I think Microsoft approached the issue of new OSes in a bad way. The idea of a new incompatible OS is that you drop the baggage of backwards compatibility with your older OSes. The way they approached it, the new OS (Vista) brought tons of new bloat, and if it dropped old bloat, the new bloat outweighs it. They should have taken a totally different approach. They bought a virtualization company a while back. All they had to do was provide XP as part of Vista. You could decide, in the control panel, what level of compatibility you wanted. No compatibility means you run Vista. Full hardware compatibility means you're actually running the XP kernel (so your drivers work) but everything looks like Vista because it's being virtualized. Partial compatibility means you're running the Vista kernel and all your Vista-incompatible XP programs are being virtualized. Two combinations that run the Vista kernel, one combination that runs the XP kernel but gives you what appears to be a Vista system anyway. Maybe they'll do this with 7. Two different Win9x compatibility modes, two different XP compatibility modes, two different Vista compatibility modes, and a full Windows 7 mode. That adds up to 7 compatibility modes. How appropriate.
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That horrible crash you just heard was Bill Stallmer launching EVERY SINGLE CHAIR in the city of Redmond, Oregon, with a catapult.
I'm planning on skipping 7 and going directly to 11 when it comes out. Mac OS 11.
I think Microsoft approached the issue of new OSes in a bad way. The idea of a new incompatible OS is that you drop the baggage of backwards compatibility with your older OSes. The way they approached it, the new OS (Vista) brought tons of new bloat, and if it dropped old bloat, the new bloat outweighs it. They should have taken a totally different approach. They bought a virtualization company a while back. All they had to do was provide XP as part of Vista. You could decide, in the control panel, what level of compatibility you wanted. No compatibility means you run Vista. Full hardware compatibility means you're actually running the XP kernel (so your drivers work) but everything looks like Vista because it's being virtualized. Partial compatibility means you're running the Vista kernel and all your Vista-incompatible XP programs are being virtualized. Two combinations that run the Vista kernel, one combination that runs the XP kernel but gives you what appears to be a Vista system anyway. Maybe they'll do this with 7. Two different Win9x compatibility modes, two different XP compatibility modes, two different Vista compatibility modes, and a full Windows 7 mode. That adds up to 7 compatibility modes. How appropriate.