Microsoft's Most Successful Failure 354
m4dm4n writes "As we near the end of mainstream support of Win2k The Register looks back at what it has achieved. What was meant to be Microsoft's most secure OS ever turned into a disaster. Worm after worm changed the face of internet security in Win2k's first 2 years. Five years down the line the battle is far from won, but the improvements are dramatic." From the article: "Things were different in the year 2000. Programmers felt vindicated that the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be that big of a deal. We made it past January 1st, and then it was time to move on. Windows 2000 came out that first quarter, just as security was becoming more interesting to more people -- and Windows was a good place to start. It was also seemed to be the start of a new breed of Windows hackers."
Learning Experience (Score:4, Insightful)
2k was excellent except for one thing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Users (including the usual PHBs) got used to that paradigm and now do not value a proper web server setup!
And people think something does not work when a link points to "C:\Dave\Projects\budget.xls" does not work on their computers!
Pardon me, but weren't most of the worm issues in (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Learning Experience (Score:1, Insightful)
It's quite easy to do. Step 1: Build a monopoly for a required commodity. Step 2: There is no step 2.
By the time that Microsoft had committed to Windows 2000, they had virtually no competition. Many people did not *want* to upgrade to Windows 2000, but had little choice due to the lack of other options. NT and 9x were only going to get less and less secure, and Microsoft ensured that several programs were put in place to force upgrades.
The end result was that any OS that Microsoft put out was destined to become a success. That's why monopolies are considered a bad thing.
Re:say what you want... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a big fan of the "best tool for the job". I like Windows for a desktop, Linux for a server environment...but Windows server environment is improving. I still think it sucks, but it's improving....
Oh for one last time..... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a big deal. Lot's of us here worked very hard to make sure that nothing bad happened and this really gets to me when people throw around the opinion that it was all a fuss over nothing.
Get a clue.
OS "Feel" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Learning Experience (Score:3, Insightful)
Get yourself a job in government.
Win 2000, a worthy OS (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 2000 is the high water mark in increasing feature creep for MS operating systems.
Future systems, especially on the server side will be significantly easier and simpler.
MS has learned that combining a large number of different recently written technology together causes more problems that it is worth.
I look to see MS developing much simpler desktop and server operating systems with a focus on security, ease of use, ease of administration, and TCO.
I also look to see MS taking BSD licensed code and using it as the basis for future OS versions and/or subsystems.
MS is also leveraging future development by making the API, languages, and dev tools easier to use (C#,
Microsoft's Most Successful Failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft Bob! [toastytech.com] Oh, wait. Successful failure... hmm... Ah! Windows Millennium Edition (ME) [aroundcny.com], without a doubt! This insecure, rushed, overhyped, bug-ridden excuse for an operating system should've gone the way of Bob and New Coke even before it was officially released.
Even more "successful" failures (Score:3, Insightful)
How's that NIS treating you for security?
Kernel "user/group/world" security should be enough for anybody.
You guys need to realize that you can't have credibility without objectivity. You would have a lot more success convincing people to switch to Linux if you didn't come across as zealots all the time.
Re:Failure -- A bit harsh? (Score:2, Insightful)
A properly configured windows XP box is also probably faster than a properly configured Win2k box. Especially WinXP64.
Re:Learning Experience (Score:3, Insightful)
A Failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a fervent Linux fan, but I'm also logical.
Win2K was by far much better than Microsoft's earlier OS offerings in terms of reliability and security.
It's like they finally realized that desktop PC monopoly didn't get them a free pass into the mainframe and server market. Realizing that, they actually produced a credible OS that wouldn't get themselves laughed at. MS has intelligent people that can do a great job (if they're not tasked with creating obstacles and artificial cross-ties in the company's product lines.) Like they did with IE before the Netscape threat was effectively vanquished.
Win2K will be humming along for many years to come.
How can you knock Windows 2000? (Score:3, Insightful)
Was it Win2K, or IE/OE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about "Trusted Computing?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Trustworthy Computing was the response to high-profile security failures like Sadmind and Code Red. And if you think Trustworthy Computing is dead, just compare Windows XP SP2 to an unpatched XP install.
Define failure (Score:2, Insightful)
Win2k was like a 1990 Taurus. They were everywhere, billions of miles were gotten out of them, but she had no airbags. Ponder that, and don't try and look up whether or not the Taurus had airbags, since I didn't
Re:Oh for one last time..... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kinda like there's a big office building on fire downtown. The news reporter is standing in front of the blaze, speaking in a calm voice layed thinly over barely-contained hysterics: "As you can see behind me, the fire continues to burn! If left unchecked, this fire could spread to nearby buildings, and from there continue to spread, until eventually the entire metropolitan area is burned to the ground. From there, who knows how far it could spread! Civilization itself hangs in the balance! Flee, flee for your lives! And buy duct tape!" Meanwhile, fire fighters work like hell to put out the fire, and it eventually dies. The next day everyone is wondering what the hell the big deal was and what they are going to do with all the duct tape they bought. Feeling gullible and duped, they forget that there really could have been a disaster if the fire fighters had just sat on their thumbs watching the building burn...
