Text 10904, 73 rader
Skriven 2006-04-30 22:17:06 av Mike '/m' (1:379/45)
Ärende: The View Beyond Vista
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From: Mike '/m' <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_19/b3983019.htm

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Early next year, when Microsoft (MSFT ) celebrates the release of its much
delayed update of Windows, called Vista, it will probably mark the end of the
road for Windows as an all-in-one operating system. Projects on the scale of
Vista -- updating and writing tens of millions of lines of interlocking code --
are becoming impossible to debug fully. While Windows will be around and making
money for Microsoft for a long time, there's a better way to build such
software. But getting beyond the complexities of Vista will mean changing the
Windows operating system in fundamental ways. The challenge facing Microsoft is
not simply its massive size but the fact that its pieces interact in ways that
are beyond human comprehension. My installation of Windows XP Professional, for
example, includes 1,600 "dynamic link libraries," a type of file that's
particularly likely to cause troublesome unanticipated interactions.

The cure for this complexity lies in a new paradigm for PC software. Technology
exists that can divide a large and complex operating system into a number of
smaller, simpler units that run on one computer but function independently of
each other. To the user, it will look much like today's software, but it will
be less prone to glitches, crashes, and attacks.

THE IDEA OF SPLITTING THE SOFTWARE BRAIN of a single, physical computer into a
number of software-based "virtual machines" has been around since IBM (IBM )
made such software available on mainframes in the late 1960s. In recent years
the technique has been used extensively on the big computers that power
corporate networks and the Internet. For example, a single computer might be
split into three "virtual servers" -- one to handle Web pages, one to process
e-mail, and the third to run a database. An immediate benefit is improved
reliability, because a software crash on any one virtual machine does not
affect the others.

A scenario of how this might work on PCs was laid out for me by Gregory Bryant,
general manager of Intel's (INTC ) digital office platform division. One
virtual machine might handle ordinary applications, such as Microsoft Word or
TurboTax. A second could be optimized to handle digital media: music, videos,
or photos. Both of these systems would link to the network (and Internet)
through a third virtual machine that would handle the actual connections. This
division of labor could make PCs safer, since the communications module would
be solely dedicated to secure networking and need to be updated only to fend
off viruses and other malware.

Except for the networking part, which will be supported on new Intel chips due
out later this year, this approach could be achieved today using software from
Microsoft or VMware. But each virtual machine would have to run its own copy of
Windows, making the whole system spectacularly inefficient.

The post-Vista computer will probably use a far more streamlined operating
system that loads only the components needed by each virtual machine. Linux has
this sort of modularity today, but Windows does not. What's more, running
several virtual machines on an operating system will require a big increase in
processing power, preferably from multiple processors. The switch is already
under way. Nearly all the chips produced by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices
(AMD ) will have at least two processors. The Sony (SNE ) PlayStation 3 is
built around a nine-processor IBM chip, and Intel has plans for chips packed
with thousands of processors.

The operating system that makes this all work won't be Vista, and probably
won't arrive until 2012. Microsoft could be the pioneer, but it will require
major cultural changes, given that the company has spent the past 20 years
making Windows ever bigger and richer in features. The fact that Microsoft
currently has a monopoly is no guarantee, as we are talking about a truly
disruptive change. The post-Vista world could see the first real competition
for the desktop since Windows 95 cemented Microsoft's dominance a decade ago.
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 /m

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