Envisioning a More Perfect Windows 2012

Microsoft is all about keeping us busily working with fresh versions of Windows, and up to now, we’ve heard precious little about Windows Server changes. Indeed Windows 8 has been a huge distraction, after Microsoft pulled a rabbit out of its hat with the success of Windows 7. Various pundits insert the travails and misery of WIndows Vista at this point, and point various fingers at prior Windows failures like Windows Millennium Edition. No, I haven’t been briefed. No, these aren’t rumors. It’s a short wishlist, and there are probably more wishes. My Windows Server 2012 Fantasy goes something like this:

1. Microsoft takes a huge knife and cuts the core Windows Server operating system down to under a gigabyte, printer drivers included, not just for “headless” operation, but to shrink not only the attack surface but also the revision control nightmares engendered with so much code.
2. Windows 2012 might also need to support ARM, because ARM code will be supported in Windows 8. My prayer: a transparent, realtime code interpreter so that ARM/x86/x64 code not only knows where it lives, but automagically adjusts so that dual sets of code, compilers, QA, debugging tools, and other coder paraphernalia will be unnecessary.
3. Licensing schemes that don’t bring tears to your eyes when you need to move instances into VMs, then a VM from here to there, evaporate it, and bring it back from the dead. Linux has conquered the cloud because licenses are mostly irrelevant. Not revenue: licenses. In 2012, VMs are going to fly across clouds like La Guardia on a holiday weekend. It needs to be simpler.
4. Windows 2012 Server should be able to boot from ROM– not flash, not disk, but from a stable, unimpeachable source, along with all of the baseline components to bring up a basic system.
5. Windows 2012 Server should have an anti-rootkit methodology; only validated loadable runtime components should be able to be added, so as also to prevent rooting or compromise.
6. Detach the UI in Windows 2012. Let us run the UI with whatever we want, including CLI (as can be done now, more or less). Don’t waste CPU strokes on dumb stuff.
7. Real power profiling is needed, like showing exactly how much each module in the system uses by activating paravirtualized tracking from Hyper-V.
8. Happy Hooks– the new way to allow Windows 2012 Server editions to become blatantly optimized for your favorite brand of hypervisor, even KVM. Let everyone know how to make Windows 2012 run better. Open the kimono. No one is going to steal Windows at this point, because there is no commercial value to doing so. Let VMware, Citrix, even Red Hat get the hooks that they need to make Windows run better. That means SQL Server 2012, Cluster versions, and whatever runs on multicore whatevers. Microsoft gives us the operating systems, we do the hardware or the cloud.

Brighter minds than mine will come up with even more changes to Windows Server Editions. Like limiting the sheer number of them down to say, two. I know it’s counter-intuitive, because salespeople think that people like to identify with their perceived target audience. But Windows Server 2012 For People with New Sneakers is too much.