Windows 8 will be the first legacy-free version of Microsoft’s world-beating operating system, at least on its new form-factor, ARM-powered mobile devices. Here there will be no support, at all, for any traditional Windows applications. Everything will need to be recoded and rewritten for the new platform. This will be a welcome break for many and, if Microsoft keep a tight grip on their app marketplace in the same way they do with Windows Phone, will help turn Windows into a truly virus-free platform.
Good news then. Even better was the discovery of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation client in the 64-bit alpha builds of the OS. The inclusion of this will enable true virtualisation of legacy software. There are a great many questions to ask about this however. We don’t know yet if this means legacy support will indeed be dropped from Windows 8. There are many technical reasons preventing Hyper-V from working on the x86 (32-bit) Windows platform.
The, frankly, long list of questions we’re all waiting for Microsoft to answer today include…
• Will legacy support be dropped completely
• Will Hyper-V be the way to install and run all legacy apps
• Will there be a Hyper-V equivalent in the x86 builds or will there be XP Mode
• Will virtualisation support be built into all editions of Windows 8 or only some builds (i.e. Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate)
These are just a few of the more common questions. But this is a subject that really matters as legacy support is Windows’ achiles heel. It’s the reason why 60% of all Windows patches exist and it’s the reason why virus and malware writers are able to exploit vulnerabilities in the OS. Indeed it’s the reason why those vulnerabilities exist in the first instance!
It all leaves questions over where home users will be with Windows 8. Will they be able to use their existing software? Will they still have the buggy legacy code in the OS? Will any virtualisation options be simple for non-technical people to use. The list goes on.
But what are the wider ramifications of dropping legacy support in Windows and what else could it mean for PCs going forward? Let’s assume for a moment that you’re happy to drop legacy support. That you don’t have any software or hardware that doesn’t work merrily in Windows 7 and that you’ve never needed to install XP Mode and may indeed never even have heard of it.
The broader implications of this then could turn out to be very good for you indeed. We could, for instance, begin to see PCs shipping with keyboards that have finally dropped the extra keys required by the original IBM PC, three decades ago. In this I mean the function keys and others such as Print Screen, Scroll Lock and Pause / Break. Of these the only keys that are used these days are F1 (universally for help), F8 (when starting your PC for the boot options), Alt-Gr (for producing only about five foreign characters) and Print Screen (for getting screen grabs).
Most keyboards these days come with additional functions mapped onto these keys to adjust backlights, open your email, change the volume and so on. What’s more there isn’t a single function used by these keys that isn’t easily mappable to another key combination, or that can be done away with completely. For instance, simply pressing Alt + a letter could produce foreign letters, the B key could bring up boot options and the help button can be done away with completely.
The keyboard is just one example of where the dropping of legacy support in Windows can change other aspects of the PC ecosystem. We also wouldn’t need much of the support we currently have in hardware (motherboards and processors for instance). This would in time see a whole new generation of devices that were smaller and consumed much less power, because they didn’t need to be capable of so much. Before too long, all PCs would be low-power devices with smaller footprints and tiny cases. The distinction between Intel and Arm devices as we understand it today would be blurred to the point where we’d never be able to tell the difference from looking at them.
Overall there are far more benefits to Microsoft completely dropping legacy support from Windows natively, and hiving it all off to virtual machines that we might think. This is a great future, one we can all look forward to and I can only hope we see the first signs of it soon.
