if i were msft, i would just take freebsd7, graft a win32 managed runtime on to it, call it mibdori and ship it
the problem they are solving is that windows, as it currently exists, is dragging around 20 years of cruft. the weight of all that cruft is slowly strangling microsoft to death. they can do it now, or they can do it later, but sooner or later, windows will have to be scrapped and replaced with something else altogether.
look what a great move it was for apple. painful in the short-term, big win in the long-term.
It was also short-sighted; that's not a sustainable way to go forward, because every one of those custom patches increases the maintenance overhead of your code, and it's not already stellar quality code, you're going to be in trouble... and MS was the epitome of the sweatshop, so there's no way that they had much if any good code floating around there.
Lately however, the other side has been gaining ground, leading to things like dotNET. They've willingly sacrificed backward compatibility in so far limited ways, which is a start in the right direction, IMO.
Since this project is in MS Research, it has a shot, but I suspect that if it were part of the standard development process at MS, it would take 90+ years, based on the story of the guy that wrote the start menu for Vista...
I think you're right; no matter what they do with the brand, I agree about windows. I don't think that they have as much time as they'd like, especially if Apple decides to get aggressive and teams up with Dell or PowerNotebooks or Boxx and starts expanding its OS marketing to take on Vista directly...
Never underestimate what a crazy marketing department with a budget of hundreds of millions can do.
i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.
It goes along the following lines: The only good thing about MS Win. are the ubiquitous driver support and secondly their programming API (since 90% of the desktop code + office + ... etc... depend on those APIs). However the rest (ie. the kernel, the gui, especially the kernel) suck. Therefore, the right thing to do is to trash the kernel and just use something else. It would be pretty easy for MS to write a compatibility layer for their drivers to say... the linux kernel (if we don't care about drivers, I would actually use FreeBSD as it is more stable and secure). Since, their compatibility layer does not include any major portion of the kernel and can be considered a separate module under the GPL (Nvidia and ATI do something like this already so it works), they can lock up the source to their pleasure and charge $150/license from us (and like $3/license from Dell et al.) and still make their nice cushy profits. Think ndiswrapper on steroids. You plug in the compat layer, point it to the Win32 drivers and magic: devices work. This works for MS. As shown, they still geto to make their cushy profits and get their lock in monopoly. If they do the same to their APIs on the app side, they can control the office market as well. It works for all those servers and stuff because they get to use the FreeBSD kernel with all the stability and server goodness that comes with it and it works for me because i take the compat layer, stick FreeBSD on top of it and happily go on bash-ing away this time with full driver support.
Furthermore, the compat layer and API layers are relatively thin with (hopefully) none of the really complex stuff like VM management, file systems, and CPU schedulers so it should be much much easier for MS to push out good code (they could even cut down their development budget and make even more money). Happy faces all around.