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No, during that huge delay, they've restarted the Longhorn/Vista project twice and did that stupid code review. The despaghettifying started during that and they're still not done. Even MinWin still needs a tons of DLL aliasing hacks, because the kernel's still making calls to upper layers, which again depend on a lot of GUI code, shit like USER32, KERNEL32 and such. If you call that a successful refactoring, you're deluded.
Unfortunately, I do know what they were doing with the code between XP an vista: Totally F**king it up. They had to start over from scratch after xp sp2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista#Mid-2004_...
Windows 7 gave us the birth of minwin. However the GP has a point. Windows does not scale from embedded to server with the same kernel. Windows phone 7 is a different OS than windows 7.
Windows NT/2k/XP/7 is very portable, when NT 4 came out, it ran on Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS and x86. It was designed that way. The problem with Windows on alternative platforms is that nobody was interested it, because of the lack of apps.
The problem with Windows on tablets, is the UI, as many people have pointed out. It has nothing to do with scaling to different architectures, as that capability is already there.
That's not really true though is it:
eg NCSA run a little "desktop" called Abe. A little "desktop" that runs Windows Server and is ranked 83rd in the Top500 list.
http://www.top500.org/system/details/8757
While I agree that Windows has it's faults (I'm really not a fan of Win7 despite it's many improvements over Vista and XP), let's not start manipulating the facts to suit our own bias's.
Edited 2010-08-02 09:48 UTC





Member since:
2006-03-20
What Microsoft still doesn't understand is that its operating system still does not scale across various form factors. Linux and OSX/iOS's BSD kernels scale from mobile to big iron server (well Darwin specifically less so). Windows NT is still just a desktop operating system. And unless they're done despaghettifying and subsequently refactoring all (which is something they're not doing), it'll continue to be that way. MinWin still has a 40MB disk footprint from what I remember, and that's unacceptable for mobile devices.