What I want most from Microsoft is to, in a weird way, go backwards to the days of DOS.

Well, OK, I don't mean that literally. There's one very specific aspect of older operating systems that seems to have been lost forever: OS/App independence.

Our engineering workstations require somewhere in the order of two weeks to fully setup from scratch. It's quite an investment in time, money and pain-in-the-ass factor. In a typical transition we might build a parallel system, keep the old one around, start using the new one and refer to the old one if anything was left behind (small apps, settings and configurations, customizations, etc.)

Because of this we do not upgrade hardware or OS as quickly as we might like to.

If applications installed with independence from the OS this would be very different. What I mean by that is that your "Programs" directory could be moved to a completely new computer with a fresh OS install and you are up and running instantly. In our case we would probably devote an entirely separate physical drive to applications, just as we do for data.

In other words: Why do I need to reinstall MS Office (or whatever) from scratch, ever?

If this were possible we might update all of our computers every two to three years rather than every six to eight. The pain and expense of dealing with upgrades would be gone. An upgrade would be as simple as buying new hardware, moving the physical data and app drives over, running through some form of authentication and off you go.

There are a million different ways to accomplish this wile protecting the rights and licenses of software companies. I don't care to have that conversation because that is a solvable problem. The problem they have to address is this question of having to reinstall all of your software every time you upgrade hardware and OS. That, to me, in this day and age, is ridiculous.

I truly believe the approach taken by MS so many years ago has actually cost the computer industry untold billions of dollars. A company with hundreds or thousands of computers can't even begin to consider upgrades given the non-trivial cost of managing them. If applications were independent from the OS in a portable manner the decision to maintain hardware and OS would be far simpler to make, even at large scales.

The issue goes farther than that. If I need to travel and have access to the $100K in engineering software on my workstation through my laptop I am screwed. Sure, there's remote desktop but that sucks or is nearly impossible to use with some of these applications. Why is it that I don't have the ability of run my apps on any machine I want. I mean, a processor is a processor, is a processor. Outside of requiring specific GPU configurations, I should be able to grab a drive with my apps, grab my laptop, get on a plane and go. I should then be able to use any and all of my applications natively on that machine, even if it is running a different (yet compatible) version of the OS.

In the end I don't care one bit about the operating system. I care about the applications. That's what I use to do my work. If Microsoft understood that they would create an operating system that would help rather than hinder the users with unnecessary complexity, toys and garbage nobody wants.