Microsoft has a new Windows and Surface chief | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has a new Windows and Surface chief

theverge.com

10 pointshasseo7 comments

If you asked me to improve Windows as a product for its customers, I'd probably be incapable of it. Not because there's nothing in Windows to improve, but because there's so many constraints placed upon it:

* You can't make it too powerful, integrated, or streamlined because you need Microsoft services to be artificially differentiated from competitors, which means leveraging platform power.

* You can't make it too fast because you can't overhaul any systems that might break a truly insane amount of backwards compatibility.

* You can't improve the UX because the primary function is monetization.

From a career perspective, head of Windows seems like not a great job.

Whoever takes that job and succeeds at it will show themselves to be truly exceptional.

The OS simply doesn't mean much anymore, and hasn't for more than a decade. However, it makes sense why they organized WinDev with Surface, since the device does matter, and your device needs to operate well enough that it isn't a pain point (why Apple has such an advantage here).

The long tail of backwards compatibility, while impressive and amazing, is holding back windows, x86, and others.

As much as I would hate them breaking compatibility, eventually it has to give.

Imagine 50 years from now, never being able to improve things due to backwards compatibility…

Having been a victim of win RT and other "modern" windows APIs the simple truth is the old stuff actually works and the new stuff is crap and gets deprecated after nobody adopts it.

Yes, there are bunch of limitations, but reducing it to plain "you can't" doesn't feel right.

Windows has, in the past, already changed its kernel, filesystem, UI, driver model and many other things. They even implemented different compatibility modes which allowed them to make "breaking" changes without actually breaking compatibility.

Windows has been rudderless since Sinofsky lost the power struggle and retired. It was true the rest of the company needed to be freed from the tyranny of the windows org but we threw the baby out with the bathwater, and since then windows has been victim to the whims of the services.

Hopefully the new chief can put some spine back in and start saying no to things that are bad for the product.

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