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."
Why don't they ask... (Score:1, Interesting)
Another product overview MS created themselves (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder how many of you did use those first versions of Windows. From 3.1 on, it was quite common but before 3.1...
It changed everything.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Leaders? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What a waste (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, at least in my books Microsoft is just another greedy company. Nothing more. I don't expect them to do same things than universities and other research organisations who have passion to this segment of industry.
Re:Why don't they ask... (Score:5, Interesting)
What's changed is that a lot of people like it (Score:5, Interesting)
In a sense, the old wisecrack "Saying that Windows is better because more people use it, is like saying that McDonalds is the best restaurant" actually applies there. For a lot of people, McDonalds _is_ the better choice, or they would go eat somewhere else.
Choosing a restaurant isn't just a matter of who has the best cuisine and the rarest wines, but a compromise that also includes stuff like:
- price (self-explaining)
- time (maybe I just want to pick my hamburger and be on my way, not wait an hour while the chef prepares a complicated 5-star meal)
- accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
- familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
- personal taste (maybe I actually _like_ a chickenburger, or not wearing a tie while I eat it.)
- social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Etc.
Yes, McDonalds didn't invent hamburgers or Cola, they're latecomers, etc. But people choose to go eat there anyway. Go figure.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice. So, well, I'd say MS has reason enough to celebrate there.
Re:I think a lot, around Windows 2000 era. (Score:5, Interesting)
And not to nitpick, but GTA on the PS2 is really bad. People just ignore all the slowdown and terrible aiming or something. On top of that, there's Multi-theft auto, something not possible on the PS2.
Re:FWIW (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but they didn't tell you it's a good thing back then.
Fact is, the commodities market isn't a place you'd voluntarily want to be in. Look at the mom-and-pop beige-box PCs or the generic cola drinks market. Those are commodity markets. They're not making a huge fortune out of it. Trust me, if either had a choice, they'd very much rather have a unique product they pretty much have a monopoly on, or a brand name that's been hammered down everyone's throat already, or whatever that allows them to charge an arm and a leg instead of a 5% profit margin.
And the same happened with computers. Whoever was ahead didn't want to become a commodity vendor.
E.g., while all swore undying love to Unix's portability and to open standards, they sure worked hard to make theirs incompatible with any other Unix, and to subvert and destroy any standard. Because open standards and the "write once, run everywhere" that Sun nowadays preaches is basically turning it all into a commodity market. All of a sudden it doesn't matter which computer you run it on, and you can just pick between a Sun, an IBM, a Mac and a PC purely on price/performance considerations.
Worse yet, a commodity market doesn't allow "vertical integration", a.k.a., "lock them in, and make them pay through the nose for everything." That's where the big money is. Having a bunch of customers that will gnash their teeth and buy everything from you anyway, because the alternative would imply ripping out and re-writing/re-buying everything else they have. You want a bunch of sheep penned in such a walled enclosure where the effort to climb out of it (e.g., to rip out all your Sun hardware and port everything to AIX) is greater than just staying there and being sheared by you every year.
People will often even take a loss to get you locked in, so they can shear you later. (E.g., see the console market, where the console itself is usually sold at a loss.)
So Sun, IBM and everyone did the same thing when they were ahead. Big surprise, eh? And now MS does it, once they're ahead. Who woulda thunk it?
The moment you start preaching a pure commodity market and how lock-in is bad, as a vendor, is when you're losing. When everyone else has the customers neatly penned in thir lock-in markets, and you'd want those customers set free, so maybe some will buy your kit instead. Then suddenly those artifficial walls are bad, because they're not keeping _your_ customers in _your_ pen, to be sheared by _you_, but they're keeping them in someone else's pen and out of your reach.
So now you see IBM, Novell, Sun and a bunch of others suddenly preaching about open standards and portability. Because they too would like a shot at shearing MS's penned flock, so they want that pen torn down already. They sure didn't mind it when it was _their_ pen, but now it's time to preach against it.
That's all there is to it in a nutshell.
Re:Relieved (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, it sure does, if you carry around 30 driver cds with your windows installation cd (which you still are required to use frequently).
Not only did my GNU/Linux installation correctly detect all my hardware, I didn't have to use any CDs other than the one used to initially start the installation process. Windows is WAAAAAY behind the curve on this one.
Funny you should mention "throwing" and "hardware" in the same sentence...that's what I generally wanted to do with my computer pre-Linux!
Re:What a waste (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to know where the phantasmal operating systems were that we could have had that were 'leading edge' and 'innovative'. The only candidate that's come along recently was OSX, which was unfortunately crippled to only run on proprietary hardware.
I'd go so far as to say that Windows 95 was pretty leading edge when it came out. Unlike the Apple operating systems of the time it had proper multitasking, and it had a lot of nice features. Was it as nice as NeXT? No, but unlike NeXT it did run on the kind of hardware affordable in the home. This is the thing about Windows - it could run on 'affordable' hardware. The first versions of Windows would run on 8086 machines, and Windows 3.0 could run on 80286 machines. The kind of 'advanced' operating system you seem to think they should have made just wouldn't be possible on their target systems. And remember, they also had to as far as possible maintain compatibility between versions.
Could Windows have been better? Sure it could, but as nobody else has managed to do any better than them, and that suggests to me it's not as easy as you make out.
I did try, honest (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem we're facing today is that there are two many people pushing single platform solutions. You can't blame them for that, you stand a better chance of repeat purchases if your software doesn't play well with others and the cost of migration is greater than the cost of an upgrade, but in the long run its not good for anyone, because it creates Micorsofts.
