Since
Courier's now a mystery unearthed -- and subsequently
sent six feet under -- it looks like we need new secret
Microsoft projects to pique our curiosity. Enter the ever-connected Mary Jo Foley with some investigative notes into "Menlo," which seems to be a future replacement of
Windows CE "with
Windows NT inside of mobile devices." The associated graphics platform would be "Experiment 19" (not quite as interesting a codename, we agree). Presumably heading up Menlo is Galen Hunt, a researcher from the Singular project, joined by other Microsoft brains Ruben Olinsky and (at least at some point) Kerry Hammil. It's always surprising how much info we can glean from LinkedIn, but we digress: Hunt's associated profile says Menlo "[combines] OS, UX, and applications research to explore the future of computing when mobiles becomes users primary PCs." Some bigger picture conjecture seems to center around Menlo having a
Silverlight-based UI and boasting improved compatibility between itself and Windows desktop apps. Lots of food for thought, and if you're interested in what might come out of Redmond many, many years down the line, head on past the read link for all the juicy tech gossip.
posted May 5th 2010 4:38AM
Yes, but will it play Guild Wars?
@Weber I hope it's as good as City 17.
@Weber
Let me get this straight, Win CE 7, or "Menlo", will heal the injuries inflicted by CE 5?
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I don't believe anyone aside from Guild Wars players understood that reference...
Vaporize!!!
I'm sorry but after the Courier debacle I have lost my faith in MS. Other than Zune and desktop Windows, that is.
@DaveBrubeck
Yeah! it is disappointing they could not pull a project like that. Now, we do not know what this has to do with WP7!
Interestingly, Engadget brought up Bing, which is part of MS's problem. They are chasing Google Search and leaving more room for others to take over their core business. Google is disruptive, and the best is for them to work with them or leave them alone, since they have the money to play is hard. With all the noise from Steve about Google, they are still using Google apps.
With Google success in bringing MS office to the web, MS is about to loose more money - remember Chrome OS demos show MS Office Web?
With HP tablet going to WebOS, if they loose Dell and Asus, then they are doom.
It is about time someone tell them they are doing to pay for the lack of configuration of Win 7 Starter and their refusal to allow the Win 7 Home Edition in rich countries.
Ballmer must go now!
they shoulda bought palm
@Pangy
I don't know about that...
I'm not a Microsoft fan by an means, but I think WM7, will be a very competitive OS at the time it's released later this year.
Who I feel should have bought palm is RIM.
I don't see RIM being able to compete much longer with a Java OS, going against these Unix-like mobile OSes...
@GTRJay I agree...but RIM don't seem to be having difficulty selling boring products.
Apple, RIM and Nokia are like McDonalds...fill a hole, won't make you sick, but hardly gourmet.
I have a feeling the human race can continue to exist just fine without Windows CE.....
So please Microsoft. Kill it. Kill it with fire.
@buoy A lot of medical equipment runs on WinCE. You still sure about that feeling of yours?
@Herr Synnberg I'm sure it would take about 15mins to port those apps to linux or just continue using the old ce, medical equipment isn't exactly the cutting edge on hardware and software requirements.
@Herr Synnberg I think if all the people who had a medical device that malfunctioned causing death, my heart would keep on ticking - literally without missing a beat.
@buoy retail stores such as walmart uses windows CE for their small searcher devices. They use it on their sales floors and in their backroom for backstocking and such.
@Herr Synnberg
Thats kinda of scary to me, if I have a heath issue, I would rather the medical equipment used to save my life to be running a Unix-like OS....
MS behaviour reminds me of universities, where researchers can pursue some vague idea only to scrap the project somewhere along the line. This is not what people expect from a company, especially if info about the projects is made more or less public as is the case with Microsoft's vaporware projects.
Perhaps naming MS headquarters a "campus" wasn't such a bright idea after all...
@harrykim23 Lots of companies are open about their R&D
@harrykim23
Microsoft is one of the few places in the world outside of Universities where researchers can actually do research without being pressured to create a final product for cash and you want that to end because some geeks on a tech blog got excited and subsequently let down about something they never even announced? Man I'm glad the internet doesn't have any power over what companies actually do.
@Delta
Exactly!
It is more like companies have influence over what the internet does :)
Speaking of Guild Wars when does Guild Wars 2 come out?
@Anticrawl Friday.. lol.
@sys3175
Good good so Friday is the firm release day, now we just need a year, month and date.
Mary Jo Foley expects that rather than using a mobile OS on these tablets, they are using a culled version of windows 7. Therefore these devices would be able to run any application that works on windows. If this is true tablets will becomes less like fancy toys.
I think this is great.
Imagine how easy it would be for thousands and thousands of developers to port over programs when they essentially copy and paste their entire code.
Essentially you would have your Windows application infrastructure that we have had since windows 95 and suddenly the app war would be a whole new ball game. But this is probably distant future and I can see how frustrating it is for everyone. Personally I don't care either way.
Bill Gates has been obsessed with tablets for a long time, I suspect he has many ideas, and uses for them that we haven't even thought of.
The iPad is a great success and should be congratulated on doing so, and if you want a tablet then don't wait for microsoft, go get your iPad, it will be a long time before Microsoft get's its act together.
But I think it is better that Microsoft does it their way, it's how they work.
And Steve Balmer did kind of bring Microsoft out of the ashes with windows 7 and zune hd, and windows phone 7. I don't see how cancelling a prototype that wasn't never officially backed by balmer is a shock.
If anything this Menlo project seemed to be a broader and more lucrative idea. And in the statement for cutting Courier, it said a lot of those technologies and concepts would be brought over to new areas. This is probably exactly like courier but more application friendly.
