From: "Geo" 

He's right but he's not taking it far enough. It's not just a fork that's
needed, it's two very specific directions they need to go.

Let me take you back to the creation of W2K. Prior to that there were two
windows teams, the NT team and the Win9x team. They were merged together
and W2K was the result. After that when XP was being developed there were
lots of arguments and mostly the Win9x team won them so most of the
original NT team bailed and left MS instead of going down the path that
Windows has followed.

What the basic difference was wasn't so much where they were headed as much
as WHY. The NT team had this belief that system stability, integrity, and
security were first and foremost, if they couldn't do something right then
they were better off not doing it till they could do it right. The NT team
used to refer to the Win9x guys as the beta team, they would develop the
flashy new stuff and put it out full of bugs then the NT guys would see
what it did and find a way to do it right without making the same mistakes.
As a result NT was slower at getting hardware drivers, UI enhancements,
etc. but we loved it because we didn't have to worry about beta tester
syndrome.

The Win9x guys believed that the system needed to be all things to all
people and that there were must have features even if system integrity had
to be slightly compromised to provide these features now. They
"hacked" lots of stuff to make it work, win9x allowed that and
the people running it were used to the stability issues that caused.

That's where the split needs to be made, a version that is all things to
all people and a version that is stable and solid where system uptime and
recoverability are king and if need be lacking until the flashy new stuff
can be engineered correctly. Call it a consumer version and a professional
version, gamer and worker versions, something like that.

Geo.


"Adam"  wrote in message
news:44c75c4a$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1993524,00.asp
>
> Dvorak
>
> "Microsoft needs to back up and re-fork its OS development from Windows
> 2000 Professional or even Windows NT 4.0. Then it needs to find a
"pope"
> who can understand the code base. Let me explain.

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