Over the weekend Christina Bonnington in Wired magazine looked at how Microsoft is struggling to decide whether to have separate operating systems for their tablet and desktop products – as Apple have – or design one that works on both.
Creating another version of Windows risks further confusing the marketplace given Microsoft already has between its four different versions of Windows and six flavours of Office.
Although Apple haven’t suffered at all by having different operating systems. Mac OSX is more popular than ever and iOS dominates its markets.
Perhaps its time for Microsoft to copy something else Apple did and have a clean break – rework all the Windows code and build a new system.
Apple did this when they introduced OSX in 2001. Among other things it didn’t support floppy disks, the Apple Device Bus, floppy disks or the networking standards used by the older systems. At the time there were howls of protest from long suffering Apple true believers who had invested a lot into the earlier versions of Mac OS.
Despite the protests and early hiccups – we sometimes forget that the first version of OSX, named Cheetah, was terrible – Apple’s clean break with the past was a great success.
Microsoft’s selling point has been backward compatibility; software designed for one version of Windows is expected to work on the next version.
Backward compatibility is the reason for the spyware epidemic of the early 2000s as Microsoft ignored Windows XP’s security features so that they wouldn’t have to ditch older code in other products like Office.
Similarly, the contradiction of redesigning the Windows operating system while minimizing disruption to existing users was one of the reasons why Microsoft Vista was such a disaster.
Perhaps it’s time for Microsoft to bite the bullet and bring Windows into the 21st Century.
Whatever they decide to do, they better hurry as Apple and Google are carving out dominant positions; waiting until 2013 or 14 for the next version of Windows and Windows Phone may be too late in a market where Microsoft is quickly becoming irrelevant.