- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42...
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050118-00/?p=36...
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051026-44/?p=33...
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32...
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060110-17/?p=32...
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070723-00/?p=25...
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200526-00/?p=10...
They had an incredible focus on backwards compatibility. That no longer seems to be the case.
Windows Desktop Evangelism playbook hasn't changed since 2000.
Perfect backwards compatibility means a perfect inability to fix any mistakes of the past.
With UAC and WDM -> WDF, they finally established an intent to deprecate older (and insecure / poorly-designed) functionality.
That said, imho, the user-mode / UI/X compatibility is an absolute !*&$ show with respect to predictability. Especially in the "utility program -> app" transition, wherein the latter still aren't feature-complete. Whoever PMs over those teams should be fired.
It's disabled the VirtualBox install that I've been running for a year or so with no issues, on the basis that it's "old software".
This certainly shows the true face of the new Microsoft.
On the desktop/workstation line though, let's take a trip down memory lane and remember all these upgrades together: Windows 3.11 -> 95 -> 98 -> Me -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10.
I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible." Windows 98 didn't cause much hassle, but, at least from my experience, that was really it. Windows 7 had its share of hassles, too. Particularly, as I recall, in the backwards compatibility department. We just remember it fondly because it was sandwiched in between Windows Vista and Windows 8.
The introduction of WDDM along with the new sound and networking driver architectures caused some headache in Vista, but were ultimately significant improvements over the way things had been.
10, on the other hand, made automatic updates mandatory, and pushed itself on everybody through dark patterns. It puts ads in the start menu and on the lock screen. It started, but didn't finish, implementing new interfaces nobody asked for while deprecating the old ones they still hand't entirely replicated. Today, they're doing their damnedest to hide the fact that you don't need a Microsoft account to set up your computer.
macOS is also quite a capable workstation OS that needs no account other than a local account.
Windows 10 Home you cannot even create a local account without having the Internet disconnected.
Pretty sure the same stands for Android.
Sure I would say this would make it more of a feature phone but the device itself is quite usable without an iCloud account.
One reason for this, interestingly, is that NT had less of a past to deal with - it was a clean-sheet design by one of the most experienced OS kernel designers on the planet (David Cutler, from DEC) - Linux was still trying to be "Unix-like" and maintain (more or less) POSIX compatibility (though to be fair, POSIX didn't show up until about the time Linux grew out of its hobbyist toy phase...)
In the simple sense that you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions (if not 3.11 and DOS too).
In theory, according to MS. In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this. What once worked perfectly well with Win8 now goes into total panic mode when it sees Win10 doing its thing in unexpected ways.
I wouldn't expect "security related" applications to work (e.g. some antivirus), as they use bizarro / too low level APIs.
But you can still run 15+ year old games, office apps, and whatever...
They wouldn't necessarily need to sacrifice backwards compatibility. They would just have to ensure that the new OS fully supports all of their APIs from the past.
Imagine Wine but 10 times better, built into the OS natively, and built by 500 engineers with full-time pay. I'm sure it could be pulled off, if they wanted to.
But they probably don't want to.
They did add that. With the initial Windows 7 release. In 2009.
I have a hard time doing that, Wine is already so good. I can certainly imagine better but even 2x better is kinda hard to picture.
The decor and fonts look like Windows 95. Unicode characters don't display and show as boxes. Input methods don't work. Lots of hardware doesn't work. There's no obvious way to configure all the things you can usually configure in Windows. GPU accelerations don't work properly in things like Adobe's products.
It has come very far but only if you judge it by the fact that everyone is doing work for it for free.
Actually, there is a company called CodeWeavers[1], which sells software based on Wine. CodeWeavers's Wiki page says "The CrossOver version of Wine is regularly refreshed with the latest free Wine patches; likewise, patches from the company are sent back to the Wine project almost immediately. CodeWeavers is a major contributor to the Wine project ... hosts the project's website, and employs the project's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, as their CTO."
Alexandre Julliard has his own Wikipedia page, also saying "He now works full-time on Wine for CodeWeavers."[2] If you look at Wine's changelogs like in https://www.winehq.org/announce/5.19 , you see his name on a bunch of commits. Piotr and Jacek Caban are names I also recognize as having been prominent contributors for years, and googling quickly shows they are CodeWeavers employees as well. So it seems true. I'm tempted to go buy CrossOver just to support their effort.
That is basically what WSL1 is: WINE, but backwards.
And in about 10 years pretend that the road started by Sinosfky on Windows 8 never happened.
I wish I could believe this, but the way Windows has been trending since 10 leaves me skeptical that the old Windows philosophies of catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible are being smothered by whoever the fuck is working on it today.