5 ms·

Windows systems set to be merged by Microsoft

38 points by AndrewDucker 12y ago

tinco 12y ago
Wasn't this the whole idea of Windows 8, why is it news now?
- Touche 12y ago
  Because now it includes phones.
- louhike 12y 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 12y ago
    first step yeah, but in wrong direction...
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      What makes you say that? Have you ever used Windows 8 for any length of time? I have it on 2 tablets and one of my workstations and to sum up my experience with it: It's awesome! Nothing else even comes close. It all starts with the most basic interactions. For instance - there's no other window manager that lets you completely control the OS with just the keyboard and in such a consistent, logical and discoverable way as Windows.
- jiggy2011 12y 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 12y ago
    >The plan here seems to be to build all Windows phones and tablets with x86 chips to eliminate battery life. FTFY
  - personZ 12y 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.
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      But surely anything else would be a disaster from a messaging point of view considering that the Windows lineup is already confusing enough as it is. Unless you can somehow force developers to produce binaries for all platforms and have that include all legacy applications which is doubtful.
      - personZ 12y ago
        If it supported the same APIs, a platform encountering native code from another platform could simply do binary translation (where simply means "enormously complex and difficult, but a solved problem"). This is exactly what x86 Android phones do when they encounter APKs with native ARM and no equivalent x86, via Intel's "Houdini" solution: The performance is actually surprisingly good, and far exceeds most expectations. And of course Microsoft could do this en masse in their application store. And really, if cross compiling a rich desktop application was simply a matter of picking a different target configuration in Visual Studio, everyone would target ARM(v8) as well, because it costs close to nothing. As is, however, that is not the case- WinRT is a very special snowflake, with a subset API. Even if you went purely virtualized with .NET, you still have the special restrictions and constraints of WinRT that mean that you have to generally specifically develop for it. Microsoft is in such a strange place. Well over a decade ago they tried to move everything to higher layers, abstracting themselves from the underlying hardware. Today they seem to be in a worse place that they even were then.
tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
Great! We may finally have an <actually useful> phone OS.
chris_wot 12y ago
I wonder if Cortana works as well as it seems to in that video?
- Rakathos 12y 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 12y ago
As they wanted to turn every PC into a tablet with Win8, do they want to turn it into a phone now?
- rvschuilenburg 12y ago
  I think they could use responsive design?
geertj 12y 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.
- higherpurpose 12y 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 12y ago
Does "One for PCs" cover both servers and desktops?
- kyllo 12y 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 12y ago
Do we really want unification across those platforms? Not joking but x86 on phones doesn't work either. More suckery to come...
- Eyas 12y 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.
jqm 12y 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.
- pilsetnieks 12y ago
  User interface is just one part of an OS. You can have the same OS on different devices with different interfaces.
  - jqm 12y 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.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      So when pilsetnieks says the user interface can be different on the same OS, which is the whole basis of Linux and also damn close to how Apple does it with OSX and iOS, it "can't be done". Then you read the exact same thing in the article, and suddenly it can be done. You posted above in this thread "Maybe complaining about some of Microsoft's decisions has more to do with user frustration and less to do with being "all the rage"?" Maybe you need to rethink the reasons why you're complaining right now. Because you have a legitimate complaint? No. Because it's fashionable? I think that's closer to the truth.
      - jqm 12y ago
        "reasons why you're complaining right now.." -Please don't presume to ascribe me motive. That's just silly. "can't be done" -Where do I even vaguely reference that something can't be done? Did you even read my comment? Sure... The underlying kernel is the same. I understand. I also understand now, (after reading the top comment) that it is kernel changes referenced in the article rather than UI. My complaint is with standardized UI so that complaint is irrelevant (which I note). But, according to pilsetniek, an OS encompasses UI. So if you have have a different UI, by his definition, then you have a different OS. Very simple logic 101. Speaking of motive, I'm not going to presume to ascribe motive to your comment, but I have to wonder about it. It doesn't seem to have been worth the time taken to post it as you didn't address the content of my comments. More like an attempted jab that falls short. Why? I don't know. My psychology degree hasn't come in the mail yet. And yes.. I believe frustration with some of Microsoft's decisions results in complaints.
popeshoe 12y 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.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  When you have to "double down" on something, it usually means you're doing to wrong thing.
ayi 12y 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-doesnt-7000031917/ http://www.zdnet.com/what-one-windows-really-means-and-doesn...
- _delirium 12y 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.
- jqm 12y 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 12y 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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - keithwarren 12y 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 12y ago
yulaow 12y 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
- pilsetnieks 12y 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.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y 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.
  - yulaow 12y 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?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Debian runs fine on my Android tablet and on my server, and it doesn't take up much space. I just install different packages.
    - Eyas 12y ago
      Its about Kernel and API unity and sharing components. It was clarified in an above thread that "One Windows" is an organizational statement rather than an OS flavor or even SKU.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
      > In that case the title of the article is wrong On hacker news or the BBC? Inconceivable!
BigChiefSmokem 12y 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?
higherpurpose 12y ago
So now Windows phones will require tons of storage just for itself, and a high powered Intel processor, too?
el_duderino 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  What's stopping you from using a keyboard, mouse, and external monitor with your phone now?
  - WorldWideWayne 12y 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.

