Microsoft is writing another OS?

In this article, The Economist describes how Vista is struggling against XP and isn't as good. This may be true but it's an unfair comparison. XP wasn't very good when it was first released either. Businesses didn't upgrade, it used too many resources, it didn't work on old hardware. All the same problems for Vista. Microsoft OSes always struggle at first. 98 wasn't good until 98 SE (Second Edition), NT users didn't upgrade to 2000, and 2000 users didn't upgrade to XP.

In each case, the older OS was better than the new OS when first released. The reason XP has been so successful is that Microsoft spent 5 years rewriting Windows XP as Vista. While Vista was being built, XP was getting better. In 5 years, Vista will probably be much better than XP.

And now Microsoft is rewriting their OS again? In all this time, Linux just keeps getting upgrades. It's the natural path for software to be upgraded, not rewritten. That Microsoft has to rewrite their OS in order to create sales exposes the flaw in Microsoft's model from the consumer's perspective and conversely, an advantage of using Linux.

Hopefully Microsoft does write a new OS from scratch that isn't backwards compatible. It would be great to see Microsoft try to compete with Linux when it doesn't have the advantage of the huge backwards compatible software library to push sales.