/rant
@CanyonOasis
Hahaha...it was a good rant so it's alright >.< I totally agree with you, especially your objective stance as a tech and gadget fan;)
@CanyonOasis
The problem I have is that this is how some of the executives must think at Microsoft. They must be sitting there in their offices saying, "if only we could make all the programs that work on Windows 7 in a tablet device, people would buy it like hotcakes." But that's totally untrue. The iPad was a success because it used a phone OS that was customized for touch. People can't use a Windows 7 program on a tablet because the controls are all designed for a mouse, not a finger.
Microsoft has been trying to push their desktop OS for tablets for a decade now and it's just not going to work. They clearly have the talent, as evidenced by the courier project and surface, but they really need a cohesive plan to break into the tablet market before it gets off the ground. Otherwise they'll be playing catchup like they are with Windows Phone 7 and that's a place no tech company wants to be.
@HighestRanked2
I see your point, but I don't think you see mine.
Selling 1 million, 2 million etc isn't really telling of anything but the skill in creating a sellable product. But the iPad has no longevity in it's current state. It will eventually need a significant software update. An update which does exactly what Mary Jo Foley is talking about.
Using the core of a desktop OS and then culling all the unnecessary elements, cleaning it up.
This is essentially a mobile OS right? The difference is compatibility.
There a billions of applications for Windows, these applications don't need the start bar, the clock, the control panel, but they do need some core aspects of Windows to run. IF these same core elements reside in the tablet OS, you would no longer need to 'port' applications over.
They would run perfectly in the mobile computing sector.
Making the concept of an app store a moot point. 50,000 apps doesn't compare to this sort of compatibility. There would be no need for emulations.
So while Microsoft is behind the game at the moment, their lack of focus in an area without any longevity could be seen as a good thing.
Mobile OS' don't make sense in the long run.
The iPad has definitely shown the way of the tablet to the average consumer. This is a big step towards mainstream tablet computing. But in it's current form, these tablets are not supplementary computers, they need to be used in addition to a desktop.
I am not saying Apple doesn't realise this, I hope they do. I hope everyone does. Because otherwise tablet computing will remain niche market.
See who can find the extra "a" first.
Go!
@weirdFishes
"...which seems to be a a future replacement of Windows CE ..."
@WPCallDay Congratulations! A a winner is you!
@Ross Thanks for playing along in the game! :)
Oh and this is the quote from Mary Jo Foley. "If Microsoft replaced the CE kernel with an NT one, Microsoft might have a more compelling “write once/run anywhere story.” What if you could make some relatively minor tweaks to your existing Windows client app to get them to run on a Menlo-based Windows Phone or Menlo-based tablet/slate? (It would be the reverse of what Apple is doing, by enabling developers to move their iPhone apps to the iPad with relatively little work.)"
I bet you all are punching those words into bing right now.
@cookiemawnstah
...actually...no, I'm not but if I did, I would have "Binged" it as you daringly presumed hehe.
Good to hear that MS realises that in few short years our mobile phones will be powerful enough to also function as our desktop PCs. Like you come home and plug your phone into a docking station which is connected to a normal keyboard, mouse and monitor. The phone OSes we know now would then basically be an app running on Win7/OSX/Linux.
Only thing, I would have expected Nokia to get this idea first. With Maemo they already have a full featured linux running on a phone. Just double the RAM to 2 GB and stick one of those new dual core 1 GHz ARM cores in there and you are set.
Think about it. Most people use their PC almost exclusively for mail, web, facebook and office. Next year phones could already be powerful enough to run those an a slim linux distribution or a netbook variant of Windows 7.
@astrath
I think Nokia already got this idea. That's why they call the N900 a mobile computer and anything in the Maemo/MeeGo line will be mobile computers instead of smart phones. Add a HDMI out and USB OTG and the Maemo/MeeGo line becomes netbook replacements. Go to the office and with a simple doc you have a full desktop with keyboard and mouse.
meh?
Tech companies shouldn't be able to use similar codenames...
Windows: Combat Evolved
@paddy1205
Windows: Certified for Eradication
@paddy1205 Windows: Reach
Way back when, Microsoft cribbed NT from DEC's VMS (N & T are the letters that follow M & S, get it?), and to call this "legacy" code is a huge understatement. Why on Earth would these guys flog this old, unsecure OS and try to mold it into a modern OS for mobile devices? This is doubling down on dumb. The "R&D" department is stuck on stupid.
@Ed T
You do know Windows 7 is Windows NT 6.1, right?
@Ed T
Sad to see fools that have no understanding of OS theory and engineering making such silly comments.
NT is one of the most advanced kernel and architectures in history, and when designed, almost every element that NT was founded on were only theory, including many concepts that no other OS architecture or kernel has yet to implement. (Seriously, the NT client/server kernel model that is fully object-oriented is not something real OS engineers or theorists poke jokes at.)
Go read a book about NT before you decide you understand it well enough to make sad remarks.
@TheNetAvenger
Ooh, a certified computer scientist in our midst. Your vaunted "client/server kernel model" certainly has a history. A history repleat with thousands of successful exploits and attacks that would fill many, many books. How much has use of this POS kernel cost businesses and government over the past 20 years? How many grains of sand are there? - LOL
@Ed T
I don't assume to know much about the NT kernel, but it seems to me that those problems would be linked to the OS, specifically, how Microsoft grants Admin to the first account and up until recently (with UAC) allowed the installation of components into the registry without the express permission of the user.
@Ed T The fact that you are mixing up a kernel and the rest of the services and layers in an OS shows you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Give it up.
I thought it said "Menio". Buzzkill.
M$ can suck it with their experiments that are just for keeping buzz up on their company. They're just fodder for their PR team to make other less valuable M$ projects still seem interesting.