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."

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[$RANDOMLUSER]

People already complain about how Vista is half as fast as XP (which is being generous). Imagine how much slower Windows 7 will be, when all your existing software is being run in a virtual machine.

Too right. Most people agree: Vista is half-fast.

Good idea?

[DrugCheese]

NOT!

Hmm. What could they base it on?

[AccUser]

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. ;-)

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[Abcd1234]

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 "fail" written all over it

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Pure Propaganda

[cp.tar]

At least it's fun to read.
Especially now that they stand out so (I foed them, so they're nice and red.
Please tell me it's red and I'm not making a fool of my colourblind self.)

Re:Who cares? It's over.

[Tiger Smile]

"We can sit and arm chair direct..."

And here I thought Balmer was in charge of "directing" the chairs around here.

Re:Has "fail" written all over it

[garett_spencley]

"(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:All Vapor.

[click2005]

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:Has "fail" written all over it

[Matey-O]

If Vista is Microsoft's copeland, than the _only_ solution is for MS to make an emulator (or buy Parallels) and rebuild Windows on top of a Unix microkernel-hybrid.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

[IonSwitz]

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:All Vapor.

[Sockatume]

I suppose they wouldn't go for "MS Shithouse", no matter how appropriately robust it sounds.

Re:Well, Joel warned us

[fred fleenblat]

Yep, as early as 2004 Joel knew that HTML was the up-and-coming technology to watch.

Re:A neo-NT4, I like it.

[kesuki]

NT 4.0 had too large of a hardware footprint, when it was developed, so they created 'windows 95' in about a year, as a complete rush job to keep consumers happy (nt was supposed to take the place of dos in 1994)

windows 95 was horribly broken, so god awful that I started using FreeBSD because of windows 95... windows 98 was much more stable, but again that came out because windows NT still took too powerful of hardware, and nobody was ready for it to replace 98 until after year 2000 when XP was finally ready for prime time.

I read a really nice article about the history of Dos and windows and journaled about it here. would have been nice if they'd brought up how direct3d was MS's response to opengl or how they stole office from apple's own in house office suite.. but it only covers DOS and Windows and xp/nt etc.
http://slashdot.org/~kesuki/journal/199834 [slashdot.org]