Continuing the offtrack discussion...

but if 7 was released as a SP Microsoft wouldn't have had so many people evangelizing it as the second coming 'for free' 😀 There's certainly a few tweaks that make things a tad more bearable but fundamentally it's the same OS with the same issues. I only wish they had ditched the legacy fully and came up with something fit for the next 10 years. Never happen as the company is just too big to innovate to that level (that is I believe they could but never would take the risk).

Reckless wrote:

I only wish they had ditched the legacy fully and came up with something fit for the next 10 years. Never happen as the company is just too big to innovate to that level (that is I believe they could but never would take the risk).

What exactly do you mean? XP was sufficiently "innovative" and "legacy-ditching" to last ten years.

No, not at all. XP was the culmination of operating system convergence. Taking home and business product streams and making a single codebase that could be differentiated through 'optional features' (some rather dubious choices of course) was an excellent action on Microsoft's part. If offered business class users (i.e. those who primarily used NT, 2000) the chance to have full gaming/multi-media environments and home users a stable platform with good [legacy] software support. So something for everyone.

"Good" legacy software support? I seem to recall reading that one in four NT 4.0 applications would not run under XP. It was a rather bold move on the part of Microsoft to sever as many ties as it did.

And besides, how exactly could any company "ditch its legacy fully" and "come up with something fit for the next ten years" ? These are rather contradictory aims. If something completely new and totally incompatible with the old is released, those who need the older features will not upgrade, and consequently the something-new will never achieve sufficient penetration to get the support it needs to last ten years.

Android was new a few years back and over the last 2 it's gained huge market share. It has expanded to now run on mobile and 'semi-mobile' computing devices. I don't know how Google defines the lifetime of its product but I guess it's got a roadmap measured in years.

Everyone would love a fully secure, robust, lightweight and effective OS. So much so these days as the OS is almost meaningless - it's all about applications and data. Requiring a fairly significant chunk of hardware resources simply to run Windows 7 is wasteful. Why not come at it from a different angle - make the applications the centre of attention and get the OS to provide support for what's actually running, not what could be running. This modularity would require a huge shift in how an OS is both designed and perceived. But it could be the basis for something that would scale across different hardware platforms.

Anyways, my thoughts are simply that! I'm only reflecting upon what Microsoft's choices was/is/could be.

Reckless wrote:

Android was new a few years back and over the last 2 it's gained huge market share. It has expanded to now run on mobile and 'semi-mobile' computing devices. I don't know how Google defines the lifetime of its product but I guess it's got a roadmap measured in years.

I don't see the connection. Android did not have to provide legacy support for years worth of applications. And it's also free open source software.

So much so these days as the OS is almost meaningless - it's all about applications and data.

Was it ever about something else?

Requiring a fairly significant chunk of hardware resources simply to run Windows 7 is wasteful. Why not come at it from a different angle - make the applications the centre of attention and get the OS to provide support for what's actually running, not what could be running.

Because every user wants to run different things, and if you make it so that the OS can be completely changed to work in a million different ways, the user ends up spending all his time on those reconfigurations. Behold, Linux! 😀

Android's success merely provides evidence that even now you can release a new OS with no legacy platform constraints and still be successful. Apple iOS did that previously of course.

I'm just taking it as far as it can go - have an OS that's so small/well formed that it doesn't even need to be thought of. You stick the OS on the platform and it runs with an expected feature set, different hardware platform and it does something more/less.

Linux does do the user customization dance very well but ultimately that's likely to be one of the reasons joe public doesn't tend to have it on their desktop/device - there are perhaps too much choice. So something in-between - modular but more closed (after all it's the company's OS and they'd no doubt want to protect their revenue stream).

Whilst I'm enjoying the exchange (it's thought provoking rather than annoying for me!) the thread has been well and truly derailed!

Reckless wrote:

Whilst I'm enjoying the exchange (it's thought provoking rather than annoying for me!) the thread has been well and truly derailed!

Now it has
http://tinyurl.com/5v2au7k