How Microsoft Plans To Get Its Groove Back With Win7

shawnz tips a blog post up at thebetaguy that details Windows 7's huge departure from the past, and the bold strategy Microsoft will be employing to maintain backward compatibility. Hint: Apple did it seven years back. There are interesting anti-trust implications too. "Windows 7 takes a different approach to the componentization and backwards compatibility issues; in short, it doesn't think about them at all. Windows 7 will be a from-the-ground-up packaging of the Windows codebase; partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows."

Has "fail" written all over it

[metamatic (202216)]

The thing is, the only reason most people run Windows is so they can run legacy Windows applications. A Windows that can't run Windows apps? Yeah, that'll sell like an iPod that can't play MP3s.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[Moryath (553296)]

Why do you think people hate Vista so much? It breaks more older apps... there are still old games I love to play, that I'll dig out, but they take enough patching even to run on winxp, I don't even want to THINK about getting them to run under Vista.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[Maury Markowitz (452832)]

there are still old games I love to play, that I'll dig out, but they take enough patching even to run on winxp, I don't even want to THINK about getting them to run under Vista.

I'm in exactly the same boat. Sadly WINE has problems with the same set of programs :-(

Maury

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[jcr (53032)]

Vista accomplished a miracle. It made some people actually like XP.

-jcr

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[minginqunt (225413)]

While we're on the Classic Mac OS comparisons, I'd suggest that on current form, this could easily turn out to be Microsoft's Copland.

Were it not the fact that they (eventually) got something to stumble out of the door, that honour would fall to Vista.

The idea that Microsoft are really going to rip it all up and start again, with a company as profoundly conservative as they are, seems unlikely to me.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[peragrin (659227)]

I would suggest that Vista is Apple's copland and MSFT just kept on beating the dad horse instead of doing something different.

Of course Vista was supposed to be this great OS with modulazation, a real command line, a fancy database file system, that ran older windows apps in a fancy VM(Virtual PC anyone?).

MSFT broke those promises, Windows 7 will have lots of hope but it too will fail. MSFt management is stuck in a rut and that won't change until all the managers do.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[tfinniga (555989)]

A Windows that can't run Windows apps?

Were you not paying attention when OSX came out? You just hook up an emulator and seamlessly integrate an older ("classic") version of the OS with the new one. That way you can still run older apps, but with reduced performance (or, about as fast as they used to run on old hardware).

Also, MS bought VirtualPC, and has been giving it away for free. Integration of the OS with VirtualPC would be pretty easy for MS to do. I've been waiting for it for a long time.

Customers win because they now have an OS that's not crap. Developers win because they just re-code the UI and sell a new version. And hopefully they have better UI libraries to do it with. MS wins because Windows7 isn't a joke.

Let's just hope that this doesn't get the same treatment that WinFS did. I'd rather they not under-promise and over-deliver, but that doesn't seem to be the microsoft way.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[Junta (36770)]

The difference being, OSX offered something intrinsically leaps and bounds better than their predecessor *and* Apple is a smaller software market anyway. It's easier to move a small, homogenous market to a new platform (the number of 'important' apps is small and were quickly ported). The market of people sticking with OS classic is uselessly small, so no one cared much about keeping them up to date. At the time of OSX, something with the sophistication of Unix marketed to the home user in a sane fashion was unprecedented. XP came out later based on the NT line and Linux was at the time hardly in a position to be that usable for the demographic in question.

Now Windows 7 is coming from a company that has not displayed itself as capable of meaningful innovation at the core of the platform for a while now. They promise doing things 'different' and claim it will be 'better', but they had the same thoughts and promises regarding a lot of the aspects of Vista that blew up in their face. They *thought* file copying would be faster, and quite the opposite happened because they mischaracterized a rare corner-case as being overly important. They again with Windows 7 claim multithreading will be faster, because they ditch ring 0 stuff, but who knows what the state of new hardware will bring to make perceived benefit evaporate and who knows what pain will happen. Will Windows 7 be any better than XP/Vista for the end-user, probably not. Will a compatibility layer be glitchy, with their history, probably so. Will Wine at that point be solid enough for most people to make the Linux platform of the day roughly comparable with Windows 7? Possibly.

