No, taken to its logical extreme, that means we'll never have anything better than Win32. Basically, if you want to make an OS that's immediately useful, it ha

No, taken to its logical extreme, that means we'll never have anything better than Win32. Basically, if you want to make an OS that's immediately useful, it has to run software that's available right now. That means either Windows (Win32 or .NET) or POSIX or maybe whatever Mac uses. That's it. Now of course, you can try to build an OS that has backwards compatibility for one standard and adds a new one. MacOSX did that to an extent to ease the transition from their older version. Windows does that too, supporting multiple APIs (even POSIX at one point). However, even here, these standards still require an OS to work a certain way underneath, which all current OSes do to a good extent. If you want to do something really, really different, it might not be so easy to build an emulation or compatibility layer. That's just the price of progress; if you want to do a clean-sheet design, you're going to sacrifice compatibility with everything that came before. If you build in backwards compatibility, that's going to limit how different you can be.