Approaching the Singularity at Microsoft

And you thought all Microsoft ever did was roll out endless iterations of Windows and Office in between buying some competitors and threatening to sue the rest -- but there's something going on up in Redmond, Wash., that looks like genuine innovation.

Yep, Microsoft has been working on a new operating system -- one they say is unencumbered by four decades of computing history -- called Singularity. They've been hacking away at the thing since 2003, but this week saw the first public release of the code. I can barely understand what they're talking about, and it looks as if installing the thing gives you a very Unix-like command line.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet on Singularity.
Larry Dignan of ZDNet on Singularity.
Singularity on Wikipedia.

And in what looks like a very un-Microsoft move, the company is actually inviting academics and others to download what they've got so far and play around with it.

The whole point here is that Windows, based on the MS-DOS of the '80s and a whole bunch of earlier Windows releases after that, and even all the Unix derivatives (including Linux and the BSDs), which go back to the Multics days of the '60s, have at their core a whole lot of ideas that might not be the best for today and tomorrow's hardware and the uses we make of it.

And who has deeper pockets than Microsoft to fund just such a project?

If the Singularity project does move forward, it could give Microsoft an advantage in the server room, where Windows isn't exactly breaking any records. And Singularity -- or something else totally new and not encumbered by legacy code -- could even become the basis for a new desktop operating system.

I bag on Microsoft a lot -- many of us do -- but it's nice to know that even a few people up there in Redmond are trying to innovate instead of litigate, give something potentially worthwhile to the world of computing, and give people who will never try Linux a reason not to suffer with Windows any longer.

Another desktop-focused OS of note: Haiku is buiit on the now-defunct BeOS operating system and is designed from the ground up to excel on the desktop. I saw a demo at SCALE 6x, and while I was impressed, I'll be more impressed when the project is further along. Besides being tuned to do the things that desktop users want to do quickly and well (with a heavy emphasis on multimedia), Haiku's filesystem-as-database approach is certainly novel.

And when you see how hard it is to get a nascent OS off the ground -- look at how long Microsoft takes -- the progress made since the '90s in Linux, as well as OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, is pretty amazing. It just shows you the value and power of the open-source development model.

Can Microsoft match it?

Totally unrelated: So I'm Googling to find an answer to something, and all I get, pretty much, are my own articles on the topic. But I found out that this Estonian (yes, Estonian) Web site, FreeSoftNews, links to just about everything I write. Thanks!