Hardware vendors should want Linux (making a commodity of the software stack means healthier margins), businesses should want Linux (a level playing field means your software vendor can't aggravate you even a little bit without reprisal, MS can piss off customers and not sweat it). Software development companies should like Linux, they can't ask for a more transparent set of APIs. Home users probably in general don't care, except for the market of ~100 dollar systems that are made possible by lack of MS tax. It seems the market is ripe to take a big 'screw you' like this and jump ship given the frustration anyway..

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[CodeBuster (516420)]

If the Linux crowd really wants to make substantial headway against Microsoft then they have to begin competing more effectively with one of the strongest remaining bastions at Microsoft: Visual Studio. The .NET Framework and Visual Studio are among the best quality products produced by Microsoft today and they are definitely NOT money makers by themselves, quite the opposite. In fact, Microsoft almost certainly loses money on their developer tools and it is probably among the smallest, if not THE smallest, markets for which Microsoft produces product. However, the developer tools support and promote the platform by ensuring that a good percentage of the available software developers in the marketplace will choose .NET and by extension Microsoft. Microsoft has always talked about "developer mindshare" and dance monkey boy [google.com] even said it himself, "developers, developers, developers..."

There is no good answer for Visual Studio + MSDN in the Linux community yet (mono is on the right path, but they are only just out of beta now) and that is one of the primary reasons that I and many other .NET developers (and there are a lot of us) have avoided Linux as our primary workstation OS and target platform. I know about Eclipse and Mono and there are a few features in Eclipse particularly that do trump similar functionality in Visual Studio. However, in the overall analysis Visual Studio is a better C# and .NET IDE and that is what is keeping many of us developers in the Microsoft fold. I actually want Mono and Eclipse to continue improving and competing more effectively with Visual Studio, but a few hundred dollars difference in OS price + cost of Visual Studio (which most of us get via MSDN subscription at work anyway) is just not worth the hassle of using a sub-optimal development environment, at least not for the professionals among us.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[Abcd1234 (188840)]

A Windows that can't run Windows apps?

It's called virtualization. Give Apple a call, they can tell you all about it.

Re:Has "succeed" written all over it

[Reziac (43301)]

Apparently you didn't RTFA in its entirety. How does M$ plan to handle the backward-compatibility issue? by including a Virtual Machine to run all your legacy apps... exactly what Apple did with "Classic" for OSX.

This is exactly what I've been suggesting for some time now -- a modular version of Windows (consisting of core OS, drivers, networking, and a basic browser suitable for downloading a better browser with) where I can install as much or as little of it as I wish, and a VM to run my old shit that won't work with this new modular Windows.

Also, it's a great razor-and-blades marketing opportunity for M$: make the core OS cheap or even free, and charge for various levels of "Plus Packs" suitable for people who WANT a monolithic software experience.

The big OEMs can make hay from that too -- basic machines with the core OS only would be cheap, while "complete solutions" (with all the Plus Packs) would be proportionally more expensive. And I'm sure the OEMs could make a good enough deal with M$ for bulk licenses that they could make a hefty profit -- exactly as they do now with preinstalled software.

If M$ were to include VMs for both WinXP and Win98-atop-DOS, everything would be covered, including old games (maybe even DOS games!), old apps, old installers, old drivers...

Also, there is some security imposed by running potentially vulnerable OSs/apps in a VM, if only because it's harder for malware to reach. A few malicious apps can "jump across" into a VM, but most can't.

Also, at a guess the new core OS will be more UNIX-like or even *NIX-based, which ought to make y'all happy.... after all hasn't "*NIX is better" been the mantra around here since forever??

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[Creepy (93888)]

Transparent emulators (should they even be called that?) are very fast - ever run a VM? They just pass through code into the native processor and make sure functions get routed to the appropriate library. Not quite as fast as running natively, but if you are able to significantly increase your "native" speed, the tradeoff is usually worth it (at most it's about a 20% hit - real world is usually much less).

    Where you DO run into problems is with I/O, meaning we get the driver headache again. I believe that is one reason Vista pushed a new driver model - an attempt at future-proofing for this new OS model.

    The plus side of a VM is you get a layer of stability for free if you do it right (I don't count on MS to do anything right, especially the first time...) - crashing the VM doesn't necessarily crash the native OS (depends on what caused the crash - bad memory crashes everything).

