With Apple's G5 announcement, AMD's Opteron and forthcoming Athlon 64, and whatever the hell Intel's going to release in a few years, it looks like 64 bit computing is here.

Or is it? I've had a hard time understanding why Intel has been so reluctant to push a 64 bit chip. Then this little article over the The Inquirer put things into position.

It's not really Intel's problem. The problem is Microsoft.

No really, think about this. Apple can go ahead and recompile OSX as a fully 64bit application (altho they're not going to, not for a while anyhow). Linux already runs on a bunch of 64 bit chips. Windows... doesn't.

Not that Windows won't. But anyone who recalls the transition from Win 3.1 to Windows 95 remembers that it was not exactly smooth. 32bit calls being thunked down to 16bit calls, etc. And who knows what nightmares this future transition will bring.

And this seems to be exactly what's happening. If you've read the article, you of course noticed that Windows on the 64 bit Intel chip kinda plods along. Linux screams. OSX on a G5 kinda screams at a slightly lower decibel level. Intel's telling people to go ahead and install Linux on their shiny new 64bit systems. MSFT doesn't like this.

Why does this happen? It's the codebase. Windows is bloated beyond belief. It's time for a cleanup. And it appears that it's happening for unexpected reasons.

Yup, IE. What once was the fastest browser around, is now the slowest. What once rendered everything so well, is pretty freakin broken. What once had every feature you could want, is utterly lacking compared to everything else.

But you can't fix IE without fixing Windows. IE's buried so deep into the OS that any changes you make to IE will ripple across the OS and tons of 3rd party applications. So why not fix both? Discontinue IE as a standalone product, which is exactly what Microsoft did last week, and bundle it into the OS exclusively. Pretty smart in one sense... newer, fixed versions of IE won't screw up the entire OS.

And it forces people to upgrade if they want to use IE. But who wants to use that anyway? There are other alternatives available.