Gratuitous MS Rant (hindsight is 20/20)

Editor's Note: Microsoft is not dead, not dying, and probably won't be for at least a few years.  The rumors of MS's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I believe that Microsoft messed up at the beginning of the Vista development cycle.  I think if they would have waited about 2 years, the following things could have happened, and life for me, them, and everyone on the planet who deal with computers would have been a lot sweeter:

• Microsoft decides that the OSX approach of using a BSD derived core has merit.  Note that the BSD style license is permissive, while the GPL license is copyleft.  More discussion here.
• Using a derived BSD style core would greatly pare down the need for OS core developers
• Microsoft devotes time to three other camps: virtualization, visualization, and apps.  And in the coming years, get rid of the legacy anchor.

MS could have done away with all of their legacy support in their core OS, such as the dumb volume management, etc, and instead created a virtual machine to run legacy apps.  They could have then created a filesystem driver to allow concurrent VM and native access to the same data.  Thus, "C:" would actually point to some location on the native file system, accesses to "C:\Documents and Settings" would get hooked to some other directory (aka /home), and so on.  And in "Parallels" style, windows running on the legacy VM could operate under the same window manager as the native machine.

Their visualization team could have then taken developing concepts (embrace and extend anyone?) out there currently, such as Compiz, Beryl, Aqua, etc, and made them work however MS wanted it.

The apps team would be busy first developing a package management system (enforce the use of this for _all_ vendors, including themselves) and porting all important MS apps over to the new platform, and developing GUIs for all the system management stuff, such as fsck, etc.

And a small, 4th team would continue to work on the existing XP platform, putting out style updates, perhaps a new shell, some new explorer features, treading water until their new system comes out.

But instead, we get Vista.  And the painful cycle will continue a few more years.