kickaha | RDF Hangover

It's always that way - you indulge a little too much, and the next day the harsh light of reality smacks you in the retinas.

iPhone downers:

1) It will not be open to developers at first. It will be closed like the iPod, not open. Major bummer.
2) No WiFi or cell syncing to desktop. Requires physical dock. Bummer.

On the up side, a 3G CDMA version *is* in the works. Wonder how that's going to fly with Cingular's exclusivity? Maybe they get the GSM version exclusive only? Or maybe both will be sold overseas, but only GSM/Cingular in the US? Hmm.

As an aside, a lot has been bandied about concerning Jobs' use of the term "OS X" for the OS for this wee beastie. Now, the thing is... the official name for the OS running on Macintoshes is MacOS X. Not OS X. Yet if you look at all of the info out of the mothership in Cupertino, it all says "OS X". No Mac.

My guess: We know the core of MacOS X is actually pretty lightweight and small. They are, indeed, leveraging this, with the various technologies they have in place over the top, to create the OS for the iPhone. However. I think this is the first sign that MacOS X is, as of RSN, "OS X for Macintoshes" the same way that the OS on the iPhone is "OS X for iPhone". Same shared base, ported to different hardware, with different sets of drivers, subsets of API frameworks, etc. If so, this is damned exciting, and completely justifies Apple's dropping of 'Computer' from their name. This would mean that, in theory, they could nimbly move to hardware at will, and slice and dice their technology sets to match, hitting consumer electronics markets on their own schedule. Hell, *making* markets. I can't wait to find out what's running the Apple TV. My hunch is that it is another cut of OS X. (I could, of course, be completely wrong, and it could be the iPod OS beefed up, but I kinda doubt it.)

This was rather a big chunk of the dream of Linux - embedded through server, one unified set of APIs, technologies, etc, to choose from. But this time... with *style*.

Oh, and lots of money. :)

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Microsoft's been doing this for a long time, with Windows Embedded and WinCE (yet another example of Microsoft's *truly excellent* sense of what would make a good name for a product; have I mentioned Teredo to you yet?)--the Xboxes and smartphones and various handheld devices all run an adapted subset of the Windows API, and theoretically at least could share applications, provided the application were designed with sharing between devices in mind.

I was working (very tangentially, it must be admitted) with Windows Embedded as far back as '94 and NT 3.5/3.51.

It will be interesting to see if Apple can get it right, with true cross-platform apps and actually compelling devices, an accomplishment that has so far eluded Microsoft.

Right, they share APIs. But do they share code implementing those APIs? Huge difference there. My understanding is that they do not.

I am speaking from decade-old statements of intent and hearsay which while more recent is not necessarily as well-informed, rather than from actual knowledge of implementation details, but my recollection is that MS was going to leverage the HAL concept for these implementations, so you'd have the hardware-specific drivers (which have to be different anyway) expose a uniform interface to the OS, so yes, the OS could be portable across different devices.

I do know that Windows Embedded accomplishes this goal, because it's possible to build a full-on XP system from Embedded components. Effectively, the Embedded system _is_ XP, but with different licensing rules that allow the Embedded OEM to omit features and components of Windows that MS legally requires standard Windows OEMs to include, like the UI and the security subsystem blah blah blah.

WinCE, last I knew anything about implementation details, does not share much code with the NT codebase. It is in my brain that I have *heard* that in recent years this gap is closing, and that WinCE systems are being built from Embedded components, but I don't *know*.

The Xbox platforms are somewhere between WinCE and Windows Embedded, but I have no idea where on the spectrum each falls.

I know people in Windows and in Games who could probably provide more definitive answers, but I'm not allowed to ask them this kind of question. (I'm probably not allowed to answer this kind of question either, but as I mentioned, all my knowledge comes from before I took this job and my MS NDA/noncompete expired years ago, so it's probably safe, in the sense that it's probably wrong or irrelevant by now. :) )

So that's the long answer. The short answer is that, last I heard, they were driving toward that goal.

Personal opinion? As long as they feel they have to support backwards compatibility with long-dead hardware and applications, they'll never get there. 'Course, that's my personal opinion on many of Microsoft's goals.

Okay, that meshes with what I remembered along the years - that the idea was for a common code base, but things... fractured along the way, and a number of side-projects that were Windows branded had to be brought back into the fold, with varying degrees of success. As I understand it, the APIs are quite unified now, but the implementation code is still all over the map in some cases. I could be wrong, not having any sources deep in the colon of Redmond. :)

Absolutely agree on that last point, however.

Yeah, it has always amazed me when people say that Microsoft has a competitive advantage because their different divisions could freely communicate and share code. I always tell them they should have sat in on some of the meetings between the NT RAS group and the Chicago RNA team, two groups doing the same thing whose products *had to* interop seamlessly. I worried more than once about how I should react when the fists started flying...

And of course, as someone who was eventually driven out of the company for *trying* to freely communicate and share technology between two different divisions, I have a slightly different take on the subject. (Wow, that makes my experiences sound /so/ much more noble and dramatic than they really were!)

PS: M. is still working the details and dates, but it currently looks like we're going to be attending some baseball games in NYC and Cooperstown around the end of July this year. We'll let you know formally when we have dates confirmed, but thought you might like a heads-up, so you can schedule your next trip to NC for that weekend. :)

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