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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Is this incompetence the result of Microsoft being unable to retain decent engineers? I mean, who actually would want to work on the next Windows release? You’d have to be a masochist.

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Hearsay: I've heard that at least Azure is having problems retaining and hiring talent. Apparently the platform was created in such a rush to compete against AWS that many of its core components are jumbled, unreliable messes, many people internally know this, and when Azure tries to recruit internally no one bites.

Interesting.

They do have Mark Russinovich of colossal SysInternals fame as Azure CTO though.

Well apple had that empty password bug on one release, everyone makes a mistake once in a while

Microsoft already had its own empty password bug for the Xbox login. A badly placed trim call let you input a password consisting only of whitespace and it would pass as long as it had the correct length.

That’s nowhere near as bad as the sfrinentioned macOS big.

It's amazing to me. With the resources MS has, they could rebuild a new OS from the ground up and finally get rid of all the cruft and legacy issues in windows once and for all and still support legacy software via emulation, virtualization or even a compatibility layer a la WINE or WSL. Why don't they do it? Google is building fuchsia, Apple/NeXT was able to take BSD and build MacOS X, certainly MS can do it right?

Probably not.

I'm not familiar with MacOS 9 interfaces, but there are so many implementations of Unix out there (including WSL, Cygwin, Linux, BSD, and another dozen independent implementations) because the Unix interface was, on purpose, very simple. That is, in part, what allows Fuchsia and Darwin to be feasible.

Windows, on the other hand, is not. It has thousands of system calls which aren't really layered in any way. Wine and ReactOS have been at it for over a decade each and they still have "not yet implemented" system calls.

Microsoft has the "reference implementation" to compare with, but the amount of work is enormous even for Microsoft.

And lose 90% of the user base (corporate users) along the way. I think at this stage they should just introduce a new OS for home users that copies the best parts of MacOS (non intrusive updates, UX, common task bar / top bar, single folder installs, unix/posix paths) and add the best parts of Windows (user space video card drivers, ???) and add some from VMS (keep file versions / purge). While at it, they could also do this on a much more secure way than before re-thinking the whole end user security.

Than I would be happy. Well, obviously this is not going to happen but I would have been nice. :)

I have big hopes for Google Fuchsia

They don’t want home users using a different OS either, because they might start asking for it at work. I’m pretty sure the only reason MS even makes a home version of Windows is to indoctrinate new generations.

> user space video card drivers

On macOS, video card drivers are userspace, in fact, every driver (kext) is userspace

It also amazes me, they didn't need much effort, just a mechanism like docker does and it will be fine.

They have now started doing this. Windows Core OS (WCOS) is under development! GO MS!

https://www.windowslatest.com/2018/09/29/windows-core-os-rum...

Are they actively trying?

I'm thinking back across years worth of recruiter spam and Microsoft would be the only major company that's not represented.

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