20th Anniversary of Windows 546
UltimaGuy writes "When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide. Take a look at Window's past and present, and what lies ahead in the future, including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
What's changed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay.....so how is it any different today? Viruses/spyware and/or anti-virus/spyware software continually slow it down, and all that Microsoft seems to do lately is copy the innovative things that its rivals do, so its still always late to the party.
Nothing new (Score:2, Insightful)
So, nothing has changed then!
The ads! They burn! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's changed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Relieved (Score:5, Insightful)
There biggest coup (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet the discussion did not go like "if you port lotus 1-2-3 to our new graphical interface and help make it popular, in a few years time we will use our position to write a competing app and wipe you off the mat."
I bet the head of lotus wished he had negotiated a non-compete clause.
FWIW (Score:3, Insightful)
SUN and Apple had the world by the tail in those days (mid 80's), but they never worked to commoditize themselves (despite what they tell you its a good thing). Rather SUN, with its hubris laden leadership thought they were so great that only universities and large conglomerates were entitled use their software and hardware; a fact reflected in their price list. And look were its gotten them... McNeally - "I could've been a contender!"
An argument could even be made that Microsoft with its relatively low priced OS is what made the business model that created Linux. The only way to compete with cheap (as in $) is free (as in beer).
What a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
What good have they done? They made the PC a commodity, accessible to all but the most poor. Gone are the days of $7000 proprietary machines that didn't operate with other different computers. These are all good things but they came as a result of market share and fate rather than purposeful design and innovation.
I look back at the last 20 years of Windows and say - what a waste. What a colossal monument to greed and complacency.
Re:What's changed? (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide.
Re:What's changed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Today, Windows' damage to humanity has been multiplied by
Well, to be fair, Windows has transformed personal computers from a happy hippie hacker's toy to a world phenomenon. Of course this may have happened in spite of and not because of Windows, still it has to be said.
Re:Nothing new (Score:1, Insightful)
http://www.devilducky.com/media/16366/ [devilducky.com]
Re:What a waste (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the second time I've seen this claim this week. As far as I know, it's utter nonsense. How did Microsoft make the PC a commodity? Surely the single crucial factor was the IBM clones being given the legal go-ahead through the IBM vs Phoenix lawsuit, which Microsoft had nothing to do with. How on earth did Microsoft make the PC a commodity?
Re:What's changed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which does not make it any faster or more secure though.
What lies ahead? More lies! (Score:2, Insightful)
1. security;
2. efficiency;
3. non-draconian DRM;
4. interoperability;
5. openness;
6. standards compliance;
7. release dates;
I hope in 5 or 6 years time the Windows anniversary will be about "the year MS lost its monopoly".
Another Thing That Hasn't Changed (Score:2, Insightful)
More importantly, there is another thing that is not changing. The Wall Street Journal has an article today that confirms its previous reports of Google in talks with Time-Warner about giving them money to prop up AOL.
Nothing has changed. Every time a potential challenger to MS pops up, the challenger kills itself off through its own hubris. Once again, the folks at MS sit in Redmond and laugh all the way to the bank while Google is throwing its money away. Intense focus on small incremental changes for MS has turned them into a money making machine.
Re:age (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can compile it, it will run.
Of course, that's a pretty big if.
I think a lot, around Windows 2000 era. (Score:5, Insightful)
I kinda stopped being interested shortly after Windows 2000. What happened? Well nothing. Before Windows 2000, you had Windows 98, which was unstable, and Windows NT 4, which was a bastard to use (in particular, it had no Plug and Play support).
Then there was Windows 2000, and it was more stable and still easy to use.
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal. XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
There have been no significant improvements since Windows 2000. Meanwhile, about 1998, I saw a screenshot of Enlightenment. I wanted Enlightenment. Linux came with the bargain. Linux was tweakable to my hearts content. And also really difficult. And I'd use it for a little while,. then mess it up or find something I couldn't do, then go back to Windows.
The thing is, Linux seemed to be improving. Things that seemed to buy me about Linux were bugging other people too. I went from Red Hat 5.2 to Mandrake, which had a nicer GUI, KDE. Then Red Hat 6 came out, and it had KDE plus a simpler GUI installer. Woo. And tools to notice new hardware and configure it. And I started learning about Linux, cause it was nice and tweakable and interesting.
After a while, I'd want to do something in Linux I couldn't do in Windows. First it was pull down sequences of files using wget. In Windows you'd need to fetch and install some trialware crap to do that, and Linux came with the tool. Then it was use Evolution. Then I found smssend, which was cool as hell. Meanwhile, Gnome got quite decent, so I switched to that. These days, Windows has
Meanwhile, I and my Linux buddies had finished Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 while most of my remaining Windows using mates were waiting for it to be released.
