Microsoft Aquires Winternals and Sysinternals

When I was doing systems management programming, and especially support for the code I’d written, the tools from Sysinternals.com were invaluable. As the name implies, they’d let you get a programatic view on everything happening behind the GUI facade. Doing memory leak debugging would be almost impossible without things like Process Explorer which let you figure out all the handles that were open and who was holding them.

So, it’s congratulations tot he Winternals guy for getting acquired. I don’t know how much they got, but their new positions seem just right for them, and I’m sure they’ll be happy. Looks like they’ll have to move from Austin to Redmond: just in time to avoid the heat down here at the moment. But, it is tragic to see the Austin tech-pool drained a bit.

Keeping the Barriers to Entry Low

Back to Sysinternals.com: there’s some speculation of what Microsoft will do with it. They’d be crazy to touch it. Keeping those tools free and easily accessible makes Windows usable by admins. That is, the Sysinternals tools are a valuable and necessary part of the Windows platform.

Put another way, if it weren’t for the tools at Sysinternals.com, Windows admining and debugging would be in a lot worse shape. Putting up any barriers to entry to acquiring those tools would damage those benefits. From what Mark Russinovich said in his blog, it doesn’t look like Microsoft will start charging for the tools, but they may shift them to another community site. With that usually comes the annoying need to sign up for an account. Worse would be the tools increased in their complexity of packaging (probably due to being more tightly integrated with the rest of Windows). As they are now, most of them are completely stand alone exes that you can, for example, put on a thumb drive or download as needed.

Tools are best when they’re simple and fit to purpose. They start to go bad when they become Swiss Army knives.

I have no doubt that Mark and crew want to keep the good thing going, but there’s always that nervous time waiting for The Big Company to prove that they get it. Acquiring the company in the first place shows a good degree of getting it, but for all the admins and programmers out there, I hope Microsoft manages to not only keep the Sysinternals tools as simple and easily available as they are, but actually improve and maintain them. It’s be a great move to see them bundled in Vista. Then you wouldn’t even have to download them: zero barrires to entry ;>

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