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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Really? Building an OS that works is a solved problem, and they don't seem to be able to do that.

The reason big companies buy startups is because they can't do what they "could" do.

Come on, building a working OS is a gigantic effort. Last time I checked Xobni was regex-ing phone numbers and names from e-mail texts, plus some fancy GUI of the kind that you said in one essay that you hate (messing around with obscure Windows APIs). Following your reasoning, the Xobni guys could have more easily built a full OS, which, with all respect, I seriously doubt.

Following your reasoning

You're not; you're supplying new reasoning for me. My point was that big companies can screw up even apparently straightforward projects, so screwing up novel ones would be even more likely.

Well, you implied one was more difficult than the other. Then the other one has to be easier, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.

PG, I would have downmodded him for you but some mean people took all my points :(

My next YC idea: A plugin for Vista that makes it work.

You know, that might be just on the right side of crazy. Could one build some kind of layer on top of Vista that would make it tolerable to users?

There have been noises from Microsoft going right up to Gates to the effect that they themselves are abandoning Vista. This would make the life of this product pretty short if it only targets Vista's flaws.

Also, only people forced to use Vista are using it at this point which boils down to employees of corporations with not-so-wise IT departments - not the prime audience for a startup product IMO.

I do think there is potential for money in the idea of building a layer on top of Windows that makes it more usable. Xobni seems to be doing exactly that starting with email. (I'm sure they are looking beyond email by this point).

got a link or cite for the "microsoft abandoning vista" thing?

if that happens, my evil glee my well burst out of my gut like a baby alien.

Depends on why users think it's intolerable, I suppose. The most common complaints I hear about Vista, even from casual users, are about performance, and I'm not sure what you could do about that.

It would not surprise me if there's a whole bunch of useless services running; disabling them might help.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm

Disable UAC.

In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit:

the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.

One issue there is that I know I personally decline to mod people if they already have a large positive or negative balance on a single post. (There are some posts which I think should sit at 0 rather than -30, or even -5, for example.) If I have to mod someone to see what others mods were then I will be much more likely to unintentionally karma-bomb someone when I really just want to see what other hackers here thought about their post.

Isn't the real cause of their problems maintaining backwards compatibility? As I understand it, Apple doesn't do this, making it easier for them to create a good OS.

it's not that apple "doesn't do this." it's that apple had a recent "ground zero event," a term i just made up, which means they had a perfect opportunity to ditch all their old APIs and start anew when they switched operating systems, from macos "classic" to macosx. that was in 2001, which is pretty darned recent. most new mac apps are written to the cocoa api, which didn't even exist before macosx.

however, microsoft is slated to do the exact same thing with the next version of windows, which will supposedly break binary compatibility with old windows apps. if ms has the guts to follow through on this, it will be a Very Good Thing.

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