Re:Congrats (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:age (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything.
Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
Re:Relieved (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not reward the monipoly. Reward standard-friendly hardware vendors who help the community, not hardware-vendors who help the monopoly.
I haven't got any hardware-problems with Linux. I simply don't buy non-compatible hardware.
As for software/features, it is getting better by the day in Linux, and I am more productive on a *nix-platform than a Windows-platform.
No, I will not surrender my independence, and I encourage all who are remotely interested in competition and freedom in the software-market to do as me.
In addition, my advocacy-strategy is one that I recommend to everyone:
1) When you go to a hardware-store, ask the clerk for Linux-compatibility! Let him know that there *is* a demand. Do it regardless if you know the answer or not (unless it's written on the box).
2) In case they don't know, and you don't know, ask for their return-policy. Don't buy if you can't return it!
3) Never buy Windows-only-hardware, even if the machine which is going to use it is currently a Windows-machine. Things may change, and some time in the feature, the hardware will be used in a Linux-machine. And even if not, the monopoly does not deserve rewarding!
Last, but not least, do not support the Windows-monopoly by being the virus/spyware-janitor for all your Windows-friends. It's quite relieving not having to bother *at all* with the Windows-viruses/spyware. Let them fix their own mess if they choose to take the lazy way and go with the monopoly. Don't be the one who makes it easy for them to use Windows!
And when they're ready, get them hooked on Linux
and no - I'm not really a fundamentalist. I believe everyone *should* have the right to choose. But the monopoly limits *my* right to choose, so I fight the monopoly. When competition is restored, mission is accomplished, not when MS is broke. If MS goes broke if they don't have a desktop-monopoly, however, I will not really feel sorry for them. I believe competition to be more important.
Re:What's changed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's changed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Has it ever occurred to you that there are technical differences between operating systems, and that the design of UNIX makes it much harder to run spyware which can spy a lot, or viruses which can spread that easy (remember "I LOVE YOU"?)?
All this "it's only because Linux has a small market share" is rubbish. Even if it had 95%, it would still be more secure because of its design, than Windows.
Google, Yahoo, Amazon (Score:3, Insightful)
Just goes to show.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just goes to show....
You build a better mouse trap.... and some stinking Harvard MBA dropout will steal it, make a bad copy and sell it for a lot less!!
Re:What's changed? (Score:1, Insightful)
I can guarantee that if Linux were on 95% of computers in the world, it would be having the same malware and security issues as MS, mainly do to (inexperinced) users.
Name one single mail client that runs on Linux that lets you run programs straight from any random email. And yet Microsoft took, what, five years to remove that complete and utter brainfuck from the mail client that comes with Windows?
"and all that Microsoft seems to do lately is copy the innovative things that its rivals do"
Are what it's rivals doing good? Do people like what their rivals are doing? Yes? Then would it not be a good business decision to try and emulate your rivals?
You well and truly missed the quite obvious point. He said all that Microsoft do is, not what Microsoft do is. Incorporating the innovations of others is fine. Doing nothing but copy other peoples stuff is not fine.
Nah, but the latches are all broken. (Score:1, Insightful)
I still remember Bill Gates whiny little letter in Byte magazine. He's the richest man in the world by far and Microsoft is the least innovative, most reactive corporation on the planet.
Re:Relieved (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Yeah, I've been using Linux for 5/6 years at home but I'm a geek, I know this, I'm OK with it
I buy hardware I can use like you say, but not everyone cares about how their computer works
they only care that it does.
They are not like you and I who usually have their nice shiny new PC opened up within a week
of purchase.
They don't want to do anymore than browse the internet, send/receive emails, play games, write
a few documents.
Windows does do this, Windows comes on the PC they buy (well buy is the wrong word, they usually
get ripped off, no, you don't want that PC you want this, more expensive, less upgradeable PC,
thank you very much).
Linux has to get into business first, then Mummy or Daddy will want it at home so they can use
what they are familiar with. Then Little Johnny will use it too.
Re:where would be linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's changed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. If we woke up tomorrow to find that Linux had miraculously taken a 90% marketshare overnight, I could write some spyware within an hour to pwn most of those new Linux users.
The security hole here is between the keyboard and the chair. Joe Sixpack with his friendly ready-for-the-desktop Linux distribution will soon discover that it's easy to install software: you just type the 'root' password into any box that asks for it. Once he does that, then the spyware author has decades of rootkit techniques to draw upon. That machine will never be disinfected.
