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News is now flying around the internet of Windows 7 - how it’s to be broken down into modules allowing you to piece together the software you want and need, it’s ever jumping and speculated release date (2009, 2010, 2011), it’s UI, M1 (Milstone1) but one thing that I’ve read has really caught my eye.

In my opinion one of Microsoft’s biggest strengths is also their biggest weakness - Size. Windows with its massive market share, its split version install base and ridiculous support for legacy applications Windows is bloated and just continue to bloats. Evidence of this is clearly in Vista with its size and performance issues - not to mention the install size!

I’ve long been of the mind that Microsoft need to though caution out the window and start fresh. Windows needs to be rebuilt to be a lean and mean OS that supports future technologies and systems - allowing it to move forward and regain the title of the best OS available. This means getting rid of support for legacy applications within the core OS. No more FAT32 (even FAT16!) no more printers that are 10 years old, office 95 etc.

Virtualization! Legacy needs to be offered via Virtualization - not in the core OS.

What Microsoft should do is exactly what Apple did with the conversion to OS X - Virtualization. With all the new CPUs having hardware virtualization support, and 100+ cores foreseeable in the near future, it would seem stupid that Microsoft would start making moves to rebuild windows for the future, whilst offering support for legacy applications in a Virtual XP or vista environment.

This leads me to the latest article I’ve read that reads of is the author has some inside knowledge - thought there is no indication it’s any more than just a glorified opinion.

According to Dev Corvin “Windows 7 takes a different approach to the componentization and backwards compatibility issues; in short, it doesn’t think about them at all. Windows 7 will be a from-the-ground-up packaging of the Windows codebase; partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows. Making the break from backwards compatibility is a dangerous proposal but a dream for software developers. Performance of native applications can be increased, distribution sizes can be cut down, functionality can be added without the worry of breaking old applications, and the overall end-user experience can be significantly improved.”

He points out that “Apple took an unorthodox approach in order to offer Mac OS 9 users the ability to retain their existing software while still upgrading to the improved Mac OS X experience; the virtual machine. Essentially, Mac OS X contained 3 separate application environments; Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic.

Cocoa was the name for the native, Objective-C environment which allowed code to execute directly on Mac OS X without any interpretation or legacy libraries. Carbon was a mid-point solution which allowed older, Mac OS 9 code to be recompiled and then executed in the Mac OS X environment, without providing access to the newer, native UI elements. Classic, the most interesting of the three environments, is the approach that Microsoft will be taking with Windows 7. Essentially, Classic provided a complete API and binary abstraction layer which allows Mac OS 9 code to run within a “virtual machine” inside Mac OS X. Applications retain the appearance and behavior (sic) that they have on the older Mac OS platform, yet still having access to the Mac OS X system resources.”

Apparently Windows 7 will be “breaking previous API compatibility, offering new API frameworks as a native solution, and providing support for legacy frameworks (COM, ATL, .NET Framework, etc) through monolithic libraries designed to provide the functionality of all previous revisions of the modules in question.”

If this is in fact the path of Windows 7 is to be taking then I believe Microsoft will be on a massive winner - if not with Windows 7 then future version of the no 1 piece of software. There is no doubt that at some stage windows will need to take a different path to what it has been since Windows 95 (if not earlier) and the sooner the better.

If you’re interested I recommend reading the full article over here.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Windows 7

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