Sure, MSFT could abandon all of the systems that have gone before, 'tear' off that clean sheet of paper, and get together with the latest and greatest design, and tell all of the embedded sales to trash their systems, and get the new one!
But Ken, Microsoft is telling everybody who doesn't run NT to do this already. If the world is supposed to standardize on NT, I think NT ought to, you know, maybe do things right?
Microsoft abandoned plenty of what had gone before when it did Windows, like the considerably cleaner and more capable architecture of X Windows. Which, by the way, was truly "modular" too, and not modular in a way that only Microsoft knows about. It was widely available, for free, on systems that were probably slower than the standard new system when Win3.0 hit the streets. But it didn't fit into Bill's business plan.
But Bill's promised us WinTerm, which, when it finally ships, will do probably most of what X did, in that unique, "open" Microsoft way, only 10 or 15 years or so after X did the same stuff. Sort of like how Win95 finally allowed the PC guys to write 32 bit programs only 10 years after the 386 hit the street. Microsoft is taking us where we want to go! It just takes a while sometimes. Maybe that's a good thing, though.
Cheers, Dan. |
