I’ve been thinking a lot about exactly where Microsoft has put their operating system lately. It’s obvious to everyone other than pure MS loyalists and apologists that there has been a lot of useless junk (amongst a few hits) coming out of their operating system division. OS development is arguably the core of Microsoft – without it, a lot of their other initiatives would fall flat.

Microsoft is definitely good at a few things. Their .NET platform is amazingly easy and productive to program for. Their XBox 360 is a profit leader finally, and a damn good console to boot. They have a lot great software products – I actually prefer Outlook to a lot of alternatives I’ve used in the past, including Lotus Notes, the most overgrown, craptacular product ever. IIS is solid (though I’m not a fan of 7.0 yet), Powerpoint and Visio are startlingly powerful in the right hands, and there’s some potential to Silverlight. They haven’t exactly shaken things up in the media player division, but their Zunes aren’t all that bad. However, then there’s the trainwreck that is Vista.

Almost every major Vista-related news item has something about how the OS was a stumble for Microsoft. Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to start admitting how much of a stumble it is. It took longer to develop than any previous OS, it’s a resource hog, it’s still unstable, and it introduces a load of features that nobody really needs or wants. On top of that, it’s still a security nightmare – one of the many things Vista promised to fix.

I’m going out on a limb now and calling Vista the next iteration of Windows ME. ME is widely regarded as the weakest Microsoft OS of recent memory. After ME, the Microsoft OS division pulled off one of their wisest moves in a long time – they brought their superior NT kernel down to the consumer level to become XP. XP stands as the most positively reviewed Microsoft consumer OS since Windows 95. It’s very stable in it’s current version, it’s not at all a resource hog on current spec machines, and it does all the things an OS needs to without trying to force you to work a certain way.

So, being an opportunist, where does that leave us? It’s not like Microsoft can pull another theft-job from their server division – they’re tapped out. Windows is in obvious need of an overhaul – it’s security model is intrinsically flawed, it can stand to lose a lot of weight, and the type of environment it was built for doesn’t really exist today. Now it’s all about how many cores you can cram onto a chip, instead of how fast you can pump content through a single pipeline.

Why not have it be a time for a rewrite? Why not of just the OS, but the push for a new direction in hardware as well? Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft said that they intend to have thir next OS be a ground up rewrite focused wholeheartedly on parallel processing through many cores, that was targeted towards solid state memory, and included things like RAID redundancy out of the box? What about targeting a new type of interface, like how the iPhone has revolutionized the phone interface? If they took a stand today, they could get all the hardware in line for three years down the road when they would actually have the product ready.

They once were revolutionaries in the OS field, and they can be yet again. There hasn’t been a better chance in years – building on top of Vista is not a good idea. In the long run, their market share will dry up as their competitors stay ahead of the curve. It’s time for change (haha, election joke!).