Arguably the legacy bits are the bits that work, the modern bits (UWP) are barely seeing any adoption. They're force feeding the modern bits, presumably because they've lost the human resources/mindset/talent to maintain the legacy bits?
This strategy of arm twisting coercion has failed them before and it will fail them again, and again, and again.
I could believe the flashing (when running over RDP), glitchy, sluggish Outlook 2016 is using some of the new stuff. It's not a success in my view.
They're worried that people will stop making native windows apps and move to "cloud" or "mobile". Sure, but people are definitely not going back in the box of their proprietary store without a really good offer. What's the unique value proposition here? The value proposition of win32 is "you get to run all your old and new stuff, locally, without a middleman".
GNU/Linux setups are nowhere to be seen on consumer shops, let alone Chromebooks (at least in Europe).
So that leaves Windows for the regular consumer, regardless how Microsoft sells it.
Do people think that "virtualization" only means running a whole other desktop environment in a window or something? You can run virtualized and native apps side-by-side and most users wouldn't be able to see the difference.
This seems like a good way for Microsoft to free itself from legacy while maintaining compatibility, including for games, for people who need it.
For 'current' old software yes, because Moore's Law held until a few years back, but now we can no longer count on that. So a game from this year will presumably become 'legacy' by 2021, but will hardware power have advanced sufficiently that it will run on 2021 virtualized container with nearly the same FPS as today on bare metal?
That doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of the old API, but it might mean radically sandboxing it.
WSL development for bringing in programmers as new users is nice and a feature that stays out of the way, but Microsoft wants to bring in tablet/phone users.
Universal apps so far seem kind of stupid, as an example Paint 3D is a single window only app. Pretty bonkers but I guess the API doesn't support multiple instances.
I've worked with the underlying RTC libraries directly, or through the managed .NET wrapper, and there's no great technical reason for this; it's just that the Lync client has a global single-instance mutex.
Do you really think somebody will ever write a single app for this all-walled-garden, dishonest effort? The current success of Windows relies on its openness. Add a walled garden and get a dysfunctional, slowly dying OS like macOS.
They should keep Windows Windows and offer the new one as a "boot to Office", not mentioning any reference to operating systems at all, to set expectations right. That one could really fly with a certain market segment (RDP thin clients are a thing). That's assuming they can get Office proper to work on the new API, it might be the one codebase that is more entangled with legacy windows APIs than any other.
The legacy is their crown jewels.
Well, OK, I don't mean that literally. There's one very specific aspect of older operating systems that seems to have been lost forever: OS/App independence.
Our engineering workstations require somewhere in the order of two weeks to fully setup from scratch. It's quite an investment in time, money and pain-in-the-ass factor. In a typical transition we might build a parallel system, keep the old one around, start using the new one and refer to the old one if anything was left behind (small apps, settings and configurations, customizations, etc.)
Because of this we do not upgrade hardware or OS as quickly as we might like to.
If applications installed with independence from the OS this would be very different. What I mean by that is that your "Programs" directory could be moved to a completely new computer with a fresh OS install and you are up and running instantly. In our case we would probably devote an entirely separate physical drive to applications, just as we do for data.
In other words: Why do I need to reinstall MS Office (or whatever) from scratch, ever?
If this were possible we might update all of our computers every two to three years rather than every six to eight. The pain and expense of dealing with upgrades would be gone. An upgrade would be as simple as buying new hardware, moving the physical data and app drives over, running through some form of authentication and off you go.
There are a million different ways to accomplish this wile protecting the rights and licenses of software companies. I don't care to have that conversation because that is a solvable problem. The problem they have to address is this question of having to reinstall all of your software every time you upgrade hardware and OS. That, to me, in this day and age, is ridiculous.
I truly believe the approach taken by MS so many years ago has actually cost the computer industry untold billions of dollars. A company with hundreds or thousands of computers can't even begin to consider upgrades given the non-trivial cost of managing them. If applications were independent from the OS in a portable manner the decision to maintain hardware and OS would be far simpler to make, even at large scales.
The issue goes farther than that. If I need to travel and have access to the $100K in engineering software on my workstation through my laptop I am screwed. Sure, there's remote desktop but that sucks or is nearly impossible to use with some of these applications. Why is it that I don't have the ability of run my apps on any machine I want. I mean, a processor is a processor, is a processor. Outside of requiring specific GPU configurations, I should be able to grab a drive with my apps, grab my laptop, get on a plane and go. I should then be able to use any and all of my applications natively on that machine, even if it is running a different (yet compatible) version of the OS.
In the end I don't care one bit about the operating system. I care about the applications. That's what I use to do my work. If Microsoft understood that they would create an operating system that would help rather than hinder the users with unnecessary complexity, toys and garbage nobody wants.