From: http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=6718 This one's an interesting read. But what's the chances of this happening soon? Vista's already taken so long, so try to imagine dumping all that and restarting from scratch again
I think the problem with Vista is that Microsoft has to make it backward compatible with a ton of stuff. I think that involves a lot of testing. Starting from scratch might actually be faster!
It'll involve a complete redesign of the thing, needless to say. Interesting thing to read on here is also the Microkernel vs Monolithic kernel arguments, even though that's only a small subset of what the entire thing will involve here. I guess one of Windows biggest problems that causes it to bloat so much is the need to be backwards compatible. But the backwards compatibility is far from complete. Developers on the Windows platform ought to be very familiar with the .DLL hell. I've known of a hardcore Visual C++ user who dumped the thing entirely and started on Java after having to go through getting the application to run on NT4 Server, Win2k Server. This is one area where a modular approach will be very useful indeed. Having a choice of compability modules that can be selected for installation depending on application needs, instead of everything dumped in. well, AI's a totally different field altogether. Usually tends to be implemented higher up on the OS stack.