Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point' 769
BobJacobsen writes "CBSnews.com has an article about Bill Gates and Steve Balmer answering questions at the 'All Things Digital' conference. When asked about 'high points' in his time at Microsoft, Gates replied 'Windows 95 was a nice milestone.' The article continues 'He also spoke highly of Microsoft SharePoint Server software, but didn't mention Vista.' Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"
Very defensive about Vista. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ballmer tried to counter Vista's reputation as a mistake and failure. CBS did not miss this.
The Register has an article [theregister.co.uk] that focuses on this and what it means.
I agree with Gates, Win95 was as good as Windows got. No, I'm not Bill Gate's sockpupet. Their vision of a unified desktop and web browser has been better implemented by KDE since. XP's copy protection and Vista's digital restrictions were tremendous mistakes. The seeds of M$'s demise were expressed early on [blinkenlights.com].
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
Its probably more personal for him (Score:5, Interesting)
At least they had fans (Score:5, Interesting)
Now a Windows release is greeted with a 'thanks, but no thanks'. Yeah, I'd look back with longing at '95 too if I were them.
My ideas on their milestones (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows 2000 was an overly of 98 on NT. I loved it.
XP was simply an updated version of Windows 2000 with a greater hardware support.
Vista is a mess, but it's getting better. I'm not happy with Vista nor do I recommend it.
The next version of Windows will be a big turning point. I would like to see Microsoft cut some of the 'cords' of the old OS and backward compaitibility.
In reality, they can push the Windows API into a new direction. Have TWO versions of Windows.
Windows World - Windows with all the compatible stuff to make it run yesteryear software.
Windows Beyond - Windows, smaller, faster, lighter with NO legacy support.
There you go. Much like an SUV and a sports car. Both nice and can easily merge into the market as needed.
D~y
Considering what came before it... (Score:5, Interesting)
...ya gotta admit, Windows95 was a huge improvemnt. WFW was really nothing more than a crappy shell plastered on top of a not so great OS. With Win95, it seems MS really came up with something much more modern and different (please note, I'm comparing Windows to earlier iterations of itself, not Mac, Unix, or anything else). It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. The stupid start button was still eons behind what Apple had (and still has), but it was a huge leap from WFW.
Windows 2K mostly worked (Score:4, Interesting)
What about NT4.0? (Score:3, Interesting)
More accurate high point == buying DOS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 95 -- right before the DOJ stepped in (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps Mr. Gates should look to such people such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Ian Murdock, Larry Wall, etc.
Re:It WAS a high point (Score:5, Interesting)
Then anti-trust investigations started up. Windows 98 was an incremental update that had to be dumped for windows NT. Security issues started to matter. This open source stuff became a threat. Now everyone is trying to knock them off the mountain. And may very well succeed.
Windows 95 was a good time (Score:4, Interesting)
It was all down-hill from there. To this day, the best way to secure a Windows box is to unplug the network cable. And if you can't do that, remove TCP/IP. (Can you run Exchange over IPX or NetBEUI?)
The ride ain't over yet though... the disappointment of Vista was gradual since they started breaking promises before they released it... and Windows 7 is no different since we're not going to break binary compatibility in order to get away from the virus and malware ridden environment that INCLUDES Vista in spite of all its security enhancements.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, no one needs to feel sorry for Bill or Steve. They are on top of the world, and they have nothing to be defensive about.
They'll do their job and promote their latest mediocre products. But who cares, we'll end up with Vista anyway when we buy the latest Sony or Dell, and sure enough a couple hundred dollars flies from our pocket to theirs. Don't you think they know that?
Year after year, all of their innovations *flop*. Yet Office and Windows keep raking in billions, and they just don't know what to do with the money anymore. Give Bill credit for giving back.
