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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

At this point probably the smartest thing which Microsoft could do would be to adopt some Linux distro (perhaps OpenSuSE, which they already have some relationship with) and base all of their future development on top of it. At a stroke this would eliminate many of their security and malware problems, dramatically improving the user experience.

Windows remains prevalent, but at present as a software developer I'm not seeing much of a future for it, other than as a legacy system that I may need to support, and am recommending home and business users to move to other platforms (either Linux or Mac) whenever that's possible.

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I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is off base. A good deal of Microsoft's strength lies in backward compatibility and entrenchment. Serving up a brand new OS could potentially destroy that competitive advantage.

A better strategy might be to incorporate better support for open protocols and document formats into their products and allow easier interoperability with the outside world. My biggest beef with Windows has always been that it's difficult to interact with its products using third party tools.

I disagree. I think much of the weaknesses of Windows - especially its security woes - are due to trying to be too backward compatible with previous versions, which has meant that long standing problems have either not been addressed, or only inadequately patched over.

Making a clean break with the past and moving to a new system where network security is fundamentally designed into the product from the very beginning, even if it's not based on a Unix clone, would be move in the right direction.

Backward compatibility may be a weakness in security, but a strength otherwise. I like it very much that I can still run many of my games that I purchased in the 90's on the Windows 7. AFAICT, Linux can't easily offer such a long binary backwards compatibility (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I also think that - along the lines of what tmountain said above - more important than open source code, is that protocols and formats are open.

Oh my FSM please no! That would remove the one and only mainstreamish OS that isn't an unix-clone from the market, leaving the computing world permanently crippled. Why do people want that sort of monoculture?

Also, if you seriously think user experience is better on Linux, I wonder have you used a modern Windows lately?

I expect alarm to be the natural reaction, but at this point I don't think it's an overstatement to say that Microsoft needs to do something fairly radical if it wishes to remain relevant in its traditional markets. In technology you can only rely upon inertia for a limited time. Most users don't care whether they're using a Unix clone or not.

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