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[garett_spencley (193892)]

"(depends on what caused the crash - bad memory crashes everything)."

Absolutely 100% true.

The last time I forgot our anniversary my wife crashed my car right through our living room. EVERYTHING was ruined.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[by Anonymous Coward]

As my father is fond of saying: "Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas."

over ambitious

[Zashi (992673)]

Over ambitious as always. I say work on improving XP . Make it more efficient and add features. Perhaps get all those other features that were promised 10 years ago working. Like WinFS. Like a dozen other things. MS is just digging itself deeper.

Just be patient, folks

[Toe, The (545098)]

No really... we'll get it right next time. The last five years were a mistake, but give us a few more years and we'll be more Mac-like. Honest!

So, this is the new Longhorn

[ericrost (1049312)]

I mean Cairo, I mean the next piece of vaporware that will be used to keep Microsoft in a dominant market position even though their current product is inferior to the competition in both the desktop and server space, because why migrate off when "Windows 7" is just a few years away and will be SO FAAARRR ahead of everyone else.

Same tune.

Awesome

[Mutiny32 (932593)]

Wasn't this what Vista was supposed to do in the first place? It was supposed to be a dramatic departure from previous versions, but too much politics pressured developers into making backwards compatability a little too over-bearing on the system. This is clearly what they were trying to accomplish with Vista, but higher-ups were too afraid to do it, so they told them to half-ass everything to make it all work. After seeing what a disaster Vista has become, both on the development and user experience side of things, the Higher-ups have no choice but to listen to what their devs wanted in the first place; kill legacy. Not build it in and make it limp along half-working and hard to develop for, but just start with a clean slate and build a kickass base OS and worry about compatability with older applications and frameworks later. Basically, they tore a page out of OS X's plan of action.

Re:Awesome

[db32 (862117)]

This is indeed awesome. Now there will be precious little reason not to switch to a better OS. "I can't run XYZ" well guess what, you can't in Windows now either, your only option is virtualization and Linux tends to be a better host for that anyways, and even the virtualization platforms are free.

Credit where credit is due

[PinkyDead (862370)]

...but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows

Sure Vista does that now.

I seem to remember Vista was supposed to be a huge departure from what was done before - and then reality hit.

The mistake they are making (will make) is that that they think their software is what is broken - when in fact the software is just a representation of the business model they have chosen. Their system design is market driven not engineering driven - and whatever they produce from this point on will be the same as all the others. Windows, OSX, Linux, Unix etc are all products of the ethos in the organizations in which they are created.

If the mould is defective, there's no point is making a second one in the hope that it will turn out differently.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[TheSunborn (68004)]

quote:Microsoft has better system APIs than does Apple (End quote)

Are you insane? The native c api for win32 is about the worst api ever designed, and absolutely the worst api that is still in use.

And the c++ wrapper(I asume you mean MFC) is a hack job too. Even microsoft have admitted that. And MFC is not at all a part of windows, it is a part of "visual studio", which is not part of windows. Hint: You can't make an application that static link with mfc and which are compiled with a port of gcc.

Microsoft should just buy a full license for QT4 from trolltech, and declare that QT4.4 + whatever extra microsoft need is not the new standard for gui development for windows. (Microsoft would still be required to rewrite the part of win32 that is not cowered by QT).

Re:Credit where credit is due

[homesteader (585925)]

Apple has an application launch process that allows for a single application bundle to have 64-bit Intel code, 32-bit Intel code, 64-bit PPC code, and 32-bit PPC code. The OS determines the correct binary for the machine and runs it. They have a unified 64-bit/32-bit install so they only have to sell one version of the product.

Windows 2003 R2 however, you have to choose ahead of time whether you want 64-bit or 32-bit. Then, if you choose 64-bit, 32-bit applications get dynamically recompiled at runtime, 32-bit apps get installed to a different path, some registry keys are written to custom redirected locations, applications that use regkeys can break because they don't know that Windows redirected them, and so on and so forth. So if you want to run 32-bit apps, your still better off running 32-bit Windows. This is why support for 64-bit is so lackluster, even though the product has been out for years. No one is rewriting the apps for 64-bit support. I have a GIS app running on 64-bit windows, which was the biggest mistake I've made lately. It's now running with IIS in 32-bit mode, with 32-bit Tomcat because 64-bit support was so bad.

