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Comment by nox101 | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me they should pull an Apple. Run everything old in some "rosetta" like system and then make something 100% new and try to get people to switch, like say no new updates except security updates for the old system so that apps are incentivized to use the new one.

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Nobody wants something 100% new. Users don't want it. Developers don't want it. You can make a new OS but then you'll have zero developers and zero users.

Yet this fantasy exists.

And as soon as you make something new, it'll be old, and people will call for its replacement.

People live under the delusion that OS X was "100% new" when in fact it was warmed-over NeXTSTEP from 1989. Most of them probably have never seen or heard of a NeXT workstation.

To reinforce how much people hate "100% new" how long has Microsoft been working on ReFS? 20 years? The safest most boring job in the world must be NTFS developer.

The OS X story is even worse than that. When Apple first released OS X to developers, like Adobe, they balked. They weren't going to port their Mac applications to this "new" operating system. Apple had to take another year to develop the Carbon APIs so Mac developers could more easily port their apps over.

Some users clearly wanted it because Apple did it and are doing just fine.

Users and business want to stop being hacked. Windows will never achieve this without starting over.

Apple did nothing of the sort. NeXTStep was already old and established, then they had to add a whole classic compatibility API layer because developers balked and they had to change the UI to make it more classic Mac OS like. They only bought NeXT because they failed at building their own next-generation replacement for Mac OS at the time Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT.

> Users and business want to stop being hacked. Windows will never achieve this without starting over.

That's not true at all.

So what if Apple bought NextStep? They still switched all their uses over from OS-9 to completely different OS-X and all the software migrated or was left behind

They had to spend an additional year of development adding the Carbon API so OS-9 apps could be ported. They had to alter the UI. They picked an already established operating system.

You're replying to a post where I said users and developers don't want something 100% new. You said "Apple did it" but they didn't. There was nothing 100% new about OS X. They had to do everything possible to make it as not-new as it could be while being a completely different OS.

OS X proves my point.

Apple moved everyone to a "new to the user" OS. Sorry if that wasn't clear. It's irrelevant that OS-X was based on some other OS. To every user of OS-9 it was a new OS for them. Effectively Apple got all of their users to switch OSes. Microsoft should do the same.

What 10+ year old existing commerical OS should Microsoft move their users to?

You aren't really addressing the point. To users, OS X was the next version of Mac OS. Apple took NeXTStep and added a pile of classic MacOS UI and added APIs so developers could easily port their classic applications. It wasn't 100% new even to the users. Familiar UI. Same apps.

If Apple has just thrown BeOS on their machines and it turned out be a success then there might be some argument for users and developers loving a 100% new OS. But, as it turns out, even an OS as advanced as BeOS is not what users and developers really want. Users want to be able to run their same applications in familiar environment and developers want to make use of their existing code and existing skills.

Another way to look at it is Apple moved their users to their own "Windows NT" -- something that Microsoft also did around the same time frame with Windows XP.

You left out the important part: abandon the Rosetta-like system a mere few years later once you've lured them in, then fuck everyone over by breaking backwards compatibility every OS release. Apple really has the "extinguish" part nailed down.

Carbon is a better Apple-related comparison since it's basically a cleaned-up version of the classic Mac OS API as a library that ran on both Mac OS X and classic.

Win32 runs on Linux by way of SQL Server.

uhhhhhh yes, but not really? All Win32 calls are intercepted and handled by SQLPAL, instead. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/blog/2016/12/16/s...

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