Apocalypse Redmond

"... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words ... their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

So says The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy anyway. Although you have to give it to Microsoft: sometimes they do get it right. Aside from all of the crashing and the security cullinder that is Windows XP, it can be nice to use. The level of integration is truely impressive and it is brilliant when things 'just work'.

I happened to be reading an article on The Register with the rather confrontational title of Windows vs. Linux. Aside from taking all of the arguments I've ever had with anyone over the whole Windows and Linux debarcle and wrapping them up in a nice, easy-to-read document that will make any Microserf begin to question his allegiance to the Beast, it raises an extremely interesting point.

Not so long ago, a rather boisterous internet worm known as Slammer appeared on the scene and rather comprehensively shat all over SQL Server. DNS and general internet traffic soared as the worm went to work, leaving comparisons with wild fire paling in comparason. Nearly every machine that was running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or MSDE 2000 and had a direct connection to the internet fell foul of this little nasty, indiscriminately causing all manner of disruption.

Wind the clock forward to the present day. Microsoft have released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP that (aside from breaking a list of applications that, when printed, quite literally reach from one side of the office to the other) supposedly fixes a lot of these potential horrors. In reality, it doesn't so much fix them as it does drive a nail into the wall and hang a picture there to cover it up (rather in the same manner a cable monkey would do). As a consequence, the holes are still very much there, albeit not quite as visible.

In their "Wisdom", Microsoft built Windows as a thumping great monolithic hulk of an OS, integrating its components as tightly as it possibly could. While this design has no doubt worked well for Microsoft in that it gives nice, tight integration between Windows components and applications whilst simultaneously making life extremely difficult for the competition, it also means that any failure or flaw in any part of the monolith has a direct and very tightly integrated effect on the rest of the OS. The obvious example of this is Internet Explorer: you simply can't get away from this subsystem. Launch Outlook Express, it uses IE. Use the windows help system, it uses IE. File management uses IE. Even your bloody desktop uses IE to manage content. It sucks.

Add to this their imbecilic use of RPCs to connect anything to anything (such as IIS to an SQLserver database), even on a local machine (I dare you to disable your RPC service!) and it soon becomes apparant as to why Microsoft can take seven months to fix certain problems.

Now, a quick trip into the future: Microsoft are presently working on their next generation OS, codenamed Longhorn. One of the features originally pegged for Longhorn (that has now, interestingly been dropped) was a replacement for NTFS, known as WinFS. WinFS is essentially SQLserver - a transaction-based, indexable, relational file system designed to automagically index and catalogue your data. Again, brilliant idea in principle, but is it really wise to integrate the very same technology that caused 2003's Slammer outbreak into the very core of every new Windows machine on the planet?

In my humble opinion: Yes, definitely, absolutely! That way, when Slammer II turns up to target WinFS in the age of the always-on-broadband connected Windows PCs, every last Windows machine employing WinFS would be left a smoking wreck. Apocalypse Redmond would be short and sweet, leaving a whole load of x86 hardware ready for a new OS. Ready for some lonely penguins or the odd sneaker-wearing daemon to inhabit, perhaps.

Clever man, Douglas Adams...

This page was last updated: 2^nd November 2004 at 4:01pm GMT