Re:MS to Give Windows 10 a ‘Modern’ Overhaul with Light Weig...
by jakebasile on Monday January 29, 2018 @04:24PM
(#16260730)
That's how it would start. But I don't believe for a moment that MS wouldn't jump at the opportunity to pull the plug on Win32 and decades of backwards compatibility if they could do so. In this case, Enterprise customers are the thing keeping Microsoft in-line for gamers and power users since they would have no tolerance for such a move.
Re:MS to Give Windows 10 a ‘Modern’ Overhaul with Light Weig...
by krylon on Monday January 29, 2018 @04:30PM
(#16260779)
> virtualization for Windows API apps
From a technical point of view I can understand their desire to ditch Win32 all too well. And in fact I have wondered years ago why they did not use virtualization to achieve backwards compatibility by letting legacy apps run in their own special VMs with all the right drivers, libraries, etc.
However, if that does not work very reliably and seamlessly large corporate and government customers are going to skip that one.
It's not an upgrade for existing general-purpose (or any other) editions of Win 10, it's a new OS edition available only with new hardware; it's basically a successor to Win 10 S and Win 8 RT. And, while no doubt Microsoft thinks they've made the tweaks that will make it more attractive to some market this time (from other stories, they expect it to have enterprise and education market traction, which it's at least remotely plausible that virtualization for Windows API apps would provide a good enough solution for), it may suffer the same fate.