What Microsoft's past can tell us about Windows 8

Microsoft Windows 8 changes a lot of assumptions about Windows. It especially affects developers. The familiar Windows API has been deprecated, and Microsoft now offers WinRT (the "Windows Runtime").

What will it be like? What will it offer?

I have a guess.

This is a guess. As such, I could be right or wrong. I have seen none of Microsoft's announcements or documentation for Windows 8, so I might be wrong at this very moment.

Microsoft is good at building better versions of competitors' products.

Let's look at Microsoft products and see how they compare to the competition.

MS-DOS was a bigger, better CP/M.

Windows was a better (although perhaps not bigger) version of IBM's OS/2 Presentation Manager.

Windows 3.1 included a better version of Novell's Netware.

Word was a bigger version of Wordstar and Wordperfect.

Excel was a bigger, better version of Lotus 1-2-3.

Visual Studio was a bigger, better version of Borland's TurboPascal IDE.

C# was a better version of Java.

Microsoft is not so much an innovator as it is an "improver", one who refines an idea.

It might just be that Windows 8 will be not an Innovative New Thing, but instead a Bigger Better Version of Some Existing Thing -- and not a bigger, better version of Windows 7, but a bigger, better version of someone else's operating system.

That operating system may just be Unix, or Linux, or NetBSD.

Microsoft can't simply take the code to Linux and "improve" it into WinRT; doing so would violate the Linux license.

But Microsoft has an agreement with Novell (yes, the same Novell that saw it's Netware product killed by Windows 3.1), and Novell has the copyright to Unix. That may give Microsoft a way to use Unix code.

It just may be that Microsoft's WinRT will be very Unix-like, with a kernel and a separate graphics layer, modules and drivers, and an efficient set of system calls. WinRT may be nothing more than a bigger, better version of Unix.

And that may be a good thing.