Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video) • Hacker News Board

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#121

Post by CountSessine » Fri, Mar 04, 2011, 2:49 AM UTC

larsberg wrote: post #104

StavrosK wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it amusing how you avoided to mention the name initially only to lapse (I'm assuming it wasn't intentional) and inadvertently say it was WinZip later on.

Whoops! Yeah, I'd had WinZip in there originally, then I couldn't remember if this particular story had already come out. I've been gone from MSFT for a long time, but it was generally considered bad form when I was there to call out specific products publicly for their bad code.

but it was generally considered bad form when I was there to call out specific products publicly for their bad code

In a way, don't you think that by not allowing customers to know just how bad the code in the software they buy is, you're encouraging more of it?

If there are advantages to producing quick-and-dirty code that violates platform programming guidelines (some would call this sort of sloppy programming "Getting Work Done"), and there are no consequences (Microsoft knows how bad the code is but Winzip's customers don't), doesn't this exert a subtle market pressure that works against good developers who take the time and make the effort to do things right?

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#122

Post by redthrowaway » Fri, Mar 04, 2011, 4:12 AM UTC

IDisposableHero wrote: post #107

redthrowaway wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but Apple didn't have to worry about the thousands of corporate clients running Enterprise software that relied upon some specific API calls to handle billions of dollars in business. When Apple says, "too bad, upgrade", their customers mostly just do so. If Microsoft were to take that approach, they'd lose billions in revenue. My point, however, wasn't really that OSX isn't backward-compatible, but rather tha…

I'm sure there aren't many engineers at Microsoft who wouldn't love to throw out the whole Windows paradigm and build something new and better from scratch. They kinda did. When Windows 3.1 was a hit, the server OS was Windows NT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT ) NT = New Technology. Windows 95, 98 and Me are evolutions of the Windows 3.1 codebase, and then mercifully died. NT begat Windows 2000, XP, Vista,…

While that's certainly true, the differences between NT 4.0 and 98 weren't particularly huge. NT was certainly the better OS, and it's good that they decided to adopt it, but it wasn't really a paradigm shift, and Windows applications were still cross-compatible.

My intention isn't to say that Microsoft hasn't made significant positive changes over the years, but rather that Windows would be a vastly superior operating system if the same people responsible for it currently were able to start from scratch. Say what you will about Microsoft, they still have some incredible engineering talent.