acceptable level. They appear to be working on getting Direct X to work on WSL, but not sure how that will work if its on raw Linux. I don't think it does. And Windows handles drivers completely differently than Linux. There was a thread here in the last few days about the AMD drivers being ~10% of the lines of code in the Linux kernel. There is all kinds of specialized hardware that take advantage of Windows drivers. Which would now probably need to all be in the Linux kernel. And how about Active Directory? Thats a huge part of the Enterprise use of Windows. Need to translate all those features and controls over to Linux too. So even if you save a few Engineers on the kernel dev directly, you probably have hundreds of new jobs to deal with the migration. If not thousands.