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Microsoft agrees: Windows is a "really large bloated operating system"
While newly minted Windows head Steven Sinofsky continues to play his cards close to his chest, we're seeing signs that Microsoft is rethinking its monolithic approach to not only the mass-market Windows operating system but the entire family of Windows products from servers down to CE-based embedded devices.
First up is a streamlined microkernel codenamed MinWin, around which a re-engineered Windows line will be built. Described as "the Windows 7 source-code base", in reference to the successor to Windows Vista which is slated for a 2010 release, MinWin strips back the current NT-based kernel to the barest of bare metal.
"We'll be using this internally to build all the products based on Windows" said Microsoft engineer Eric Traut, when he slipped the first public glimpse of MinWin into a demonstration of Microsoft's virtualisation technology at the University of Illinois last week.
After loading multiple versions of Windows from the original 1.0 release through to NT 4 - including Windows ‘Bob' which earned a few chuckles from the audience and which Traut described as "not necessarily Microsoft's proudest moment!" - Traut fired up an additional VM session to load MinWin, which he called "the core of Windows 7, the Windows 7 source-code base". Microsoft agrees: Windows is a "really large bloated operating system"