I wonder if it bothers him? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if the fact that MS is now decisively on the wrong side of the computer-as-tool-of-empowerment bothers him? I don't mean as a CEO or shareholder, obviously MS' strategy has made him giant piles of money; but personally. It can be argued that MS had a considerable hand in making cheap and common x86 gear a reality, back in the bad old days of fragmented consumer gear and hyperexpensive IBM suitware; but it has been a while now. Perhaps more than ever, MS is working against empowerment(and no, I'm not just fudding about Vista DRM-OMG!, I'm talking about things like Rights Management Services, and mandatory driver signing.) Even when they feel charitable, their notion of empowerment is "like corporate; but cheaper".
I wonder, does that bother Bill? What does he feel, privately, about the fact that MS has become the tyrant it overthrew, and has basically settled down to make money by offering software for enforcing corporate control? Does he like that or would he, off the record, admit a certain desire to be on the other side?
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, most commercial software just plain sucks. Not from a "I can't copy this or modify the source" way but the fact that it breaks, has outdated documentation, gives cryptic error messages. For example, the other day I was using some software that is critical for the business that I was at. It was a Windows program and worked fine for about 2-3 years and then it just suddenly stopped working. So I pull out the documentation (now granted the company bought this software about 2-3 years ago) it was in a spiral book and the first steps were of installing it... in DOS!!! Now the system that this was installed was a low-end XP notebook, and so none of the documentation was even remotely relevant (they did tell you how to use it in Windows but it seemed like an afterthought and it only covered Windows 95!) and this was the only software for the job (it was to enter in data for a remote system to control access). So I tried to reinstall it, didn't work. So I thought about uninstalling it and reinstalling it until I realized that the database (which you couldn't export without the program working) backups were made in 2006!!! So in the end I was left with cryptic error messages, a program that would install but still have the same problem, and the company that sold us the software changed hands so many times that Im not even sure what it is called anymore.
About the only commercial software I would call "good" would be some proprietary games. The rest either suffer from not enough documentation, cryptic error messages, lack of company support, a program that can easily be replaced with a F/OSS solution or a horrible UI.
WGA and DRM came later... (Score:4, Interesting)
>"none of the 'rest power from the user' sludge"
They came via Windows update, which is also in Win2k.
PS: The word you want is "wrest"...
Halfway decent Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 2000 was the other pretty-good-OS. All the geeks took it home and installed it on parents machines, etc. Thus, we forget that it was never a home OS. The upgrade path was ME->XP (more likely 98SE->XP) for Joe Sixpack, so they never thought of W2K. It's finally starting to creak to an end (software packages that won't install for whatever reason).
The other OS that is really good is one you can't legally get. It's called "Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs". Only available (legit) for big corporations. XP stripped the heck down. No BS, no activations, updates work. Best Microsoft OS yet. And they won't sell it to anyone. At, say, a $30 price tag (probably less than they're getting from Dell for OEM Vista), I'd buy ten copies today.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Interesting)
wait, WAIT, hear me out.
I'm not tlaking about the smothness of graphics, clearly we're way beyond that.
But look at how it was orginized on the desktop.
Easy to see what you want, you knew at a glance where to go.
Look at how a lot of people use there modern interface. folders with similar(or groups) of links in those folders.
None of this click this button, then move the mouse over to see a list of what you have displayed, then moving the mouse to the correct folder, then moving over to select the correct program.
It is a ridiculous amount of work for what you want to do.
As much as we don't like to admit it, we really don't do much more with our computer then we did then, just a lot more of it.
Re:"Win95 was as good as Windows got"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:1, Interesting)
Windows XP was much faster than 2000. Yes, 2000 had the "bare essentials," but XP had internal improvements all over the place (system call performance anyone?) that made just about everything faster. Of course, most people just look at the theming and assume that it was a shitty layer of bloat "tacked on" to 2000 that completely destroyed the performance of the OS, when that wasn't the case at all.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill Gates says that Windows 95 was a high point for him because he beat IBM in the marketing wars and solidified their monopoly once and for all. They had a huge party when word was sent throughout Microsoft that IBM signed the license deal for Windows 95. It was on the day it was released IIRC. So a technical flop but a marketing marvel is what Bill calls his high point. Yup, I remember seeing the video of a bunch of Microsoft employees in a hallway with a bowling ball and at the other end were 10 software competitor's products lined up like bowling pins. OS/2 was at pin position #1.
