Wall Street Journal questions Windows approach

It’s a familar refrain these days : web-based services, by Google and others, are encroaching on the sacred turf of Microsoft’s massive Windows platform.

Web 2.0, as it’s clumsily called by some, is a growing tidal surge of easily accessed applications on the web. A “thin client” is all you need. The Windows/Office “thick client” is out of date.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) : In late 2003, Jim Allchin, top dog at Windows development, “had his team draw up a map of how Windows’ pieces fit together. It was 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide and looked like a haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other.”

Allchin realized that bolting together thousands of pieces of code, produced by 4000 programmers, was not going to work. He told Bill Gates in 2004 that the WinFS file system was not going to be ready. A new approach was urgently needed.

“By July 2004, it became clear that Google was working on a ‘desktop search’ tool for finding information on a PC ~ offering some of the features that Mr. Gates’s WinFS program was supposed to bring to Longhorn/Vista. Google, previously focused exclusively on the Internet, was now stepping onto Microsoft’s turf as the creator of software inside the PC.”

In August 2004, Allchin announced to Microsoft engineers that they would “reset” Longhorn “using a clean base of code that had been developed for a version of Windows on corporate server computers.”

The WSJ concludes : “This week Mr. Allchin announced that as part of the restructuring he will retire next year after Windows Vista is in customers’ hands. In a recent interview he said his demons aren’t fully exorcised. ‘There’re weaknesses in everything we’re doing today,’ Mr. Allchin says. ‘But it’s such a huge step up from where we were.’ ”

It’s clear that Microsoft is addressing the threat from Google partly by acknowledging the relevance of web-based services, but also by improving and slimming down its thick client software. Office 12 will operate serverside via XML. But is there still too much “legacy” involved?