MinWin: Is it or isn't it part of Windows 7?

Confusion over exactly what MinWin is -- Is it a concept? a new operating system kernel? a floor wax? a dessert topping?) -- and how/whether it will be part of Windows 7 is still rampant, a week after Microsoft "communicated" about Windows 7 via a Q&A with News.com.

The official word from Microsoft's Windows Engineering Chief Steven Sinofsky seems to be that MinWin -- the slimmed-down Windows core many expected to be at the heart of Windows 7 -- is not going to be part of Windows 7.

Knowing that Microsoft execs are fond of disputing an entire premise based on a single word choice (Anyone else remember Chairman Bill Gates' back and forth with the Department of Justice around the meaning of the word "we"?), it's important to parse the words of the parties involved in the MinWin debate.

Here's what Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Eric Traut, the exec who first discussed publicly the MinWin concept, had to say about it (courtesy of my ZDNet blogging colleague Ed Bott):

"Now, this is an internal only - you won’t see us productizing this - but you could imagine this being used as the basis for products in the future. This is the Windows 7 source code base, and it’s about 25 megs on disk. Compare that to the four gigs on disk that the full Windows Vista takes up. We don’t have a graphics subsystem other than text in this particular build, so you can see that’s our Windows flag [referring to an ASCII art splash screen].

"[I]t’ll be a while before you can build something directly on top of this really tiny core. … Like I said, we don’t have any productization plans for it. We’re definitely going to be using this internally to build all the products that are based on Windows.

This is where the confusion -- on my part and others' -- began. The fact that Microsoft had no plans to commercialize MinWin: OK, I got that. But if a technology is embedded inside a commercialized product or is used to build a commercialized product, isn't it still "part" of that product?

Here's what Sinofsky said (and didn't say) about MinWin last week:

Sinofsky: "We are going to build on the success and the strength of the Windows Server 2008 kernel, and that has all of this work that you've been talking about. The key there is that the kernel in Windows Server 08 is an evolution of the kernel in Windows Vista, and then Windows 7 will be a further evolution of that kernel as well."

News.com: "What was this idea then that got talked about in terms of a kind of minimum kernel?"

Sinofsky: "Well, why don't we stick at a higher level today, because I think that I don't want to really dive into the implementation details today."

Next to weigh in: Shipping Seven, the anonymous Microsoft blogger claiming to be part of the team building Windows 7. From a blog post dated May 29:

"MinWin is not some magical new kernel. It is Windows with every single feature stripped out - It is the base ingredient of any version of Windows. (I forget the exact size. But it is pretty tiny - small enough for embedded stuff.)...

"You already have MinWin - It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

"So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose - you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don't know what the hell you'd do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though."

In last week's "Windows Weekly" podcast, Paul Thurrott and I discussed whether MinWin is actually shorthand and/or an enabler for the design concepts that the Windows team has been working on for the past several years, namely more modularization/componentization and fewer dependencies between the various Windows subsystem elements.

Thurrott's theory is that Microsoft doesn't want to set off mass panic by mentioning the "K" (kernel) word. Given the driver and application incompatibilities that marred the launch of Windows Vista, the last thing Microsoft wants to do is have anyone think that Windows 7 might introduce more of the same because of changes being made at the lower levels of the operating system.

Again, it would be nice if Microsoft's Windows client team would just come out with a clear statement as to what MinWin is and how it will figure with Windows 7. But it seems it's not time to communicate that message yet... at least not according to the official (non)disclosure schedule.