Bloomberg.com: U.S. — What you have to note here is the strategy change mentioned in the article. Microsoft would always predict low then come in high.
Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer will release a new Xbox video games console and new SQL database software, helping overcome sagging demand for Windows personal-computer software. Revenue will bounce from this year’s growth of about 8 percent, the slowest pace ever. Microsoft’s prediction surprised investors who had expected the company to maintain its tradition of making low forecasts.
Linux on Microsoft Virtual Server is supposedly the future of interoperability. Then there is the paravirtualized approach, which I’m really concerned about. The sledgehammer approach is another way to go.
The crash-only approach may be the best!
Appears in Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-IX), Lihue, Hawaii, May 2003
By using a crash-only approach to building software, we expect to obtain better…http://www.stanford.edu/~candea/papers/crashonly/crashonly.html
Why Crash-Only Design ?
Mature engineering disciplines rely on macroscopic descriptive physical laws to build and understand the behavior of physical systems. These sets of laws, such as Newtonian mechanics, capture in simple form an observed physical invariant. Software, however, is an abstraction with no physical embodiment, so it obeys no physical laws.
Crash-only components recover quickly, thus recovery is very cheap.
I guess if we get Microsoft Virtual Linux that crashes by design, it will be cheaper than Linux that crashes less because recovery will be cheap.