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The Cathedral and the Pirate

artima.com

35 pointsemontero121 comments

This is Steve Gillmor-class word salad. Microsoft is alternatively described as a ship, a water buffalo, a cathedral construction crew, something that guards a basket, a monarchy, and a net hanging in the jungle. The various metaphors try to fight it out, but they don't have a chance amidst all the cliche and jargon.

This level of inattention to language makes me think that not many neurons were fired during the writing of the article, and prejudices me against what might be a perfectly valid point, if I could find it.

It actually reminds me of this: http://i25.tinypic.com/2it1s9.jpg

Yes! Friedman is an even better comparison.

Not only is it incomprehensible, it's factually inaccurate. According to Eckel, IE came along after Google, which is funny considering Microsoft got sued for bundling IE before Google was even incorporated.

He also asserts that IE started the browser wars. As I recall, there was competition from the very beginning, with Netscape Navigator battling with NCSA mosaic. And even upon the advent of IE, you've got to turn your sites toward AOL as well.

We also have this;

> But [MS .Net is] not revolutionary as Java was (by introducing the virtual machine, garbage collection and unified error reporting into the programming mainstream).

which is odd, because Visual Basic had been running a bytecode interpreter with garbage collection since 1991.

It's amazing how much commentary there has been about a piece of vaporware that is over a year from release (at least). Oh, I'm sure Google will release it, but there is so little known about the final architecture that it is almost impossible to speculate intelligently about it.

And does anyone see the parallel with the Java Network Appliances that were going to be "the next big thing" at the end of the 90's? Certainly, we live in a much more connected world today, but to pretend that nothing of value is done on PCs except opening up a browser is a bit of a blindered view, IMO. Oh well, it's all just speculation until there's a product..

Right and if I read one more article about how no one can do anything on a netbook with their paltry 1.7 gig Atoms I am gonna spew.

I am running a stable of happy 900 mhz machines for my bread and butter work.

When I look back on the years [most of the 70's] I spent programming 16K x 18-bit single-digit megaherz machines, with single-digit megabyte hard disks (although they were head-per-track, which makes them much faster - similar to lousy SSD's), and what I was able to get done on them, I laugh....

I am running Windows 7 on a SSD right now. While most of the author's points aren't based on the assertion that this is impossible, such a poorly researched argument makes it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.

What is the size of the SSD? If it's a desktop-sized (60GB+) SSD, then I don't think it applies; the author's argument is that it won't fit on the tiny netbook SSDs. Obviously, within a little while that will be wrong as well.

I agree. I think he's probably talking about this:

According to Microsoft:

"When running on a solid-state drive (SSD), Windows® 7 requires a minimum of 16 gigabytes (GB) of space. Although some configurations of Windows 7 may appear to fit on smaller drives when initially installed, 8 GB SSDs are not sufficient for deploying Windows 7."

I think the section "MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES" from Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line was a much better analogy, despite it being a slightly different, but related, topic. That whole intro analogy bit could have been skipped without losing anything.

Microsoft could have taken .NET and created a thin layer of glue onto the hardware, and come up with a really good, robust, and revolutionary OS

... That ran only on one exact hardware configuration.

Not necessarily: consider Windows and then take out everything that doesn't belong to the lowest level kernel and essential driver services. Now, build the .NET API on top of that core and not on top of the Win32 API.

There you have it. A non-Windows OS built with Microsoft technology.

Microsoft will never do that as it would sacrifice sales of its Windows line and their VPs just can't sacrifice their bonuses.

More likely they won't do it because it would mean that everything made for Win32 would not run on the new platform. This includes all programs made with various other libraries (MFC, WTL, QT, Fox, etc) that "plug into" Win32. Hence they'd have vastly fewer application that would run on this new OS, and people trying it out would complain that "this version of windows breaks my applications".

On the other hand it would be interesting (Singularity comes to mind), but they'd have to call it something other than Windows.

They can avoid program breakage by emulation, much like Apple did with early releases of OSX.

Microsoft will, of course, offer a similar product based on IE + Bing + Live. The only real loser here are the PC OEMs. In 2 years they'll be reminiscing about the good ole' days of high margin netbooks.

Similar? Only on paper. Sure it will be designed to meet a bullet-point list of formal features compiled by an Analyst, but those won't matter much in the end.

It will not have the appeal nor the ability to interconnect with standard-abiding software from ISVs from all over the world the Google offering does right now. Carpet-bombing style marketing won't help much.

"Windows is an enormous collection of design mistakes that work well enough to get by."

Don't forget, Windows was ripped of of the Mac, so....

Really, this is one of the very few article on GCOS that actually make sense (or at least tries to). So far, most of the coverage has been "ZOMG!!1! SHINYCOOL NEW!!1!".

Although I still don't think GCOS will take over the world. It's going to be an OS for the clueless. I'm pretty sure most geeks would rather use a regular Linux distro than a stripped-down web-centric OS that has Google's branding everywhere.

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