Define Innovation: Reboot Manager

If you've been following this blog or my seminars you know that one pet peeve of mine is the constant redefining of "innovation" – and Microsoft seems to be taking the cake as of late. For as many times as Microsoft engineers have pointed at Linux and claimed it copies them they are stealing ideas and very principles that have been available in Unix for… well, decades. The latest one is the "restart manager" which on the surface appears to be a simple killall -9 processname before an update. As Jim Alchin explains in this eWeek article:

"If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot," he said.

Yup, killall and insmod/rmmod alright. But when you dig a little deeper there is more going on in there:

"If you have to reboot, then what happens is that the system, together with the applications, takes a snapshot of the state: the way things are on the screen at that very moment, and then it just updates and restarts the application, or in the case of an operating system update, it will bring the operating system back exactly where it was," Allchin said.

Now its a little more interesting and sort of puts Windows Vista on the same page that Redhat Enterprise Linux hopes to get to with Xen virtualization. While this is not quite on the scale of innovation that Monad/MSH seems to be, it is nice to see that open solutions are forcing Microsoft to be more competitive and innovative without constant acquisition and butchering of stable products. I for one commend them on this one and am glad to see Microsoft is hiring developers for change.