How soon we forget the past
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A lot of people say they want Microsoft to get a clean start but they don't really understand what that means. Running your legacy support in a VM is a really stupid idea. Remember when Aplpe did that with Classic? It was horrible. Overnight they basically lost all compatibilty with scanners, tons of printers, camera and lots of other products. Not to mention that various production enviornments involving audio recording, video creation, or digital imaging is going to suffer for years to come.
It took Apple about 3 years to get OS X usuable. That's counting from the day 10.0 was released but in reality they had been working on OS X and NeXT for at least 5 years before Panther came out. And Apple had the NeXT code base to draw from. Microsoft would be starting from scratch so it would probably take them much longer and there's no way they could spend time creating "cool" new features because they'd be busy re-implementing basic stuff like DVD burning and file encryption.
Sure, every other Linux kernel can throw backwards compatibilty to the wind because they know everyone will upgrade quickly and all the software is free but Microsoft doesn't have that option. The Windows world would be split between the new and the old for the better part of a decade and the cost of re-buying all your proprietary software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Nero, Acid, Office etc.) would be prohibitably expensive.
For some people the move from Win9x to WinNT (XP) was difficult enough and that was after 6 years of transitionary work on the NT platform to make everything as seemless as possible. You guys say you want to see that future but in reality you really don't.
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A lot of people say they want Microsoft to get a clean start but they don't really understand what that means. Running your legacy support in a VM is a really stupid idea. Remember when Aplpe did that with Classic? It was horrible. Overnight they basically lost all compatibilty with scanners, tons of printers, camera and lots of other products. Not to mention that various production enviornments involving audio recording, video creation, or digital imaging is going to suffer for years to come.
It took Apple about 3 years to get OS X usuable. That's counting from the day 10.0 was released but in reality they had been working on OS X and NeXT for at least 5 years before Panther came out. And Apple had the NeXT code base to draw from. Microsoft would be starting from scratch so it would probably take them much longer and there's no way they could spend time creating "cool" new features because they'd be busy re-implementing basic stuff like DVD burning and file encryption.
Sure, every other Linux kernel can throw backwards compatibilty to the wind because they know everyone will upgrade quickly and all the software is free but Microsoft doesn't have that option. The Windows world would be split between the new and the old for the better part of a decade and the cost of re-buying all your proprietary software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Nero, Acid, Office etc.) would be prohibitably expensive.
For some people the move from Win9x to WinNT (XP) was difficult enough and that was after 6 years of transitionary work on the NT platform to make everything as seemless as possible. You guys say you want to see that future but in reality you really don't.
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