38 points by AndrewDucker 12y ago

tinco 12y ago

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

Touche 12y ago
Because now it includes phones.
louhike 12y 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 12y ago
  first step yeah, but in wrong direction...
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    What makes you say that? Have you ever used Windows 8 for any length of time? I have it on 2 tablets and one of my workstations and to sum up my experience with it: It's awesome! Nothing else even comes close. It all starts with the most basic interactions. For instance - there's no other window manager that lets you completely control the OS with just the keyboard and in such a consistent, logical and discoverable way as Windows.
jiggy2011 12y 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 12y ago
  >The plan here seems to be to build all Windows phones and tablets with x86 chips to eliminate battery life. FTFY
- personZ 12y 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.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    But surely anything else would be a disaster from a messaging point of view considering that the Windows lineup is already confusing enough as it is. Unless you can somehow force developers to produce binaries for all platforms and have that include all legacy applications which is doubtful.
    - personZ 12y ago
      If it supported the same APIs, a platform encountering native code from another platform could simply do binary translation (where simply means "enormously complex and difficult, but a solved problem"). This is exactly what x86 Android phones do when they encounter APKs with native ARM and no equivalent x86, via Intel's "Houdini" solution: The performance is actually surprisingly good, and far exceeds most expectations. And of course Microsoft could do this en masse in their application store. And really, if cross compiling a rich desktop application was simply a matter of picking a different target configuration in Visual Studio, everyone would target ARM(v8) as well, because it costs close to nothing. As is, however, that is not the case- WinRT is a very special snowflake, with a subset API. Even if you went purely virtualized with .NET, you still have the special restrictions and constraints of WinRT that mean that you have to generally specifically develop for it. Microsoft is in such a strange place. Well over a decade ago they tried to move everything to higher layers, abstracting themselves from the underlying hardware. Today they seem to be in a worse place that they even were then.

tdsamardzhiev 12y ago

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

chris_wot 12y ago

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

Rakathos 12y 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 12y ago

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

rvschuilenburg 12y ago
I think they could use responsive design?

geertj 12y 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.

higherpurpose 12y 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 12y ago

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

kyllo 12y 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 12y ago

Do we really want unification across those platforms? Not joking but x86 on phones doesn't work either. More suckery to come...

Eyas 12y 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.

jqm 12y 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.

pilsetnieks 12y ago
User interface is just one part of an OS. You can have the same OS on different devices with different interfaces.
- jqm 12y 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.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    So when pilsetnieks says the user interface can be different on the same OS, which is the whole basis of Linux and also damn close to how Apple does it with OSX and iOS, it "can't be done". Then you read the exact same thing in the article, and suddenly it can be done. You posted above in this thread "Maybe complaining about some of Microsoft's decisions has more to do with user frustration and less to do with being "all the rage"?" Maybe you need to rethink the reasons why you're complaining right now. Because you have a legitimate complaint? No. Because it's fashionable? I think that's closer to the truth.
    - jqm 12y ago
      "reasons why you're complaining right now.." -Please don't presume to ascribe me motive. That's just silly. "can't be done" -Where do I even vaguely reference that something can't be done? Did you even read my comment? Sure... The underlying kernel is the same. I understand. I also understand now, (after reading the top comment) that it is kernel changes referenced in the article rather than UI. My complaint is with standardized UI so that complaint is irrelevant (which I note). But, according to pilsetniek, an OS encompasses UI. So if you have have a different UI, by his definition, then you have a different OS. Very simple logic 101. Speaking of motive, I'm not going to presume to ascribe motive to your comment, but I have to wonder about it. It doesn't seem to have been worth the time taken to post it as you didn't address the content of my comments. More like an attempted jab that falls short. Why? I don't know. My psychology degree hasn't come in the mail yet. And yes.. I believe frustration with some of Microsoft's decisions results in complaints.

popeshoe 12y 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.

higherpurpose 12y ago
When you have to "double down" on something, it usually means you're doing to wrong thing.

ayi 12y 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-doesnt-7000031917/ http://www.zdnet.com/what-one-windows-really-means-and-doesn...

_delirium 12y 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.
jqm 12y 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 12y 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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- keithwarren 12y 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 12y ago

yulaow 12y 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

pilsetnieks 12y 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.
SideburnsOfDoom 12y 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.
- yulaow 12y 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?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Debian runs fine on my Android tablet and on my server, and it doesn't take up much space. I just install different packages.
  - Eyas 12y ago
    Its about Kernel and API unity and sharing components. It was clarified in an above thread that "One Windows" is an organizational statement rather than an OS flavor or even SKU.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    > In that case the title of the article is wrong On hacker news or the BBC? Inconceivable!

BigChiefSmokem 12y 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?

higherpurpose 12y ago

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

el_duderino 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
What's stopping you from using a keyboard, mouse, and external monitor with your phone now?
- WorldWideWayne 12y 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.