If 2000 was a failure (Score:3, Insightful)
maybe it's because it's true (Score:3, Insightful)
So am I, and I think the best tool for both desktop and server at this point is something in the UNIX family (Linux, BSD, etc.) with one of the X11-based desktops (Gnome, KDE, etc.).
The NT kernel is just a bloated design (and an even worse implementation).
There is one thing Microsoft has done well recently: C#, a Java derivative that fixes many of the most annoying problems of Java. Unfortunately, they are spoiling it with the same kind of poor library design that already made their C++-based environments so miserable.
Re:Lessons Learned - a paraphrase. (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft execs - remember you have a fiduciary responsiblity to shareholders to do what's in the shareholder interest. Clearly your newfound obsession with security hype is not playing to your strenghts
I would say not ignoring security and leaving yourself wide open to customer negligence lawsuits while alienating your client-base is in the shareholders best interest.
Why must so many investors and (by extension) pro-business people have such a short-term outlook these days? Screwing over the customer/employees might help you out in the short term but you'll pay for it in the long haul. Unless you are a day-trader I don't see how you could advocate this.
Re:where would we be.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you know why? It's because segmented memory models SUCKED. Have you ever tried to program for a 80286? It was an incomprehensible nightmare. Few if any programming languages provide appropriate models for the non-uniform memory space introduced with segments. You're on your own handling the details of ugly, klunky pointer models. The paging features introduced with the 80386 made the segmented model unnecessary, and programmers woldwide dropped segments in a heartbeat.
All you need to do achieve the same security goal is make data pages non-executable. That's what's been done with the latest x86 CPUs (sure it should have been done back in 1986, but unfortunately we can't change the past). You don't need complex kludges like segmented memory.
That's the main problem I have with Microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
The same can be said about almost every Microsoft product/technology/implementation.
Microsoft focuses on functionality even when it means making something completely insecure.
So, it all comes down to which do you value more, functionality or security?
Lol took them long enough to "get concerned" (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean more interesting to Window users. Other operating systems have always been concerned about security
"More innocent times" .. yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Article is pure MS propaganda.
- They're trying to divert attention away from all the security problems that XP has had. XP is BY FAR the "biggest disaster" of any OS in the history of humankind when it comes to security. Something like 25% of XP boxes are still to this day infected zombie machines. Typical time-to-infection of any pre-SP2 XP system hooked up to the Net was something in the order of seconds or minutes. But wait, let's rewrite history by claiming that 2K was far worse, so that people think don't XP was so bad in retrospect, and that people think MS were already improving their security between 2K and XP.
- They're trying to pretend, yet again, that 2K and XP were written in "more innocent times" when "security problems" were unknown - so that the public is tricked into thinking that their shocking neglect of security was somehow excusable. Spin, spin, spin. All of today's security problems were very well-known by any IT professional even by the 80's; even Java in the 90's touted security over and over as one of its major selling points, and when started pushing their ActiveX-based "trust" model in response ('hey, we have an object model, let's just pretend it's secure and market it heavily') anyone who knew anything was already warning that that was going to be a disaster.
Microsoft knew that security was going to get this bad, but they ignored it in favour of pushing for better time to market to be ready for upgrade cycles and attrition sales.
Re:Learning Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 2000 is one of the rare times in the Microsoft world when you actually want to upgrade due to it actually being a clearly superior product than its predecessors. There is no question that Windows 2000 is a better OS than any of the Dos-based ones. It's also more stable and easier to install than NT4, and has better driver support, plus it adds some of the nice touches introduced with Windows 98. This is completely unlike the Windows 2000->XP "upgrade", or the essentially identical last 4 versions of Office.
Re:say what you want... (Score:2, Insightful)
puh-leaze... the "windows constantly crashes" line of attack is just SO 1998. I mean, why didn't you just go all the way and call it M$ Windoze?
I'm constantly amused by supposedly 'leet Linux users who complain about Windows constantly crashing on them. Seriously, that's not the type of thing you should admit in public.
4 years to get better printer support (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a good strategy: you don't like the argument, so you attack its syntax... Here's a newsflash: not everyone here is a native English speaker. So most reasonable posters show some grammatical leniency and instead focus on the author's intent.
The parent was undoubtedly referring to the pitiful state of printer support Linux at the time of the Windows 2000 launch in March 2000. At launch, Win2k had support for thousands of printers inbox. But with Linux, unless you had a fairly standard postscript or PCL4/5 compatible printer, printing was usually not even an option except in text mode.
My guess is it probably took about 4 years for the parent's printer to receive support. Although a large number of inkjet printers have been added via either CUPS raster drivers or GIMP-print, it has been a slow and arduous process, and many are still unsupported.
I'd say the 4 year figure may be about accurate.