As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft isn't a technology company. They don't seem to be driven by technical prowess, a la HP when engineers ran things, or google now. They are a marketing firm that employs programmers.

Poor article

[mrslacker (1122161)]

Unfortunately, the article itself is a work of fiction. The guy has lots of bad reasoning, poor memory and is desperately lacking in technical understanding.

For once, I'd say just read the article summary ;-)

Re:Poor article

[Schnapple (262314)]

My Slashdot-fu fails me but I seem to recall, circa 2002, an article almost exactly like this, but the speculation was on "Longhorn" (i.e., Vista). The predictions, the most notable of which was that Longhorn would completely break all compatibility with everything that came prior, was pretty much identical. Then, as now, it seemed like the single stupidest idea ever. And then, as now, it was in an article using no sources on what was essentially a blog. And then, as now, the Slashdot submitter posted it as if it was the Gospel and the first several submitters carried it as if it was going to be the death blow to Microsoft they needed. Then someone (like yourself) clued in that this is just something that some blogger pulled out of his ass.

And the best part about the circa-2002 article was that either in that post or on another post on the site the author railed on about how you can be a 40-something programmer and lose out on a job to a 28-year-old programmer because the 28-year-old has "social skills" and you don't and don't want to because if you wanted to have "social skills" you would not have become a programmer in the first place. His "about" page revealed that he was a 40-something programmer, complete with a laughably awful photo of him, morbidly obese, sitting in front of his PC.

So essentially this was a bitter old man making a bunch of shit up. I'd almost guess that this "betaguy" is the same person with some better web design skills.

Seriously, Copy Apple Again

[Gotung (571984)]

Why can't they do what Apple has done about 3 times now?

Move to new technology, but provide a compatibility layer so legacy apps still work, even if they are in some sort of emulated environment?

The new hardware people will be using with the new system will be fast enough that even an emulated environment will be as fast (or faster) then their previous machine.

With the virtualization technologies available today this should be even easier to do then, say, Apple's transition from 68xxx chips to PowerPC chips, or PowerPC chips to Intel, or OS 9 to OS X.

Were they all seamless transitions? No. But they were arguably better then then the transition from XP -> Vista has been so far.

Microsoft seems to want to either take the course of backwards compatibility at the expense of progress, or progress at the expense of backwards compatibility.

Why not go for the best of both worlds through emulation/virtualization?

Re:Seriously, Copy Apple Again

[Otter (3800)]

Microsoft has always been obsessive about providing this kind of backwards compatibility. I would be astonished if this "exclusive" about them doing completely the opposite this time turns out to be accurate.

Those who think in operating system...

[A beautiful mind (821714)]

...releases lost the game long ago. It is useless to think in an OS as a package, much less something you put in a box. Given that the OS is the first software building block of a system and due to the sheer complexity of the thing, it has evolved into a continually updated and polished piece of engineering, where you take snapshots of the development and call them releases.

An operating system evolves and you don't sell it. You either provide it as a service, or provide it for free, so that you can hook people on some service you offer.

I'll tell you why Win 7 will be a huge flop: since it breaks almost all compatibility between itself and previous windows releases, it has to compete on the same grounds as Linux, *BSD and OSX. Which means, that without the massive inertia of the previous windows releases, those three will kick the living crap out of Win 7 in terms of maturity, usability and price.

Re:Those who think in operating system...

[gsslay (807818)]

I'll tell you why Win 7 will be a huge flop: since it breaks almost all compatibility between itself and previous windows releases, it has to compete on the same grounds as Linux, *BSD and OSX.

Why all the negativity? This is a good thing. For the first time in a long time Microsoft will have to sell an OS on its own merits. If it doesn't deliver the goods it will lose out to others. Rather than being part of the crowd intoning "Doom, doom!" from the side-lines, I hope that this inspires/forces Microsoft to deliver a kick-ass operating system, and everyone involved in computing can forget about the nightmare that is Vista.

What Microsoft is doing here is a bold move. We all benefit if it pays off with an improved product.

Legacy support may happen

[oahazmatt (868057)]

From TFA

...This should allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly, while still retaining native performance for applications compiled specifically with the Windows 7 platform in mind.

Seriously, what is it with all the editing of story submissions? Lately every summary has a knee-jerk reaction, but if you RTFA it's not nearly as bad as implied.

This reads like a 7th grader's English paper

[by Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't get past the first paragraph.

"In the face of the mass-media criticism of Windows Vista, mainly with regards to the performance issues present when compared to Windows XP on hardware with similar specifications. However, very little information has been presented with regards to the performance of Windows 7, this article however shall change that."

Hmm. What could they base it on?

[AccUser (191555)]

Apple used FreeBSD and this was a success. What Microsoft needs is a service based operating system kernel, such as this one [gnu.org]. It would be nice to see it used. ;-)

Two articles within one

[javilon (99157)]

The first article tries to push the idea that all problems Microsoft is experiencing come from the antitrust wrist slapping they have got. This is stupid. Also takes some jabs at Apple and Linux.

The second part of the article is telling us the real problem Microsoft is facing. Code bloat. Dll hell. They have decided that they canÂt hold it any longer and they are going to start from scratch and run the old windows apps on a virtual machine for backwards compatibility.

There is a third part that is missing in the article. Most people around here suspects that some of VistaÂs performance problems, specifically on the the multimedia department are caused by the interference of DRM code. Is Microsoft removing all this code from Windows 7?

So that's what slowed Vista down?!

[Coryoth (254751)]

Some interesting comments in TFA regarding the "source" of Vista's performance issues:

In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together; shifting more towards modular designs rather than the monolithic processes used in previous versions of Windows. This increased amount of componentization, while satisfying the DoJ and EU, also led to performance issues due to the increased number of libraries which comprise the operating system. On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit.

and then later

Another reason for Windows Vista's performance issues is the way in which Microsoft approached backwards compatibility in Vista. The operating system stores multiple copies of core system libraries, as each revision of a library typically adds/removes functions, and applications compiled with dynamic links to a specific version of a DLL file may call on functions not present in the currently installed library.

So, apparently, Vista being slow is all the fault of the EU and the DOJ asking for a more modular design that didn't have everything tied into monolithic core systems. The thing is, unless I missed something, most Linux and *BSD already have exactly what is described: a very modular system with literally hundreds (if not thousands) of shared library files; moreover, versioned shared libraries have been around for a very long time as well. If having to split things out into many library files, and keep multiple versions around is such a death knell for performance, then surely something like GNOME would absolutely crawl. For those who say GNOME does crawl, note that, in comparison to Vista on the same hardware it flies -- it's only in comparison to to other lighter linux options that it looks slow. So I have to say, I'm just not buying the excuse. Modular functionality in lots of versioned library files shouldn't be a problem. I suspect it has more to do with blaming poor performance on EU anti-trust regulations than reality.

TFA is just a troll..

[sw155kn1f3 (600118)]

No single link to source - where did they get this info, just unfounded speculations.
Windows 7 early builds was already demoed and there's no evidence that it will be backward-compatible.
Also WinSxS (side-by-side dlls) is what windows xp uses to maintain different versions of runtimes from the start and obviously it has little to do with OS speed.
While reading this article the only thought prevailed - wtf author is smoking. Complete rubbish.

Microsoft's answer to code bloat - bigger DLLs?

[Animats (122034)]

From the article: On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit. ... In Windows 7, Microsoft will break from the Windows' norm by breaking previous API compatibility, offering new API frameworks as a native solution, and providing support for legacy frameworks (COM, ATL, .NET Framework, etc) through monolithic libraries designed to provide the functionality of all previous revisions of the modules in question.

And so, the answer is to put everything in one bloated DLL?

It apparently hasn't yet penetrated to the Windows 7 group that computers aren't going to get much more powerful for years to come. That stopped once laptops started outselling desktops. In laptops, what matters is size, weight, and battery life. The future is the OLPC and the Asus Eee. In a few years, laptops in bubble-packs for $89.95 will be hanging on racks at the drugstore. Microsoft isn't ready for that.

Progress now will come from reducing software bloat. Microsoft has, in desperation, extended the life of Windows XP for little machines. That's only a stopgap measure. Now they need to de-bloat their whole product line and get their costs down.

If Microsoft was smart .....

