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Gartner: Microsoft Must Turn To Virtual OS After Vista

Friday, 08 September 2006 by Michel Roth

From Informationweek.com: If Microsoft is to avoid the mistakes of Windows Vista in the future and deliver updates on a more frequent schedule -- a promise the company's chief executive has made more than once -- it will need to break the operating system into components and use visualization technologies to separate those parts from each other, analysts from Gartner said Tuesday.

"The sale of new operating systems has to start coming in more closely-defined periods," said Brian Gammage, a Gartner vice president and resident expert on virtualization. "The way to do this is with modules."

Microsoft's mistakes in Vista's development have been well-chronicled, and the company's leaders recognize that another five-year gap between major updates of their money maker could be disastrous. In July, chief executive Steve Ballmer told financial analysts "we will never repeat our experience with Windows Vista, we will never have a five-year gap between major releases of flagship products."

But exactly how will Microsoft do this? How can it handle the increasingly unwieldy amount of code in Windows, better secure the operating system, and maintain backward compatibility with the legions of legacy applications? Gartner's Gammage and two colleagues, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith, believe they know.

Read on here.