Ozzie points to slimmer future for Windows client

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. is putting the Windows client operating system on a diet as a way to bring the PC operating system into the age of cloud computing.

Windows 7, Vista's follow-up, will already be a thinner, more streamlined operating system, replacing some of the software Microsoft previously included with its Web-based Windows Live Services. And if comments made by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week are any indication, Windows will slim down even further in the future, returning to the original intent of an operating system -- a way to optimize the hardware it runs on -- instead of being a bloated piece of software whose performance and value rely on compatibility with installed applications.

"The purpose of the OS on the device is to have the best value on that device," Ozzie said at PDC in an interview with the IDG News Service, adding that there is still "tremendous opportunity for innovation" for using the operating system to leverage device hardware.

He said that in the future, Windows will have "base connections to the Internet" so people can connect to the Web through a browser and services such as Windows Update.

But Microsoft won't rely too heavily on the Internet to achieve its goal to support innovative hardware features -- such as touch-screen capability -- so people in places without reliable connections to the Web can still reap the benefits of the operating system, he said.

This slimming down of the client operating system is as much a way for Microsoft to keep Windows relevant as a hardware operating system as it is for the company to acknowledge the new cloud-computing and services paradigm that Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and other companies are pioneering.

Vista might have been a good place to start this evolution, but Microsoft missed the opportunity, said Brian Madden, an independent technology analyst in San Francisco.

He said Vista "would have been great" if it had come out in the late 1990s or even in the early part of the 21st century, the height of the trend to use client-side applications on PCs that is rapidly becoming obsolete as hosted services evolve.

"Vista to me is the culmination of the old way of thinking as the desktop should be," he said, and the fact that it came out in 2007, as the industry was shifting from packaged software to Web-based applications, was "a huge disaster."

Madden called the company's plan to evolve Windows to be lighter and more nimble a "reluctant" one. "Microsoft is not leading the way down this path; they're being dragged kicking and screaming by companies like Google," he said.