[mlwmohawk (801821)]

If Microsoft was at all smart, they would use a light weight "Windows on Windows" strategy similar to how they implemented 16 bit Windows on the NT base on a new VERY stripped-down 64 bit Windows kernel and use virtualization of every Windows application.

In this day and age, it makes no sense to me to write another massive OS.

Am I supposed to take this guy seriously?

[MBCook (132727)]

However, very little information has been presented with regards to the performance of Windows 7, this article however shall change that.

No numbers. No estimations. Just some hand waving of "they are doing something different". The article doesn't change that fact at all.

Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism)

Because OS X and Linux aren't de facto monopolies with 80%+ of the market.

In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together [... this] also led to performance issues due to the increased number of libraries which comprise the operating system.

Yes, because loading 1 MB of code as part of one executable is vastly faster than loading it as 1 MB of library. This is especially true when loading 10+ different executables that have the same code statically linked in. That is way faster than loading it once. More efficient too.

No, wait...

Besides, that code (such as MSHTML.DLL) was already an external library. Just about every operating system tends to get new libraries with major upgrades. Windows was not one monolithic executable before. Heck, it wasn't way back in the 3.11 days.

However, Windows' lure has always been that applications from older versions of Windows are almost guaranteed to work post-upgrade; this is in contrast to older UNIX solutions where upgrading the system could render old applications useless without access to the source code.

That has not always been the lure. The lure was it was pretty and not a DOS prompt. Then the lure was simply that there were more programs for it when it became dominant. But then again, Leopard runs programs designed for Tiger and before. OS 9 ran programs designed for OS 7. Just about every OS does that, including many UNIXes.

During Apple's death throes back at the start of the decade, Steve Jobs made a bold decision; to replace the old, proven Mac OS lineage with a UNIX-based platform running a custom GUI.

You've GOT to be kidding. "Proven" for OS 9? It didn't have memory protection. It didn't have preemptive multitasking. Heck, you still had to pre-allocate memory to programs at launch, didn't you? It was a fine OS design for 1992. It didn't work so well in 2000. It was a weight around Apple's neck and would have killed them if they didn't try to escape. It needed to updated, and previous projects had failed. A clean break was a very smart decision.

Mac OS X was such a success - despite breaking backwards compatibility - that many customers were willing to put up with Apple's hardware, which ranked far below Wintel solutions in terms of performance, in order to obtain the hardware-locked user experience of their new flagship operating system.

This is somewhat true, (quite on the laptop side later in life with the G4s), but it's also highly troll. "...in order to obtain the hardware-locked user experience of their new flagship operating system"? That's unnecessary.

Apple took an unorthodox approach in order to offer Mac OS 9 users the ability to retain their existing software while still upgrading to the improved Mac OS X experience; the virtual machine. Essentially, Mac OS X contained 3 separate application environments; Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic.

It's not like anyone had ever thought of that before. If only Windows had a virtual environment in it. Maybe since 95. It could have run old DOS programs. Oh, wait, it did. Then there was WoW, Windows on Windows, that let 95 and up run old Win16 programs. Emulating older stuff is a common way of handling it.

Well, Joel warned us

[overshoot (39700)]

Looks like things are playing out as Joel predicted. [joelonsoftware.com] It should be interesting to watch.

Re:All Vapor.

[Maury Markowitz (452832)]

"This should allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly," while Vista provided less than 60% of the same.

And as anyone who actually tried to use Classic knows, it sucked. All it did was push Mac users to get new versions as soon as possible. This was actually a great thing for everyone involved -- developers got upgrade revenue, abandonware was replaced by new versions, and Apple got everyone to buy-in to the new system. If there was any problem, in my book, it was Carbon.

But there is one key aspect of the X story that has to be remembered: Apple was effectively a dead platform with a small user base. The vast majority of active Mac users today are new to the platform, or on a new-ish machine. There was little to no installed base to lose.

To think that Windows can pull off the same stunt strikes me as ridiculous. There is hope, surely, in the rapid rollout of ever-better virtualization systems, and API mappers (like WINE). But does anyone really think that the MASSIVE FREAKING installed base of Windows can afford a semi-solution like Classic while new versions of their software ships?

