Sybren Stuvel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Gerhard Fiedler enlightened us with: > > I don't know how many reasons you need besides backward > > compatibility, but all the DOS (still around!) and Windows apps that > > would break... ?!? I think breaking that compatibility would be > > more expensive than the whole Y2k bug story. > > Microsoft could provide an emulated environment for backward > compatability, just like Apple did. Wouldn't know what that would > cost, though.
I believe Microsoft could have saved many billions of dollars of development costs, and hit the market well in time for the 2006 holiday season, if they had designed Vista that way -- a totally new system, wih no direct compatibility constraints, and with virtualization used to run XP stuff. That strategy (in the Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X migration path, with "Classic" as the ``virtualization'' layer) is what saved Apple's bacon when all attempts to craft compatible extensions of old Mac OS had floundered in excessive costs and complexity. And virtualization is obviously a prepotently emerging technology -- look at VMWare's huge profits, at Microsoft's purchase of the makers of VirtualPC, at the rise of Parallels, at open-source developments such as QEMU and Xen... > I think the folks at microsoft are used to getting cursed at :) Particularly by their stockholders, with the stock down from a high of almost 60 to the recent lows of below 22...:-) Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
