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I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is off base. A good deal of Microsoft's strength lies in backward compatibility and entrenchment. Serving up a br
by tmountain 16y ago
I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is off base. A good deal of Microsoft's strength lies in backward compatibility and entrenchment. Serving up a brand new OS could potentially destroy that competitive advantage.
A better strategy might be to incorporate better support for open protocols and document formats into their products and allow easier interoperability with the outside world. My biggest beef with Windows has always been that it's difficult to interact with its products using third party tools.
- motters 16y agoI disagree. I think much of the weaknesses of Windows - especially its security woes - are due to trying to be too backward compatible with previous versions, which has meant that long standing problems have either not been addressed, or only inadequately patched over. Making a clean break with the past and moving to a new system where network security is fundamentally designed into the product from the very beginning, even if it's not based on a Unix clone, would be move in the right direction.
- jpr 16y agoBackward compatibility may be a weakness in security, but a strength otherwise. I like it very much that I can still run many of my games that I purchased in the 90's on the Windows 7. AFAICT, Linux can't easily offer such a long binary backwards compatibility (please correct me if I'm wrong). I also think that - along the lines of what tmountain said above - more important than open source code, is that protocols and formats are open.