Digital Home Thoughts: An Open Letter to Micorsoft from Neowin on the Next Version of Windows

"Dear Microsoft, Congratulations on recently releasing the Windows 7 release candidate. As I've mentioned before, it's shaping into an excellent product and I have given my reasons why I think people should upgrade. But let's pause for a moment and look ahead to your supposed next version of Windows, Windows 8, since it's already in planning stages. Now that you've gotten a way to get some kind of backwards compatibility in your OS virtually, this presents an opportunity to rebuild Windows from the ground up and turn it into an excellent product. Here are some ideas I think should be implemented into the next version of Windows..."

Neowin is a Windows-focused site that has been around for quite some time, so they know of what they speak when it comes to Microsoft's flagship product. I agree very strongly with some of their requests - the death of the registry is overdue, and the general mess that applications are allowed to leave on a system - and the conflicts and crashes that occur from DLL sharing - shouldn't be allowed to continue. Microsoft makes the naive assumption that developers will code their apps properly, but that doesn't occur as often as it should. DLL sharing is a concept that came about when hard drives were tiny and it made sense to save space. Now? It's just one more way for an app to crash - every app should use its own DLLs.

I disgree with Neowin when it comes to the one version of Windows. I just don't think that scales well when you consider netbooks - they need a lower-cost version of Windows to maintain their lower prices. I'd like to see less versions of Windows 8 though: perhaps Windows 8 Basic (for netbooks and low-cost computers), Windows 8 Premium, and a single business/enterprise SKU. And most importnt of all when it comes to SKUs, a family pack that gives people 5 licenses for $199 - a match for what Apple does with OS X.

One completely new thing that I'd like to see in Windows 8 is OS-level coding to take advantage of increased system RAM. Today there's virtually no real-world performance increases if you move from 2 GB to 4 GB, or 4 GB to 8 GB. Unless you're running multiple virtual machines, having 8 GB of RAM in your computer gives you virtually no benefit over 4 GB or even 2 GB for most users. What I want to see is a system-level RAM drive of a sort - something that would dramatically accelerate operating system functions by moving them to RAM instead of leaving them on the much slower hard drive. RAM is cheap now, and Windows 7 does nothing to scale performance to more RAM - I want Windows 8 to do something better.

What would you like to see in Windows 8?