Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Windows: Is It Time For a 'Do Over'?

Digital Home Thoughts is a Featured Community, and has a part of that, one of the things I enjoy the most is getting to interact with leaders from other technology sites. In our private forum we were discussing the issue of whether or not Microsoft is out of touch with its customer base; what the customer needs, what they want. From a consumer point of view, I think there's definitely some truth to that. I think that Windows XP was the "right" operating system for consumers at the time, but we're now six years later and Windows Vista is having some trouble getting accepted - even by the geeks that normally flock to anything new and shiny. There's a lot of FUD out there about Windows Vista, but even if I toss out 80% of what I hear from others, the remaining 20% is enough to make me realize that Windows Vista simply didn't deliver the way it was supposed to. Windows Vista is fundamentally broken.

The more I think about it, the more I believe with every brain cell I have (hey, no laughing!) that Microsoft needs to do what Apple did with OS X: create a new OS from scratch. Create something for the modern era, something designed for a constantly connected era. The OS we have today in Vista is still one created based on thinking from 15+ years ago. Whether it's the registry, drivers, codecs, DLLs, or the way programs are installed, Windows Vista has the same root problems that Windows 95 had. Microsoft needs to start over, to build something fast, lean, stable, and secure. They'd have to implement a purely virtualized XP/Vista layer for compatibility, because one of the reasons Windows is so big and slow is because there's so much legacy code in there for compatibility (what about thin-slice virtualization?). Microsoft needs to create something beautiful and easy to use, but more than that, they need to fix the problems that Windows has at it's core.

A drastic step? Yeah, absolutely. Impossible? Maybe - Microsoft is a big company and big companies are hard to turn around. But mark my words, Apple is going to keep pushing ahead and people are going to keep switching. Microsoft's current strategy of relying on Moore's law to save them is no longer working. Throwing hardware at speed problems works to a certain degree, but hard drives aren't getting much faster, nor are CPUs (they're moving to multiple cores instead). Sure, RAM is cheap, but going from 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM doesn't do a heck of a lot to speed up the overall performance of Windows. Faster hardware might make things happen faster, but it doesn't fix most of the problems that people have today with their computers.

Faster hardware doesn't solve codec and DLL problems that are deeply rooted in the way Windows is architected. Why is it that installing a new video editing program has a good chance of breaking the other video editing program I already had installed? It's the shared codecs and DLLs - it's the way Windows works, and it's fundamentally flawed. The concept of shared DLLs dates back to the era when hard drive space was at a premium and it made sense to have multiple applications all use the same DLL. When is the last time you ran out of hard drive space? We no longer live in that era. Applications crash too easily, and while often it's the fault of sloppy programming, the operating system has a lot to do with that - the way Windows applications stomp all over each other means headaches for users.

And remember all of this is coming from a guy who really likes Vista, uses it on all his computers, and defends it from the slings and arrows of Mac users all the time. And if I see something wrong with the direction Windows is going on, there's a serious problem.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog.