These people dovrebbere learn a lot before writing for a major newspaper.

“With the next Windows version, Microsoft should say that if an API was used in 3.1 but superceded by something else in 95 (for example a newer dialog) that the 3.1 stuff will be removed, guaranteed.”

And in so doing, break all Windows 3.1 apps. I still have a few at work. You’d be surprised how many installers still have a 16-bit bootstrapper – Microsoft had to specifically work around this for 64-bit versions, because the 64-bit processors don’t provide the mode that 16-bit Windows apps need to work.

Removing the APIs that have been superseded doesn’t gain much either – they generally just map onto a more feature-rich API that was added later. You also break binary compatibility for anyone who ported a working bit of code from Win16. Some pretty much obsolete APIs only exist in Win32 at all for that reason. To take one as an example, see the documentation for OpenFile at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365430.aspx. Microsoft deliberately made Win32 as close to Win16 as possible, to ease porting for existing 16-bit apps. The documentation still details what they did (at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa383674(VS.85).aspx).

Again, these APIs cost no Windows 7 developer any sleep. They work, they’re unlikely to be broken, and they therefore don’t need fixing. Removing them is more effort than leaving them alone. A little effort is required to ensure they keep working, but probably no more so than ensuring that the APIs added in Windows NT 3.1, and still used all the time by ‘modern’ Windows applications, do.

See here
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2008/06/29/randall-stross-jumps-the-shark.aspx

I haven’t seen the codebase so I can’t say with certainty what the problems with Windows are internally. I can see the symptoms which lead me to the opinion that something needs to change (probably not starting over).

Go to the Fonts folder and try to install a font. A folder and file selection dialog comes up that is from Win 3.1. I’m sure there simply wasn’t time to change it but the question I would ask is why does that dialog still exist in the first place? When you have so many different ways of selecting a file, how can the dependencies be manageable? We all know that over time patches get added to various pieces of code. How can the 3.1 dialogs be maintained even and more importantly, why? I don’t know if the newer dialogs are based in any way on the 3.1 dialogs but if they are, the dependencies must be insanely difficult to understand and code for. With the next Windows version, Microsoft should say that if an API was used in 3.1 but superceded by something else in 95 (for example a newer dialog) that the 3.1 stuff will be removed, guaranteed. Over each new version they would increase the “minimum version” for compatability by one version. This would seem to simplify the code base, at least that’s my guess.

When you consider a cost of Windows Vista that is in the multiple billions of dollars, I wonder how much longer the current development methods will work for Windows.