We need to educate people in the benefits of hetrogentity - don't buy software that only works for a single platform. Don't buy computers that will only work with similar computers. Don't buy into product that only has a single line of support - and never buy a product that has no support (I include offshore telephone support in that) and top of the list must be: don't buy software that generates files that can only be read by a single application.
Anytime you buy/use a product that adopts and enhances a standard protocol and doesn't tell the rest of the world how they are doing it, you buy into the next Microsoft.
Re:Another product overview MS created themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
The internet made multitasking a legitimate necessity. Today it seems absurd that we wouldn't be able to keep our im windows open while we download files and stream music all in the background of our actual work. Back then, however, multitasking was like the solution looking for a problem. The first version of windows didn't provide any form of multitasking and later versions didn't multitask dos apps. Desqview, however did, and before windows 3.0/3.1, desqview was the multitasking solution of choice for those people who really needed it.
People did want to switch between tasks quickly but there were lighter weight solutions than windows for that. Products like sidekick and expanded memory print buffers (one of the few ways to use more than a meg in even a 286) gave people the quasi-multitasking solutions they needed to get their work done. It was precisely the explosion of applications for windows 3.1 that made windows successful. Before 3.0/3.1 few people used windows because there wasn't any point in using it. Until native windows applications came along, windows was just a silly, bloated, guified app switcher that just got in the way.
Re:What a waste (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's changed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike in the Windows world, there are solutions to this problem outthere. Consider e.g. MacOS X which uses a setting with a bit more privileges for the admin account, but disabled login for root. If admin privileges are not enough for certain tasks, then suid root wrappers are used. By using root wrappers you can effectively control what is allowed to happen or not on the machine (like installing software which itself is suid root).
Re:What's changed? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (inexperienced) users.
Um, no.
The major open source operating systems (Linux and the BSDs) actually take security seriously. The kernel and most userland software is specifically designed with security in mind and they deliberately try to make it quite hard (ideally, impossible) to get unauthorized root access remotely. When bugs are found, they are patched quickly and the world knows about them instantly via various security-related mailing lists. As long as his or her systems are kept up to date (which is easy to automate), a Linux/BSD user would have zero need for anti-spyware and anti-virus software, even if it were the most popular platform of the day.
Now, contrast with the Windows security model. I could never dream to guess at what goes on inside the minds of Microsoft developers, but I'm pretty sure security isn't (or wasn't until recently) something that pops up too often. New security-related bugs are found in Windows and Windows software every day. Not entirely surprising, because the same is true of the OSS world. However, the bugs that are discovered in Windows are much more often those that allow a person or program to gain administrative access to the OS. (Partly due to the fact that almost every program that runs as the administrator.) Meanwhile, we admins and users have no way of patching these new daily vulnerabilities. Our only hope is to rely on (third-party) firewalls, anti-spyware apps, and anti-virus apps, all of which treat the symptoms rather than the illness.
So, while OSS and Windows vulnerabilities might be roughly equal in number, it would be difficult to argue that they are anywhere near equal in severity. The statistic that Windows has 95% of the desktop market but attracts 99.9% of malware has always seemed a little odd to me. (By that logic, 99.9% of all software should exclusively run on Windows, which clearly isn't the case.) Even assuming that very nearly all viruses are written for Windows just because it's more popular (unlikely), if Windows market share does decline, we would still see Windows with the majority of the malware because it's a lot less challenging to slip a virus or spyware program onto a Windows machine than an open source one. As an example, if you penetrate the defenses of the Microsoft web server, you get full reign over the machine. If you do the same on Linux running Apache, you get full reign over
The moral of the story here is that Windows has the lion's share of malware perhaps not so much because it's a bigger target, but because it's simply an easier target.
Re:I think a lot, around Windows 2000 era. (Score:3, Interesting)
You missed the point. I'm not complaining about the effort to download and install one thing, I'm complaining about downloading and installing 25 things, many of which require reboots (Cygwin IIRC thankfully doesn't). Is this not a legitamite complaint?
Read my post before you respond to it next time.
Re:What's changed? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ahead of its time... See Wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graph
90% statistic impossible (Score:3, Interesting)
As if. Random sampling [ursine.ca] seems to put the number at around 80% and falling over time.
Re:What's changed is that a lot of people like it (Score:1, Interesting)
Compare this to Windows. Windows is used on 95% of computers. This would be similar to having 95% of my food choices being McDonalds. There would be a McDonalds at 95 out of 100 corners with no other resturants, grocery stores, etc available. My car (software) is designed to only drive me to McDonalds or to places where McDonalds deems worthwhile or people specificly paid to make their locations McDonalds compatible. McDonalds is known for being greedy and frequently destroys competition that it feels is superior.
Other facets of my life revolve around McDonalds. Items I buy for the house, clothing (peripherals), music, movies (media), etc revolve around McDonalds. Sometimes it is compatible with other resturant choices, sometimes not. Unfortunately, in recent years, there is a trend that makes these items less and less compatible with other choices (dmca, trusted computing initatives, etc..).
Re:Linux is still too hard for the average user (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:90% statistic impossible (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:age (Score:3, Interesting)
Where did you get that information?
The only major multitasking problem with Windows is a CPU chewing up 100% CPU (common to all platforms), and that can be worked around by having a high-priority task manager that can be used to kill rogue applications.
Even Windows 3.0 could multitask. I was playing solitaire while I had a DOS application wipe the sectors of a floppy disk (which kept pausing because of sector errors on that floppy.) As far as I know, there was only one competeting product that was capable of multitasking in the same way for that platform, and it certainly wasn't one of the Unicies.
Of course it thinks that - 95% of the population blindingly purchased Windows 95, even though some of them didn't even have a computer.