Comment by fsloth
15 days ago
"I've always been surprised that Microsoft didn't do a full operating system refactor and provide a compatibility layer for running old binaries"
Just keeping a legacy system in working order is different skillset than writing a new system from scratch.
So you need a new team. Nothing from Windows maintenance transfers.
Maybe would require hiring someone who knows how to design an OS.
It would be a major undertaking, needing protection by CEO (and if it would not succeed CEO would loose a lot of prestige).
I'm not saying MS does not have the existing talent base. I don't _know_.
But I've been inside a house maintaining a monstrous legacy codebase.
I can tell you - it requires surprisingly little deep understanding just to keep an existing system going.
I mean technically they did with Windows on NT and again with Windows on Windows 64. Vista was also a huge redesign from the 1990s NT to a lot of the new technologies they'd made in Longhorn.