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Comment by ben_straub | Hacker News Reader

For good or bad, Microsoft has committed to backwards compatibility. That means that all the techniques that work for installing apps now will work until Windows 7 is no longer supported.

My team has put a lot of effort into making our install more contained, but certain things still need to go in system locations. Registering a handler for a file extension means writing to the registry, as does (ironically) registering for visibility in the Add/Remove Programs UI.

I'm certainly jealous of the bundle system on OS X, but it doesn't solve everything. Device drivers still need to associate hardware devices with a handler, which we have to run code for on OS X.

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> Registering a handler for a file extension means writing to the registry, as does (ironically) registering for visibility in the Add/Remove Programs UI

But it doesn't have to be that way. Microsoft can deprecate and replace those outdated mechanisms while still supporting them.

OS X's bundle system is indeed elegant, but it's been around for 20 years (!) and its benefits are well understood. You have to wonder how long it has to take for Microsoft (and others) to catch on.

>For good or bad, Microsoft has committed to backwards compatibility.

I wonder if they couldn't get around this by breaking compatibility on a new OS version and then running something akin to Wine to run apps for older OS versions.

They do. Sorta. It is called "Windows XP Mode" (XPM), but it has some fairly significant limitations: it is only available to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. It also suffers from the overhead limitations of VMs - for instance, the video "card" is emulated so video-intensive programs suffer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_M...

They also have an emulator for 16-bit apps on 32-bit Windows, and for 32-bit apps on 64-bit Windows.

    it is only available to Windows 7 Professional, 
    Enterprise, and Ultimate editions

That's sounds like a business issue, not a technology limitation, unless there are costs associated with it that make it impossible for them to offer it across all of the many versions.

    It also suffers from the overhead limitations of VMs

OS X was in a similar situation, twice: first with the OS 9 classic environment then with Rosetta for PPC-compiled apps. Performance with each was less than ideal, but that's what was needed to move on.

That's totally different then. WINE is just an implementation of the Windows API that also sand boxes windows applications into one area. Since windows actually has their API they could pull this off much better than WINE does.

There is no earthly way that an app-store style platform for Windows would be backward compatible, but it doesn't have to be. New apps would run in a sandbox and only those would be allowed to use the slick new distribution system, go in the app store, etc. Legacy apps would run the same way they do now. Some day, there would be no more legacy apps but until then, the two types can happily coexist.

What they need is something like ".NET App Framework" that offers a complete platform in a sandbox. They could easily leverage existing Windows and .NET functionality to the point where the platform would be considerably more powerful than iOS/Android/WWW and very difficult to clone. Making it touch-friendly would be a good idea too.

This is a far better option for them than trying to clone Google's clunky web apps or start yet-another-smartphone-platform. There are really only a few critical things that allowed those models to successfully compete with the desktop, so figure out what those things are and fix them. Contrary to Microsoft gospel, the market is clearly willing to throw everything away and start from scratch, just to fix the bloody mess they made, so do it.

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