[LINK] Microsoft

[Kim Holburn]

On 2006 Aug 06, at 1:29 PM, Howard Lowndes wrote:
> Frank O'Connor wrote:
>> MS should probably have bitten the bullet when Vista was first  
>> proposed, stopped rejoicing in the fact that they latest version  
>> of the NT kernel contains 50 million lines of code, realised that  
>> sort of complexity is a BAD thing, and also realised that there  
>> comes a time when a kernel is so long in the tooth that it's no  
>> longer worth working on. They should have gone with the BlackComb  
>> project rather than the LongHorn project, and built over a stable,  
>> secure and scalable UNIX kernel, added their codecs and API's and  
>> a neat front end (like Apple did) and Bob would have been their  
>> proverbial uncle.
>
> One of their biggest problems is maintaining backwards  
> compatibility; I think they are very afraid of losing their  
> monopoly base if they don't maintain some semblance of backward  
> compat.
>
> I wonder how Apple went when they switched from OS9 to OSX.  Can  
> any of the Apple aficionados shed some light on the backward compat  
> of these two.

Apple have done this several times so they have a lot of experience  
of it.  Apple II -> Macintosh, 680x0 -> PowerPC and OS8 -> OSX and  
now G3/4 -> Intel.  They eventually get rid of the backwards  
compatability stuff.  I think you can still run OS8 stuff in MacOS X  
but why would you?  You can turn off the OS9 emulator and most people  
do.  I don't know if it still runs on MacInteltoshes though.

Microsoft did it once and they still have stuff left over in their  
OS.  (I think they finally got rid of the 16bit stuff in 2000 or XP  
but I'm not sure.)

Cringely was talking about this recently :
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060420.html

> Speeding-up performance is important, too, if you intend to compete  
> in a broader market and not just with your own installed base.  
> Apple has plenty of experience emulating old operating systems to  
> maintain compatibility, whether it was 680X0 emulation on early  
> PowerPC machines, System 9 or Classic emulation under OS X, or even  
> today's Rosetta on-the-fly conversion of PowerPC apps to run on  
> MacIntel boxes. But in all three cases, the performance result was  
> slower than users would have liked. Apple could get away with that  
> when it was an Apple-versus-Apple contest, but now we are talking  
> about Apples running Vista (or Windows apps) versus Dell or HP  
> computers running native Vista. To win, Apple has to be more  
> secure, easier to use, more solid, and not too much slower, so  
> every hardware tweak they can find is great, thanks.


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Kim Holburn
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