

A new Windows? Please supplant the old one. - terhechte
http://www.terhech.de/2010/03/a-new-windows-please-supplant-the-old-one/
Would it make more sense for Microsoft to go tabula rasa, and create a completely new OS - replacing the Windows moniker, or would it be better to place this new OS next to the current Windows, offering two radically different Operating Systems?
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jerf
Microsoft's problem is that it can't answer the question "If I am switching to
a totally new OS, why does it have to be from Microsoft? Why not [any current
non-Windows OS]?"

I do not mean this as a quality slam, it's a business observation. Give up
windows and they're suddenly just another entrant, and what business sense
does that make? Other OSes already do virtualization with software, and it
wouldn't take _that_ much to put together a %buntu that natively supported
VirtualBox and Windows, where you stick the XP/Vista/7 install CD in at a
defined point in the installation.

Better to just start dumping their biggest bits of baggage over time and
slowly migrate to better tech than have a big bang "everybody dies" big OS.
They can get there just by lowering the priority on backwards compatibility a
little, rather that slamming it to 0.

This bears a certain striking resemblance to what they are actually doing,
oddly enough. Either way, it can't be a fast process; a brand new OS would
take years for the ecosystem to spin up, and these changes will take years.
There's no fast solution.

~~~
terhechte
I think that you're certainly right. The biggest problem is outlined by your
initial question "If I am switching to a totally new OS, why does it have to
be from Microsoft". I think, that such a question shouldn't, ever, be guiding
a companies strategies. But for Microsoft, it is. Their products legitimate
their existence through their Windows-Brand heritage. The actual question that
they _should_ ask themselves should rather be "What innovative features could
we create, that would make customers crave for our products". Sadly, their
whole corporate culture has stunning difficulties coming to terms with this
line of thinking.

A new Non-Windows Microsoft-OS might actually work, if it would be crammed
full of breathtaking, innovative, extraordinary great features (whereby
features I mean useful, life-enhancing ideas, not gimmicks). And it's very,
very difficult to start with a blank slate and come up with something
distinctly different but still incredibly awesome and useful.

------
makecheck
Windows can already be virtualized. The problem is accessibility and cost.

We've seen that most users can't be bothered to upgrade machines. You have to
give them an old-car, new-car model: copy all their precious data, then _throw
their entire box away_ and give them something new that happens to be running
Windows virtually.

A virtual PC must be as easy to buy as an iPod.

It must be cheap (free of any nonsense about not being able to reuse old
upgrade-only copies or otherwise paying again for Windows). A program that
would let people trade in old PC hardware for fast new virtual boxes would be
ideal: something that copies their entire Windows image onto it right at the
store, preserving their files, much like you'd trade in your car and keep
whatever stuff you had in the trunk.

And, it must start looking "uncool" or almost unheard-of to use anything else
as a Windows PC, similar to the effect the iPod has had on other music
players. It has to feel "ridiculous" to the average person to keep using some
old clunker PC, it can't just be something that tech people would think.

------
d4nt
Microsoft have had a "WIN" project one the go in one form or another for
years. "Cairo" anyone? For years, Longhorn was going to be an almost complete
replacement of the platform. They've never got it to work though, perhaps
because it's always been an engineer driven revamp rather than a UI driven
one.

To get something like this done they'd probably be better off abstracting the
OS and making it insignificant in the way as web browsers do. Imagine the
Windows Phone 7 OS running on laptops and tablets, all silverlight driven and
no sign of a filesystem anywhere. Then they could release a version that runs
on classic Windows, OSX and linux.

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angstrom
From what I understand of the (very preliminary) plans for 8 is to integrate
some of the elements from Surface, finally do away with the registry, and hide
much of the filesystem from the end user among other things that may be more
or less surprising to some. Backwards compatibility will still hang around in
the form of virtualization.

Microsoft is still an innovative company that needs to do a better job fast
tracking R&D to real world applications.

------
d0m
I've always been surprised that Microsoft hasn't made a Windows for gamer..
with preinstalled drivers for cards, DirectX to latest version, etc..

~~~
AndrewDucker
Windows 7 (and to a certain extent Vista) grabs the latest certified drivers
for all of your hardware. And Windows Update will also update DirectX.

So Windows already does what you're asking for...

