Where is Microsoft Headed?
Recently, Windows NT Magazine interviewed Bob Muglia, Microsoft's
Director of Windows NT. We asked him many of the questions you
have asked us in focus groups, on CompuServe, and on the Internet.
Muglia's responses are enlightening and provide a sneak peak at
the future directions of Microsoft and Windows NT. Here is the
bulk of that interview.
What are your views with regard to where you think the desktop
is going?
When we started focusing on our strategy of Windows and Windows
NT in 1990, we realized that the hardware requirements were such
that it was not possible to have a single operating system that
met all the requirements customers have. That's why we've been
pursuing a dual operating-system strategy with, first, Windows
3.x and now Windows 95 as a high-volume general-purpose operating
system which satisfies the needs of most people.
At the same time we were building a higher-end operating system,
Windows NT, that satisfies the needs of customers who want a secure,
robust environment and also servers. It turns out that the characteristics
of a robust, high-end desktop and a server are pretty common.
That will be true for about two more years. Because of the hardware
price point, it's necessary to continue to have two different
operating systems. NT today is a 12MB minimum operating system-16MB
to serve an optimal configuration for most simple desktop uses.
For more advanced stations, you may want more memory-potentially
32MB, or 64MB if you're doing very high-end CAD or compute-intensive
work. As time goes on, that distinction begins to blur. The machines
that people are buying now are Pentium P75s, P90s, 16MB of RAM,
and those machines are very capable of running NT.
There is an installed base of 70 million DOS/ Windows machines
that probably aren't capable of running NT. Windows 95 has a tremendous
market to upgrade that base. In fact, for consistency reasons
people will buy Windows 95 for some time.
If you look forward, though, in about two years, it will become
apparent that NT-especially for business uses-will be able to
satisfy what people need because the hardware will have advanced.
Now, we are putting NT first into business because that's where
its characteristics are most important: its robustness and security.
Certainly by the end of the century-probably as early as 1997,
1998-we'll begin to see business shifting over to NT.
It'll take longer for the home to shift, because one of the things
NT does is compromise some compatibility for the robustness characteristics.
It's just not possible to be robust and crash-proof and to run
every application. You have to make a trade-off. Where we've made
those trade-offs up until now, we've made them toward robustness.
As the applications go to Win32, the games go to Win32 with WIN
G and DCI, you're going to see those things all run on NT in a
robust way. You begin to be able to run "Grandma and me"
on NT. Then you can potentially bring the system down or have
a high-end game asking the first question, to insert a boot disk.
We're not there yet, and I don't think we'll be there for another
24 months. But as the games market shifts, we can begin to move
NT into high volume, not just in business but in the home. I think
you'll see that in probably four years.
I'm confident we will be able to get to a single kernel architecture
a single operating-system architecture. Whether we choose to package
that differently-continue with the two distinct brand lines-is
something that we'll have to figure out. It will reflect what
the marketplace wants. We're beginning to see this distinction,
where corporate wants the ability to download software. They want
to be able to manage their desktop; they want a series of things
that are very different from what people want in the home.
By the way, when you have a question about NT/Cairo, recognize
that Cairo is NT. It's simply a follow-on, an upcoming release
of NT. In fact, every day, we do a Windows NT 3.51 build, and
we do a Cairo build. And we do it out of the same source tree.
In some of the other environments-I think it's true of both the
desktop and the server, but it's much clearer on the desktop-the
key to success is the application base. Today, it is dominated
by Windows 16-bit applications, but it is moving overwhelmingly
to Win32 and OLE as the fundamental characteristics of these APIs
are built. Because the applications are in Windows today and they'll
be in Win32 tomorrow, the predominance of the desktop will still
be Windows-based. We may change the characteristics, but fundamentally
it will still be Windows.
Will we see more size and performance tuning in NT in the near
future?
When we shipped NT 3.1, we had few distinguishing characteristics
between the workstation and the server in terms of performance.
When we went to 3.5, we changed that fairly significantly. The
basic pieces of the system are the same: The kernel is the same;
the device drivers are largely the same; the user GDIs are the
same; but we tune it differently for a workstation or a server.
A server is tuned for throughput, and workstations are tuned for
response time. A Windows application will run on NT Server, but
it will not run as fast as it will on NT Workstation. You're not
going to get the kind of service you'll get out of a workstation;
it's not meant for that.
Let me elaborate a little bit on performance: We made massive
changes in 3.5, as you know. In 3.51, we have more subtle changes,
but they're still distinct. We've improved OLE performance considerably,
and NT Server is around 10% faster than it was in 3.5. If you
run an OLE application like Word or Excel, you will notice that
3.51 is faster. We still see tremendous opportunity to improve
performance on NT, and we will continue to do that in upcoming
releases.
NT still lacks many features needed for large-scale mission-critical
applications. What are your plans to remedy this?
What NT people are trying to do in many cases is use a PC-based
system to replace a business-critical function that formerly ran
on a higher-end UNIX system or on a mainframe, a system like a
VAX. We are not yet at the point where we can replace all these
systems. There are certain characteristics that we don't have
in place yet, but we're getting there.
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