Check your facts please - [9:46 AM]
Have Mac will Blog [via James Robertson]: "For all OS X’s excellence, it should be remembered that OS X is a good deal younger than Vista, with the Mach microkernel sitting under BSD and a coherent interface layer sitting above it. Windows has archaelogical layers of software buried under the covers, because Microsoft chose to provide a great deal of backward compatibility." - That statement is only partially correct. NT began life in 1989, Mach in 1985. The NT Kernel is newer. As to the backward compatibility layers on top of an otherwise excellent kernel, well, he's right there.
If Microsoft were to create a new OS they should start with the NT Kernel and go from there. Microsoft could survive creation of a new OS, just as Apple did, and they can be heroes on the other side. Keep the Win32 API's in the OS as a compatibility layer, just as Apple has Carbon, and introduce the "new" way to do things, slowly turning developers to it, with a conversion deadline of a number of years, say ten. If you remember back to the initial release of NT it included two shells, Windows and the OS/2 shell. Yes, you could put a new UI on top of NT. I used to know the complete details, but my old brain is failing me at the moment.
In a nutshell Microsoft could strap the .NET runtime up on top of the NT Kernel, as the new API, just as Apple did with Cocoa, and move toward a much easier development model. Of course that's a big oversimplification of the real work, but they could do it.
There's no doubt Windows is carrying around old baggage, but the OS as a whole is not a complete loss as folks would lead you to believe.
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