The problem with starting fresh with no backward compatibility is that the business world would revolt. I know in my organization, we are very slow to adapt to new software. We wait until it has been out there for quite a while before using it. That goes for the OS as well as applications. I know most business' would not be willing to do a wholesale swap for a new OS and new application software to go with it. It is too expensive and too risky.
Let's face it, MS makes most of their profit from the corporate world. Not too many consumers are buying $500 Office suites. Business' have too much invested in legacy software to simply change everything.
-edbro
I'm not so sure - if businesses are slow to evolve in terms of OS and software then those companies provide limited income to MS anyway. I would guess the bulk of MS income these days comes from OEM installations on personal PCs - that's how they managed to get such ridiculous sales statistics on Windows Vista and Office 2007. You can't tell me that businesses around the world have suddenly dumped old hardware to upgrade to the demands of Vista. Similarly most businesses will have avoided jumping onto Office 2007 because of the retraining issues inherent in the new design. If the business world is really MS's major market they are doing a funny job! It isn't as though they don't innovate between versions - it would just be easier to innovate and steal a march on Linux and MacOS if they went back to basics first. From a user perspective things wouldn't have to change much at all - all the changes would be under the hood - and I'd guess many developers would relish the idea of reworking software in a more coherent and less convoluted environment. MS could even provide porting tools so that software written within proper specs for current Windows would just need to be recompiled - it's presumably what Apple did when they moved to Intel.
That's also why I suggested something like a 10 year transition period where there is a VirtualPC-like layer integrated seamlessly into the new version of Windows so that legacy apps can be run during the transition. I suppose there may still be some businesses using Windows 3.1 and Office 97 out there but if there is MS isn't getting revenue from those customers and why should the rest suffer so they can stick with Word 97 until the year 2100 ?
Corporate Customers who use the MS licensing system to continuously upgrade wouldn't be that affected because they will probably either stick with a version that does the job or just move on with MS. Software houses that provide other software would have to port their products to be compatible with the new OS (as they do now anyway - it would be a one off major updating process).
I don't think people should be forced to lose legacy apps but if things continue the way they are going now then in the next 10-20 years Windows will become so ungainly that MS will lose support anyway from most people. Already you need to have hardware for MS Vista that would only have been dreamed of 20 years ago (somewhat higher spec than the IBM mainframes of that time). There must be a physical and theoretical limit to how far hardware can be developed on the current basis and the way Windows releases grow exponentially it will outgrow hardware's capacity to cope. As I said above for people who don't move on perhaps continue to maintain Windows XP and Vista (at least in the security sense and making use of new hardware) for the long haul (say 10-20 years) so that people have a long time to make the transition.
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) reading should be normal speed. Worth keeping in mind, though.