These are the people who click on banner ads and fake-dialog-box popups, say 'OK' to everything and agree to every EULA that you shove in front of their fat stupid faces. You think they won't also hand over their root passwords as well to anyone who asks?
I hope you do realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
Re:where would be linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for linux, if you read Linus's early e-mails from 1991, you won't find any mention of Windows in it. Couple times he mentions DOS. It doesn't surprise me, because at that time, Windows was just beginning to be popular, around version 3.1. I think that both increasing popularity or Windows as well as emmergence of Linux can be attributed to Intel's 80386 chip.
I think for a long time Linux evolved pretty much independently od Windows. It's only lately that we see a lot of work being done on "desktop environments" that are inspired by/competing with Windows in some way. There is a lot of newer applications (like office suites) that are definitely influeneced by Microsoft. Interestingly, I almost never use any of them. I only use OpenOffice or Abiword to open word documents that other people send me, and gnumeric to keep track of grades (and I am actually thinking about going back to slsc, which I used before).
The important bits (Score:2, Insightful)
"We got in my little Toyota pickup that I had at the time, we drove it to Egghead, and we literally bought one of every multimedia application in the store," Cole says. "Picture a small-size Toyota pickup and the back of it is heaped with boxes of applications, games, all kinds of crazy multimedia stuff. We brought them all back, literally backed the truck up to the building, and we handed them out to all the employees and said, 'We've got to get these things tested.'"
Re:What's changed is that a lot of people like it (Score:3, Insightful)
I beg to differ. To simplify to the max, reasons for Windows being used has NOTHING to do with the reasons for people that go to McDonald's.
People don't go to Mc Donald's because they know someone in the vicinity that will help them to eat for free, while that's the case with OSes.
Mc Donald's imply a sense of scarcity, nothing like that with software.
Windows right now is not popular because people love it or because it is simple. Well, to say that, I only have to look at the TONS of Windows magazine explaining lots of trivial things that should have been simple in Windows, and yet people buy these again and again. I only have to remember that AS SOON AS I stopped providing support (and other illegal things) for Windows to my vicinity, they all stopped using Windows or computers altogether.
The only thing to be proud of for MS is their monopoly. You will always read how simple and loved Windows is on forums like Slashdot, while other forums for normal users are full of people angry, with things that do not work, and who put up with it, or give up. And these are the people that can't afford to pay for phone support or don't have a geek that will waste hours to help them
Right now, Windows is the best choice when you are ready to give up lots of money, and have a geek to help you. For the family and friends I manage, Windows is not the best choice. I'm still in the minority, but I sure hope this situation will improve.
Re:Relieved (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you the one who is going make it easy for my friends to use Linux? I really hate it when fan boys say that people who use Windows are just taking the lazy route. No, Linux is not simple. I'm sorry, but for the majority that is the truth. You want an example? Try walking a friend or relative through updating a video or sound driver over the phone. With Windows all you have to have them do is download an executable from the manufacturer website. With Linux they'll probably have to recompile the kernel. Good luck with that one...
Re:I hope you do realize... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's changed is that a lot of people like it (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you on this, and I can put myself as a live example[although I use Subway instead of McDonalds]. See I am from Mexico and I live now in the UK. After arriving here, the first thing one does is look for places to eat. When I was in Mexico I always wondered why Gringos (no deprecative here okey?) always wanted to eat McDonalds when they went to Cancun or Puerto Vallarta, when they where a lot of better restaurants (some of them with seafood).
After I arrived to UK and I started to look for a place to eat the places I went were of course Burger King and Subway, why? because:
1. I was already familiar with the way they "work", I just have to say that I want a package number 1, or a "king with cheese" and soda, so I am familiar with that, but not only that, I am also familiar with the place and the "mood" of that place.
2. It is really true (and a friend in Mexico that worked for the tourism told me once) that a McDonald hamburger will be the same quality in Mexico and in UK, you bet it, it is exactly the same (basically, here it is more expensive). And the same for Subway.
So, how does this translates to Miscorsoft and Windows? well, as somebody stated once on
So, a lot of people could rant that Windows is broken, that it does not works or that linux is better and has better tools or whatever, but the main reason of why it is not mainstream in the desktop is because of the more than 100 different linux distributions.
