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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

As Mark Shuttleworth said, no OS has ever succeeded by emulating another OS (why they chose not to build a Dalvik VM for Ubuntu phone). The fact that it runs Android apps in this way is not going to make this thing a best seller. If Android apps are the biggest part of the buying decision, then most people would just go straight to an Android device, instead of dealing with such a solution. This is why the Android emulator has also never worked for RIM (and never will).

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One example of an OS that succeeded by emulating another OS is OS X. It came with a well-developed OS9 emulation strategy. Even though it didn't get used very often, the existence of a smooth transition strategy was key to its success.

IBM has also done fabulously well emulating various old mainframe operating systems.

Emulation strategies are never the be-all and end-all, but if you want to be a "successor for X", you need to have an emulation story.

Emulation, virtualization and dual-booting are a very large part of the reason of the success of OS X. A Mac is the only machine that will run OS9, OS X, Windows & Linux software. So people buy one knowing that they won't be stuck if they end up not liking OS X or needing a critical app. Then they end up staying on OS X.

So to be a successor to something, you need to:

1) have an emulation or virtualization story so that people won't be afraid to switch

2) be significantly better so people end up not actually using the emulation or virtualization.

>A Mac is the only machine that will run OS9, OS X, Windows & Linux software.

Technically, you are incorrect. You can't run OS9 on the Intel machines and you can't run Windows on PPC machines.

Not today but for six years mac os x shipped on powerpc and could emulate mac os 9 and x86 (via several software emulation options).

You can probably find a decent "classic" option for intel macs if you look hard enough, but that wasn't the original point.

Okay, but what I really meant is a competitor's OS, and an OS that is still successful, not one that is getting obsolete and forgotten, and you're only emulating it because it's your own OS and because you want to maintain backwards compatibility.

This is not like Xbox360 being able to run Xbox-1 games. This is like Xbox360 being able to run PS3 games. Big difference. I don't think Xbox360 would've been successful if they said "Here we have 5 games of our own, and 100 from PS3". I think most people would've still gone with the PS3, if it had that many games at that point compared to the Xbox360, instead of dealing with PS3 emulation for Xbox360 just to get those 5 extra games.

"As Mark Shuttleworth said, no OS has ever succeeded by emulating another OS (why they chose not to build a Dalvik VM for Ubuntu phone). "

When I started using Linux, having a working DOS emulator was a very significant issue for me. Today, many Windows games work just fine under wine, not to mention actual applications.

I think it's a big deal for the changers.

Except windows emulating itself of course (WoW). Its so good, most people don't even realize it exists.

That is because the underlying hardware was never powerful enough to support the emulation or the emulation code was not efficient enough. With the current virtualization technology and powerful hardware, I doubt why this would not be effective.

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