Real World Computing
Hard to get
Money spent to produce some, indeed any, coherent story about WinFS development would be welcome, too, although a bigger and more worthy effort still would be to bite the bullet and do a complete ground-up rebuild of Office, rewriting it wholly in managed code and refusing to carry over a single line of the existing code.
If Office is to survive for the next 20 years, not only does it need repurposing as managed code, but it needs a total clear-out of the cruft that it's accumulated. Put aside another few billion for this.
We're then left with the server and client-side operating systems and tools. The server and tools are in good shape, having managed to avoid the crippling compromises that afflict the client-side group. Some more clarity about licensing wouldn't go amiss, but apart from that it's business as usual. How to sort out the client side will take a brain better than mine. As with Office, part of the problem is that there's too much crufty old code lurking in there, and a genuine Win-New effort would be a breath of fresh air, but it would have to be matched by an unswerving and uncompromising vision about application compatibility - no longer is it acceptable for applications to be marked "Vista compatible" and then to throw the rule-book out of the proverbial window. How much for this effort? Lots, but if Microsoft sees a future for itself in the desktop OS space (which consists of more than applying sticky tape to Vista and continuing life support for XP ad infinitum) then something has to be done.
Configuration manager
I just spent a week in Lost Wages at the Microsoft Management conference, and what an event it was. I ended up dropping around $200, which I guess is fate punishing me for last year, where a one-dollar bet landed me 500 notes in a single go. The conference itself was frankly stunning: this was classic, hard-core, 100% all-beef Microsoft server engineering - and what a range of technologies it had on show. This is Microsoft at its best: a clear set of needs and targets, and real deliverables. This is a long-distance road map, and it's plainly obvious that these people have been working hard.
The new Configuration Manager tool simply blew my head off. If you want to take a bunch of machines and roll out operating systems and configurations onto them, then this is your tool, but it isn't just for a few dozen - you can use it to deploy in the thousands. This year's demos went much further, thanks to new technologies from Intel that let you dive into the hardware configuration of PCs, so that now you can do complete out-of-band management of the computer as well, and all from the one Configuration Manager desktop. Shut down the remote desktop, drop into the BIOS, make some changes, reboot it and watch it come up, too. This integration of out-of-band management into an in-band configuration management tool is simply stunning. Yes, you'll need to get XML-based device definition files for all your hardware, but I've seen Dell and HP setups for this already, so you just pick your precise model from a list and all the configuration options are laid bare.
But that's not all. The NAP (network access protection) feature of Server 2008 knocked me sideways, too. Again, go into Configuration Manager and you can set up a policy definition that says that every laptop that connects must be on the current patch revision, its anti-virus must be up to date, and the machine must be clean before it can see anything on the network. And I don't just mean "is allowed to log in", I mean "can see anything on the network". So you take a laptop away from the network and it misses some updates. How can you ensure that machine is updated and clean before it reconnects? NAP is the answer. Just make those items NAP mandatory, and the system does it for you. You can force the updates to be put onto the machine, it can then be fully checked out, and finally reconnected to the network. The sysadmin is then safe in the knowledge that everything is patched and up to date.