So in my opinion I think Mr. Gates and company did a great thing, they give computers to computer illiterates, maybe some elitist geeks do not like it, and they might say that people needs to understand how computer works in order to use it, but for me that sounds as stupid as some people telling me that I must learn to drive a standard transmission vehicle. I dont know to drive standard, I do not have a car now but I know that when need to buy a car, it will be automatic. Because I just want it to take me from one place to another, I do not give a dime if the car is not the best one in fuel comsuption or in speed, or if the sparkplulgs are better rounded than squared (whatever ok? as you can see I do not know anything about cars). I only want to turn on the car and (if possible) tell it to take me to the supermarket or my house or whatever.
Re:What a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Their innovation can be summed up as not being as completely fucking retarded about the way they ran their business as IBM, Commodore, Apple, and any UNIX vendor you care to name were.
Having a superior technology and not getting it into users hands is a failure. Why is it so hard for people to understand this? There's a reason why we aren't all typing into Amigas right now and it's not because Microsoft is an EBIL MONOPOLY!!!, it's because Commodore made a lot of extremely dumb business decisions. God knows that's also true of the UNIX vendors and Apple.
Re:I think a lot, around Windows 2000 era. (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal.
Well, Win2K = NT 5.0 and WinXP = NT 5.1, released only a year and a half later, so what were you expecting?
That said, a lot of the useful features that were supposed to be in Win2K from the start (particularly remote desktop and fast user switching) did get shoved back to WinXP, so I wouldn't want to have stuck with 2K.
XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
OK, this I don't get. What is wrong with the XP SP2 firewall? It does the job its supposed to do: stop incoming connections to services that you haven't specifically authorised to accept connections from outside. And please don't tell me it's because it doesn't do egress filtering: egress filtering is just about useless. It's trivially easy for any malware that wants to send data outbound to do so using a method that could not possibly be distinguished from legitimate traffic.
And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
Funnily enough, I've never had a problem with it. And I've never needed a tool to get rid of it off other people's systems, either.
As long as you don't go around installing random software from unknown sources, you won't have a problem. Of course, Linux users don't do this, because unknown sources don't tend to have a Linux version of their software available, so it isn't really an issue there, either.
Sure, you could install all this stuff in Windows, but you have to find it and pay for it and reboot and reboot and reboot.
Everything you list is trivially easy to find, completely free and doesn't require reboots to install under Windows these days.
There's even useful shit like strace in the OS.
Similar tools are available for windows as parts of the various SDKs, or for independent download [microsoft.com]. The rationale for not including it is that it's useless to anyone who isn't a developer, which seems sensible to me. Linux installs are often intimidating to new users, because they get to the software selection screen and see all the packages that are included, and have no idea how to choose what they need and what they don't need. Windows works the other way around: give the user a basic install with some tools that a large proportion of users will find useful (but without asking what they want), and then let them get anything else afterwards. It's a difference in philosophy and there advantages each way. But what it isn't, really, is a big deal.
Re:age (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Relieved (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, right. We live in a world where vendors change the chipsets in their cards without changing the model numbers. No amount of research will tell you whether or not a Belkin F5D7200 will work under Linux: it could be one of two entirely different cards, one of which works fine, the other of which doesn't, and you won't be able to tell until you get it out of the box. And if you're not very careful with the research you do, you'll just get the "it works fine" response, because it's listed on the hardware compatibility lists.
And when that's the only card that your local shops stock that does the job, are you supposed to travel further to a different shop? Where do you draw the line at what's convenient and what isn't?
The point is, if you run Windows, you can just buy hardware, take it out of the box, plug it in, stick the CD in the drive and expect it to work. If you run Linux, about 60% of the time it's even easier. But the other 40% is a real hassle.
Re:What's changed? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm usually one to parade around in my self-aggrandizing arrogance that all the people around me are mindless automatons, but that has nothing to do with why Windows owns the market today.
For many, MANY years, Windows was the only viable operating system for the masses. There was no Linux (and when there was, it was horribly complicated and hobbyist; only recently has it gotten better), and Macs were too expensive for widespread adoption. Since Windows was the only affordable, "professional" platform, people used it. Its ease of use compensated for its bugs and insecurities. People developed for it.
Now, it's kind of a legacy thing. Because it is the accepted OS, most companies still develop for it. Lots of polished, easy-to-use applications are the reason it maintains ~95% of the market.
OSS supporters need to wake up. Windows is far from perfect, but it's pretty damned good. Blindly parroting its flaws from Win95/98 days hurts your credibility, and it makes you believe that Linux/BSD is a better platform than it really is, and that it's the users' fault for sticking with Microsoft.
Free as in freedom (Score:1, Insightful)