Case in point: I looked into the .net frameworks a few years back and basically gave up on it as massively underdeveloped. I knew this would improve as soon as Office was based on it. So I decided to wait until this happened, then I'd take another look. Still waiting. If MS's own applications end up running under emulation it will be unlikely to please. But if they don't, then you have to include all the legacy crap into the "base install". And if that happens, what, exactly, are you abandoning in the new code base?

Hey, maybe they'll pull off a miracle and make a compatibility layer that totally kicks ass. You know, like the new Office kicks ass.

Maury

Re:All Vapor.

[Dolohov (114209)]

I think that the big problem is that Microsoft is calling this new operating system "Windows". If they were to break with the past, and continue offering and supporting XP for the installed base, they would find a lot of benefits.

First, a non-Windows operating system would probably free them from the anti-trust agreements. After all, the old Windows line, that was the monopoly -- this new OS is competing with Windows.

Second, freeing themselves from the name allows them to experiment with new changes to the OS experience, which in turn would allow them to make much better use of their in-house R&D and their UI experience from their gaming division.

Third, it puts them in the position of underdog again, a position in which Microsoft historically thrives. They're a competitive bunch, and they just write better code in a competitive environment. With Vista, there was no real pressure to get it right, because they assumed that everyone would just upgrade from XP. If they're competing against XP, however, that frames the development process quite differently.

In a way, it's kind of a cheap trick, but I think that it would be very good for Microsoft to break out of this rut and break away from Windows. If they make a product, and compete fairly to get people to use it, they have the cash, talent, and reputation to pull off something good.

Re:All Vapor.

[click2005 (921437)]

I think that the big problem is that Microsoft is calling this new operating system "Windows".

Yeah, Windows sounds too easily breakable. They should call it something like MS Bricks.

Re:All Vapor.

[BlueWomble (36835)]

Absolutely, that article was ridiculous.

Any article that uses "loading excessive library files forced on us by the DOJ" as the first (and presumably therefore most significant) reason for Vista slowness should be laughed out of town.

GPL'ed Windows XP clone ReactOS

[Orion Blastar (457579)]

might be the answer. ReactOS [reactos.org] should be ready for at least beta testing by 2010. No need for Microsoft to GPL XP as ReactOS is a Windows clone built by GPL code to run Windows XP etc programs in it and use Windows drivers.

Re:GPL'ed Windows XP clone ReactOS

[Linker3000 (626634)]

Well, maybe there's your answer - MS wants to drop backwards compatibility specifically BECAUSE of things like ReactOS.

If Apps manufacturers are forced to follow suit, all new apps will have no (or poor) XP compatibility and thus will not run on the likes of ReactOS - in other words, end-users MUST use Win7 in order to run the latest apps.

Re:GPL'ed Windows XP clone ReactOS

[hedwards (940851)]

No, just no. It's a mystery to me why MS hasn't done this sooner. There's a lot to be gained for end users by throwing out the old code and starting from scratch with a set up which is designed for modern processors.

It's hardly a credit to MS that they've stuck with what is a bog of broken code and APIs for this long. ReactOS and wine just aren't large enough competitors to warrant this sort of radical "fix."

One can throw around a lot of paranoid speculation, but the reality is that a lot of the flakiness of Windows has been a byproduct of having all that stale code and 3rd party software interaction. Doing a redesign now with VM processor extensions and an awareness that right now things are moving to a multi-core 64bit environment makes this a good thing. Many of the design decisions would have been handled differently had the engineers known where things were going even 3 or 4 years down the road.

In terms of threat, the biggest threat here is that win 7 will not only not suck, but will do a genuinely amazing job at providing the end users and support staff with what they really want.

Re:Who cares? It's over.

[Machtyn (759119)]

With this announcement of total backwards break, Microsoft has declared complete defeat for their business model.

I don't think that announcing breaking backwards compatibility is declaring defeat for a business model. It is more a cleansing process. And I welcome that. A lot of the hardware and software we use could be a lot more efficient and, quite possibly faster, if backwards compatibility were dropped.

We're to the point now where processors are fast enough now to handle VM's. Let VM's handle the backwards compatibility, translating old code for newer uP/uC code.

I, too, would like to see Microsoft's practices of messing with their user base to satisfy their customer base stopped. But for the sake of competition, I don't think Microsoft sinking is a good option, either.

