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Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on.

Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and business analytics.

Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent among developers with the Mac hardware line.

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A rewrite without full backwards compatibility just wouldn’t have taken off. Even today, developers are reluctant to embrace the new Universal Windows Platform that sheds a lot of the legacy Win32 brings with it.

That's why I was suggesting running Win7 in an emulator for legacy apps.

And everybody runs everything in the emulator, because day one that's where their apps are. Developers continue to develop for it because not everyone has upgraded to Win7 yet. And you just end up with 2 OS's competing for users and developers from one company.

Win7 did just that with WinXP

The “growing discontent” is mostly within the Internet bubble. Mac sales declines are happening more because of the lack of new compelling hardware until recently.

Microsoft rewriting the operating system from scratch wouldn’t help. The only compelling advantage that Windows had was backwards compatibility. Once you take that away they have nothing left - evidenced by thier complete failure on mobile.

The only compelling advantage that Windows had was backwards compatibility.

and games, and popular software, and domain administration, and office, and tons of users and books and training and repair people available everywhere, and hardware compatibility, and ubiquity from home to work to places like library computers, and a tidy enough GUI, and thorough accessibility options, and ..

And half of what you said just proved my point. If Microsoft moved to a new OS they would lose the compatibility with games, popular software, and hardware support. They would also lose the advNtagd of ubiquity.

Windows is already very simple and reliable. What it lacks though is easy to use sandbox isolation of apps like Web/Android/iOS.

I'm at a point now where i lost trust in almost all software when it comes to respecting privacy. So even if windows has the biggest share of useful third party apps, most of them are old and not written against UWP/Store so they are not sandboxed, which means i'd rather not install them in the first place. So instead i open my android tablet and see if i can find an equivalent there.

Having to pay the huge markup for Professional edition to get disk encryption is also ridiculous when this is standard on Andrdoid and iOS. If my laptop gets stolen i want my data secure. This should be considered standard feature in this age.

Wasn’t Longhorn pretty much that?

ChromeOS isn't a new OS. It's Linux running a web browser and a very simple desktop shell.

Windows is 30 years old. Rewriting it would throw away a lot of builtin value.

"Built-in value"

Translation: It's good enough. Why innovate? We still make money on it.

It's like having a company van that breaks down all the time, but that's O.K. because, "It's paid for!" Meanwhile, your customers are getting increasingly impatient with your inability to meet their needs.

Windows doesn't break down all the time; I've had a continuous environment for like 2-3 versions of Windows now on my desktop. From 7 to 8.1 to 10.

The fact is, I actually like a lot of the "legacy" stuff in Windows (the classic control panel, etc) and the new iOS/Android like stuff feels just as basic on Windows as it does in those operating systems. Windows gets better (and even smaller) with each release; what's not to like.

What needs?

They did, Windows RT

I thought RT was just an ARM port, not a rewrite?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime

Close, but not quite. The first sentence on the linked article says:

"'WinRT' redirects here. It is not to be confused with Windows RT."

So "Windows RT" is an ARM port of the Windows 8 OS, while "Windows Runtime" aka "WinRT" is an API for "modern" Windows applications.

To be clear, I was responding to OP's literal "Windows RT" mention in my parent post.

Well, it's both I guess, it's designed to only run WinRT Store apps, not Win32 (Although Win32 is somewhat ported as Office runs on it), but that's the general idea, to break with the past. But the only reason people use Windows is The Past

That wasn’t a ground up rewrite, that was just the normal windows running on a different processor. They limited features so that it would be in its own market segment… But it was not a completely new OS.

I think that's the point they should have hard forked Windows. Have the business version continue on with the Windows 7 UI and the consumer version with Metro and ARM. All the things like touch support, Cortana, Groove Music, the XBox app, Weather, News, etc should have been available only on the consumer version of Windows.

yet another OS without apps.

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