ESSAY RANDALL STROSS

Microsoft Windows has put on a lot of weight over the years.
Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code, it has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware - is there anything Windows doesn’t try to do- Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to barely change while Mac OS X or Linux sprint ahead. The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.
Vista is the equivalent, at a minimum, of Windows version 12 - preceded by 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, NT, 95, NT 4.0, 98, 2000, ME, XP. After six years of development, the longest interval between versions in the previous 22-year history of Windows, and long enough to permit Apple to bring out three new versions of Mac OS X, Vista was introduced to consumers in January 2007. When technology professionals and consumers got a look at Vista, they all had this same question for Microsoft: That’s it?
Just after Vista’s birth, Kevin Kutz, a manager at Microsoft, issued a statement in February 2007, “In Response to Speculation on Next Version of Windows,” announcing that the company could not say anything about post-Vista Windows. The internal code name for the next version is “Windows 7.” The “7” refers to nothing in particular, a company spokeswoman says. This version is supposed to arrive in early 2010.
Will it be a top-to-bottom rewrite- Recently, Bill Veghte, a Microsoft senior vice president, sent a letter to customers reassuring them there would be minimal changes to Windows’ essential code. “Our approach with Windows 7,” he wrote, “is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7.”
But sticking with that same core architecture is the problem, not the solution. In April, Michael A. Silver and Neil MacDonald, analysts at Gartner, a research firm, presented a talk titled “Windows Is Collapsing.” Their argument isn’t that Windows will cease to function but that the accumulated complexity, as Microsoft tries to support 20 years of legacies, prevents timely delivery of advances. “The situation is untenable,” their joint presentation says. “Windows must change radically.”
Some software engineers within Microsoft seem to be in full agreement, talking in public of work that began in 2003 to design a new operating system. They believe that problems like security vulnerabilities and system crashes can be fixed only by abandoning system design orthodoxy, formed in the 1960s and ‘70s, that was built into Windows.
In April, Microsoft publicly unveiled the five-year-old research project, called “Singularity.” But it is nothing more than a neat academic exercise .
“Singularity is not the next Windows,” said Rich Rashid, the company’s senior vice president overseeing research. “Think of it like a concept car.”
If Microsoft thinks it is too late to change, the company should take heart from Apple’s willingness to brave the wrath of its users when, in 2001, it introduced Mac OS X. It was based on a modern microkernel design, which makes the system less vulnerable to crashes. The change forced Mac users to buy new versions of all their existing Mac applications. But it has paid off in countless ways, for example, the iPhone uses the same code base.
Microsoft should not wait to begin work on the big switch; it will take many, many years to prepare. Apple had the helpful goad of desperation. Avadis Tevanian, who worked on microkernel research as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie- Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and worked for nine years at Apple where he oversaw the transition to Mac OS X, recalled how the decision was made when Apple was losing money.
Mr. Tevanian was asked if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch. “Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has ” the courage, he said. “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”