Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 16th Jan 2008 21:49 UTC, submitted by Bleistift
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Member since:
2005-07-11
Um, I'm not sure you can spell a numeric value wrong can you? lol... I take your point...
Well, personally I don't think it will be the second half of 2009, it will be 2011 at the earliest I would guess, but not because of what happened with Vista, but because of what other OS's including OS X will have in them by then, MS will need to catch up and add those features too. They have to catch up on 2 fronts, the OS and the mobile phone side and come up with something to take on the iPhone, which will mean a version of windows that can run on a small platform and compete (even at the current 2008 level) with some of what the iPhone and Leopard are doing as far as the API level is concerned.
To be honest, I think MS needs to bite the bullet and start again (just like Apple had too).
Maybe a scenario such as...
1. grabbing the Win2008 server as a base (I know, I think *nix would be better, but that is never going to happen)
2. only managed .Net code goes on top, nothing else
3. no access directly to hardware
4. older win32 code (so basically most of the code today) to run in a "classic" mode.
This would allow MS bring a stable platform that is new, safe, light and agile (that is, can run on a lot of platforms) with no baggage. Maybe this is what MinWin is?
Now the biggest objection people would have that classic mode would be slow for gamers, and I think it probably would as you still don't have (or shouldn't have) complete access to hardware.
I suggest MS bring out a very light stripped down OS esp. for gamers that is basically a stripped down XP that does one thing, runs games, and runs them fast, maybe a simple interface similar to Media Centre perhaps (I haven't seen what the XBox does, but maybe it has a simple interface they could use)...
The other reason this is a good idea is that developers would move existing code from Win32 across to .Net much faster as noone wants to run stuff in "classic" mode. It happened on the Mac, so should happen on the PC (thought the base is so much larger).
Anyway, just some thoughts I had the other day...