Windows 8 Forum: IPB Portal

The next Microsoft Windows operating system should put everything—and I mean everything—in a sandbox. There was a time when I disagreed with the idea that the core of Microsoft's next major operating system, Windows 8, would be a hypervisor, or virtualized machine monitor. Now, however, I see the beauty of this approach, especially for consumers.


An operating system that runs everything as a virtualized machine could be one of the most significant and beneficial steps Microsoft has ever taken in the continuing development of the Windows platform. Plus, there is evidence, going all the way back to the early days of Windows 7, that this is the exact direction Microsoft has been going in all along.

When I met with Windows executives at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October 2008, they told us about the newly componentized nature of the operating system. For Windows 7, this meant a peeling away of many things that had been intrinsic to the OS.

So, all of the apps that used to come with it—the movie and DVD creation tools, messaging, and even e-mail—would now be optional. Even before Microsoft took a hatchet to Windows 7, the company had to figure out how to disentangle Internet Explorer from the operating system's core. Now, at least in the European Union, you can choose to have other browsers pre-installed on your desktop.

While these are mostly minor changes that do not get to the true core of the OS, they do, in their small way, help clear the path for Windows 8 to become the first fully virtualized Windows. I also have a theory that Microsoft has been working to reduce the size of the core OS dramatically (though the company has gone on record, saying it hates to talk about the kernel) and, even as it adds features and functionality to the interface, make it smaller, too.

If you look at what's possible on 1MB Web pages, you can see that everything Microsoft is doing on Windows 7 is little more than calls to the core OS with some lightweight graphics work on the front end. Even flashier features, like see-through panes, are really off-loaded to powerful graphics CPUs.

My point is that Windows 8 can, essentially, be a lightweight core (or kernel) and even a lighter-weight interface. Everything else can be a virtual machine. Here are the benefits.

Full story: PC Mag

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Last week, a passel of leaked PowerPoint slides appeared to give a sneak peek of Microsoft's plans for Windows 8. (I should call them "alleged Microsoft PowerPoint slides" or something, but Mary Jo Foley and Ina Fried are accepting them as the real deal-and that's good enough for me.)

Among the features mentioned: A new technology for superfast startups (a perennial boast of new versions of Windows dating at least back to Windows 98), multiuser login via face recognition, an improved help system, and a tool for restoring Windows to its original settings without munging your data.

The company would apparently like to help PC makers build machines that have some of the "it just works" reliability associated with Macs. (It turns out that consumers are willing to pay for a better experience-apparently, the price premium that Apple commands is about more than unicorn tears.)

It would be a mistake to take the leaked slides as a definitive guide to the upcoming OS: Windows 8 is still early in the development process, and the details in the deck were prepared to address early questions from hardware types, not to serve as an overarching prospectus.

And Microsoft's early pitches for forthcoming versions of Windows usually haven't been a terribly reliable predictor of the products it's actually shipped-just ask anyone who took the initial scuttlebutt about Vista very seriously.

But thinking about Windows 8 left me mulling over what I'd like to see when the the OS (which may well be called something other than Windows 8) arrives. Here's my quick wish list-I'm assuming that Win 8 will still be recognizably Windowsesque rather than an utter reimagining for the Web era...

Full story: PC World