Why is Windows so slow?
Microsoft announced last week that Windows Vista will not be ready until January of 2007; as opposed to November 2006. This has left a lot of people really upset; including consumers and other tech manufactures. PC makers, such as Dell and HP, were counting on Microsoft Vista to boost up their holiday sales. With no new OS from Microsoft; the incentive for users to upgrade this holiday season will be very little. On the other hand, Apple might be the one company to gain due to this slip up by Microsoft.
Since XP was launched 5 years ago; Apple has developed and shipped 4 upgrades to its operating system: OSX. With each upgrade; the technological gap has increased greatly between the two Operating Systems.
This causes many to accuse Microsoft for being slow. That may be the first reaction; but lets study the problem in a greater detail. Mac OSX runs on about 5% of all computers in the world; while Windows runs on 90%. This means that every version of Windows has to be backwards compatible with some 300 million PCs that are out there. Not only does it have to be compatible with those PCs; lets not forget the boat load of different peripherials from thousands of companies.
As a developer, the more ‘legacy supporting’ a product has to be; the worse it will be. There is nothing more joyful for a developer to just pull the plug on a old bloated software and just start over. This is what Apple basically did with OSX. They bought Steve Jobs company NEXT, and basically took that OS as a base and started over. What would happen if Microsoft was to do that; can you imagine the backlash it would face?
In my personal (or work related) software projects; a newly started project is just so much better than an existing one. If I was working on product that is over 10 years old; that has to support thousands of legacy hardware and software; I would not be able to meet my deadlines either. So, it is strange for me, but I have to take a step back from my usual Microsoft bashing and say that I do understand the delay that Microsoft is having with Vista; and I am not that upset about it. 