Why Windows is Slow

hype7 writes "The New York Times is running an article on why they think Windows is so slow. They boil it down to one key factor - legacy support - and they hold up Apple as an example of a company willing to make hard decisions around legacy support in order to provide a better product. From the article: 'Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down ... That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation.'"

Comments

Emulation Layer

[NETHED]

Windows Vista is coming out as a 're-write' of the code, but I don't believe they are recoding the real legacy parts of the Windows code. I think Microsoft needs to do away with native legacy support like Apple did, but keep it around with emulation. If WINE can reverse engineer the Windows layer, than why can't Microsoft, with access to the source?

TERRIBLE name for the article!

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

The NYT titled the article "Why Windows is Slow" - it should have been titled "Why Microsoft is Slow". The article talks about the slow delivery of new versions of Windows relative to Apple deliveries of Darwin. It's got nothing to do with the performance of Windows itself.

Re:Transitions....

[Matey-O]

What's funny is, based on Microsoft and Apples experiences with virtual environments, you'd think Microsoft would take the whole backwards compatibility miasma and throw it into a Connectix/Virtual PC environment.

Build the whole OS as a tight, single codebase that supports VMs, then let the VMs handle backwards compatibility. I never understood why 100% of the population has to suffer for the 3% that wants that parallel port handheld scanner to work.