XP Still Killing Vista In Sales Volume, Says HP
Linked by Tony Steidler-Dennison on Mon 28th Jul 2008 18:42 UTC, submitted by Dan Warne
Windows Business PC buyers are still overwhelmingly opting for XP, computer giant HP has revealed. Yet at the same time, Microsoft is claiming that Vista is selling faster than XP ever did ... so where's the truth? HP, which is the world's number one computer maker, has explained how Microsoft comes up with these dubious statistics.
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g2devi
Member since:
2005-07-09

The key problem is, if you stay with XP and abandon Vista, you have to add Vista capabilities to XP and maintain all the 1000s of configurations kept inside of XP to preserve backwards compatibility.

In essense, XP would become incredibly bloated. Eventually, Microsoft has to abandon its backwards compatibility. It's not without precident. It gave up DOS, in favour of the less close to the metal NT-DOS. This resulted in thousands of DOS applications failing to work, but they gave DOS enough time to survive. Microsoft can't do this now, but they can clean up Win32 to get rid of all the backwards compatibility kludges and build it on a lean kernel. Then the Windows XP and Windows Vista APIs can be built, WINE-like
on top of the Win32-clean API.

This approach has several benefits:
(1) The Vista libraries would only need to be
loaded if you have Vista apps.
(2) The XP libraries would only need to be
loaded if you have Vista apps.
(3) If you only have Win32-clean apps, your machine would be a lot faster and your kernel will be a lot smaller (idealfor the embedded market).
(4) Porting apps from XP and Vista would simply be a matter of replacing obsoleted APIs with new ones. Code analysis software can catch most of these cases.

I don't see the down-side, other than Microsoft possibly regaining its leadership (which is, Roman empire-like, slowly in decline).

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