(I would also like to say it's the year of the penguin, and signs are showing that people are fleeing MS Windows... they just also happen to be fleeing the WIntel world, too, towards Macintosh. ... boy, what a locked-down mess the computer industry would be in if Macintosh had won the PC war in the 80's.)

Re:Who cares? It's over.

[norminator (784674)]

I don't think that announcing breaking backwards compatibility is declaring defeat for a business model. It is more a cleansing process.

The whole reason why I have stuck with Microsoft for this long (as well as many other people), is that apps I use aren't compatible with other OS's. If I could have iTunes for Linux, my wife would let me switch at home. Why doesn't Apple provide it? Because Linux doesn't have the marketshare. Why doesn't it have the marketshare? Because there aren't enough of everyone's favorite apps.

How much of the corporate reluctance to migrate to Vista is because of incompatibility with current apps? Some people are still running Windows 2000 to support old apps that were never updated to be compatible with XP, muchless Vista.

I understand that MS would have reasons to want to "cleanse" itself, but doing so would make them lose the one major advantage they have over Linux. If software companies have to re-write every app to work with Win7, why even bother with it? Who would use Win7, since all the apps are broken? Why not just write for Linux or Mac? The Apple market may always stay relatively small because of the price and the limited number of PC configurations, but Linux doesn't have either of those issues.

Linux has been in a tough spot for years because its marketshare is tiny next to Windows. But with no functional applications, Win7 would be starting over on marketshare, with no good reasons for anyone to buy into the new OS. Apple was able to start over with OS X because there was a relatively small number of users, who are fiercely loyal, and the change enabled them to get more users. I don't think MS can risk pissing off 90%+ of all computer users. Their biggest problem is that they could lose users, and breaking backwards compatibility can only increase the probability.

I'm sure they'll have some type of virtualization-enabled "Classic Mode", but you can do that from other operating systems as well, and if we have 2 years to prepare for it, Apple and the Linux community can have solutions that are just as elegant (or more so) than what Microsoft will cobble together, because whatever solution MS provides will most likely be an afterthought, since it's just a stop-gap solution until all the developers move over to Win7... if they ever do.

Re:Who cares? It's over.

[nomel (244635)]

And...I'm all for them trying something new. Start over! Look at apple. They've started over a few times, and I think it's been worth it...there's just not as much community pain felt because the install base is relatively small.

If you want a stable, mostly command line, system that'll be backwards compatible for decades to come, use your flavor of *nix...but if you want a fancy graphical interface with pretties (targeted at an audience who enjoys them)...you're gunna have to deal with sdk's and API's...that's just smart/efficient programming...where have you seen anything else?

In my opinion, it's marketing that screws the tech of MS. They come out with stupid as claims before knowing what the final product will be, over hype everything, and seem to get their hands in determining code paths. Their sdk's and api's (directshow for instance) and are mostly pretty neat. Marketing makes it so abstract and burried in coined tech terms that somehow make their way into the msdn (I consider this in the marketing goup...cause an intelligent software engineer would never make something like msdn) that it takes all the fun, desire, and some ability to learn it (at least for me)!

I agree, they are admitting defeat...but that comes with a realization that the customers (us) obviously want something better (sales of vista), but are limited with the current platform/code organization/model that they use now. Sounds like innovation/renovation to me...and that should be something constant in any field.

Yeah, let them sink in their record revenue...

[IonSwitz (609514)]

You're right, let them sink!

Let them perish in that huge heap of cash they're bringing in. Look how their utterly failing business model is killing them. St00pid ancient business model. They're just bringing in 16 billion dollars per quarter. Muahahaha! S00 sp00pid. Linux FTW, etc, etc.

The Linux vs Windows flame war was fun back in 1995. Can we move along?

Re:The Netscape Thing is a giveaway.

[rahrens (939941)]

What lie? Internet Explorer IS tied into the OS!! That IS the way they screwed Netscape! I do desktop support for the Feds, and we CANNOT remove IE, even to reinstall it. There just is no way to do so, the system will not allow IE to be uninstalled. That was the original complaint, and continues to be in the EU. If Win7 removes that roadblock and allows IE to be uninstalled, then they have answered that complaint. Frankly, if they DO toss out all the old Win code and start over, that'll be the smartest thing they've ever done, but it'll be eight years too late and again, waaay behind Apple!