Windows vs. Linux

[Alex Martelli]

Sybren Stuvel <sybrenUSE at YOURthirdtower.com.imagination> wrote:

> Gerhard Fiedler enlightened us with:
> > I don't know how many reasons you need besides backward
> > compatibility, but all the DOS (still around!) and Windows apps that
> > would break... ?!?  I think breaking that compatibility would be
> > more expensive than the whole Y2k bug story. 
> 
> Microsoft could provide an emulated environment for backward
> compatability, just like Apple did. Wouldn't know what that would
> cost, though.

I believe Microsoft could have saved many billions of dollars of
development costs, and hit the market well in time for the 2006 holiday
season, if they had designed Vista that way -- a totally new system, wih
no direct compatibility constraints, and with virtualization used to run
XP stuff.  That strategy (in the Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X migration path,
with "Classic" as the ``virtualization'' layer) is what saved Apple's
bacon when all attempts to craft compatible extensions of old Mac OS had
floundered in excessive costs and complexity.  And virtualization is
obviously a prepotently emerging technology -- look at VMWare's huge
profits, at Microsoft's purchase of the makers of VirtualPC, at the rise
of Parallels, at open-source developments such as QEMU and Xen...


> I think the folks at microsoft are used to getting cursed at :)

Particularly by their stockholders, with the stock down from a high of
almost 60 to the recent lows of below 22...:-)


Alex