Microsoft Must Break Free from Itself in Order to Move onto the Future
| by Joe Leo, Columnist | April 12, 2007 |
continued... from: previous page
Let's get to the heart of the matter here, which I got into a discussion with my colleague at work over at my main job. I mentioned to him that from my readings on Windows Vista--meaning the things I read in magazines, not my personal intuition!--I found out that even though Vista is the next-generation OS from Microsoft? It lacks one thing... that next-gen factor.
Believe it or not, Microsoft's next-generation OS is a holdover from the past!
It would be like Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanding the Enterprise-E, but with Scotty--and we all love Scotty--down in Engineering. "I canna give ye more power Cap'n." Well, not really.
(To match the Microsoft metaphor, Scotty wouldn't even be in Engineering. There'd be a wooden boiler room from the H.M.S. Enterprise fused into the high-tech modernized architecture of the Enterprise-E, and tending the coals downstairs would be a Neanderthal in Starfleet uniform who spoke in grunts only!).
I can't remember where I read this exactly, but thankfully, an article yesterday down over at MacNewsWorld.com refreshes the same idea (so I don't have to search the internet to find my old source) in a piece entitled "Microsoft Could Learn OS Foundation Lessons from Apple."
They point out, as I was telling my colleague late last year, that underneath the hood of Vista is every darn piece of code and "DNA" from the day Windows was conceived! To put it bluntly in Mac terms, MacDailyNews.com's rehash of a piece done by John Martellaro on The Mac Observer, sums it up quite nicely.
Rather than being OS X, Windows Vista is like Mac OS 9.3-- a tiny bump up from 9.2.
What's the significance here? Well, as Mac users know, the last big upgrade to the legacy operating system was Mac OS 9 and it lasted only until version 9.2, where all development on the system ceased (okay, 9.2.1 and 9.2.2). Mac OS 9 was probably the best and most stable system Apple created and really worked out all the kinks from 7.6, to 8.1, to 8.6.
Then came the dawn of a new era. The rewriting of history. The second coming of Apple. A clean slate. (You get the picture). Mac OS X, written from? the ground, up.
And that's the big focus of MacNewsWorld.com's piece yesterday where by no coincidence at all, writer... John Martellaro of The Mac Observer, who wrote the article says, "The key is the foundation of the OS. If the OS is designed on a shaky foundation, everything on top will suffer."
Case in point, the shaky foundation of Vista being, as Martellaro says, the Win32 applications that Microsoft can't let go of and wants built-in to the system to ensure backwards compatibility.
To play devil's advocate, that's what Apple did with Classic mode in OS X where all your OS 9 apps could run seemingly natively on your OS X boot only machine. But what did they do when they moved to Intel chips? Goodbye Classic forever!
Apple has moved on and broken its ties with its past in favor of the here and now into the beyond. Let it go! Get over it! Microsoft, on the other hand, is stuck in a rut and can't get out. "Microsoft has never been able to make that commitment... and we are still paying the price for it today," says Martellaro.