Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthem
Windows 8 will be the Windows Vista of Windows 7 to Windows 9 (perhaps!). Vista was a solid platform that got a far worse rap than it really deserved, but Windows 7 came along, tweaked a few things, made a few platform changes, and Boom! people love it. We may see something similar with the 8-Threshold transition.
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Sounds about right. Vista got slammed for two basic reasons. One was getting released before the hardware needed to run it well was fully in the pipeline, and many systems sold with Vista didn't have the horsepower it required.
The second was a change in the underlying permissions model. Windows through XP followed the same permissions model inherited from MS-DOS - the user at the keyboard is the administrator with all powers to do everything. Since most exploits require admin rights to do their dirty work, this became increasingly untenable as time passed. Vista made the default user a power user, able to run existing programs but not modify the state of the underlying system, and required assuming administrator rights to do a variety of things users were used to just doing.
Personally, I thought what MS did with Vista
should have been done in WinNT, when the NTFS filesystem was introduced that made it possible. You couldn't do it under FAT because the file system had no place to store the permissions information. NTFS did, and supported the notion that there was more than one kind of user on a system with differences in what they were allowed to do.
Win7 kept the new permissions model, but smoothed a lot of the rough edges and made dealing with it far easier. WinXP can be thought of as what Win2K should have been, and Win7 as what Vista should have been. Win9 looks like it will follow the pattern and address the issues raised by Win8.
We can now get a head start on speculating about what transcendent horrors Win10 will unleash on the world, and what Win11 will have to re-mediate...
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Dennis