I guess NT was supposed to take all of the server market but reliability kept UNIX going and by the time people figured out how to make a whole bunch of Windows PCs replace UNIX, Linux came in and really messed up Bill and Steve's plan for world domination. Where's Bill's tech leadership legacy? Windows 95?
Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO.
LoB
As a windows and hackintosh user... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Halfway decent Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
You only say that because you missed out on Windows NT 4.0. Far and away the best OS Microsoft has ever produced. Faster than 95, very stable (except early on, due mostly to crappy drivers), completely non-automatic, and very simple both to use and repair...
Every version of Windows, Microsoft adds another layer of abstration. Count how many steps it takes to get to the disk partitioning/management tools in 2000, XP, and Vista... In NT4 it was just Start Menu -> Programs -> Admin. Tools -> Windisk. How many services do you have starting up on 2000, XP, and Vista that you can't even identify? There were about a dozen on NT4, and I knew EXACTLY what every one did, and confidently disabled most of them for a performance boost without ill effects.
And let's get the standard complaints out of the way:
DirectX for NT was a version behind 9x, but it worked well, and most games ran fine. It reach DX6 in the end, which is plenty respectable.
USB support in the OS isn't required for USB keyboards, mice, etc. Never the less, 3rd party USB drivers were (and are) freely available for NT4. Dell still provides them for download. They even have UMASS support, which makes NT4's USB support superior to the USB support even in Win98SE. There are even USB2.0 drivers for NT4.
People complain about BSODs with NT4, but I saw them less than I do now with XP/2003 systems. It should be noted that most PC hardware was much flakier back in those days.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:1, Interesting)
And Vista's DRM is a non issue unless you want to play BlueRay or HDDVD's. I can listen to MP3 files on Vista, or play AVIs with no issues. I can even rip and encode CDs and DVDs. The people that licensed BlueRay and HDDVD were very scared of people ripping them, so they forced OS manufacturers to add a bunch of security features in return for being allowed to license the patents. Both Apple and Microsoft had to choose between implementing these features and not supporting the new formats. And both chose to implement them. But that only applies to the new formats.
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
And most people seem to be quite happy run the OEM copy of Windows they got with their machine rather than try to put together an alternative from free software. Hell I'd pay much more than the $50-$100 or so I pay for an OEM license for Windows because I've tried the alternatives and they really irritate me. $50 or $100 dollars or whatever the manufacturers pay Microsoft for a Windows license is not a high percentage of the machine cost, and it means I don't need to fart around trying to find clones of all the non free software I own. Every time I've done this, I end up spending weeks putting together a far inferior system. It's just not worth it to save $50-$100.
Now you can say it's Free as in Freedom. But that doesn't apply to me really. I want to be free to use the software I want to use. Most of the people that write it don't want to GPL it so the the Linux folks will regard them at best as leaches, even though I'm totally cool with people not giving their work away. Plus Linux has a tiny market share and they're not really too bothered about supporting it. So my Free as in Freedom machine will definitely not run the software I want to. Theoretically of course I could spend my time rewriting stuff to run on Linux, but why would I do that unless I could sell it to other people? And I can't do that if I give away the source code, since people will just take that and not pay me. But the whole Linux ecosystem is extremely hostile to people that don't GPL code. So the lack of the sort of software I want to use is not even a business opportunity.
So thanks, but no thanks. The OEM fee I pay for Windows when I buy a machine is fine by me.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Interesting)
Live Search [wikipedia.org] was Beta on March 8th, 2006, and 1.0 on September 11th, 2006.
Google Desktop [wikipedia.org] was Beta on October 14th, 2004, and finally escaped beta status (actually 5.1) was released on April 27th, 2007.
Given Google's track record with Beta stuff, it tends to trump Microsoft's released stuff, at least until the first service pack. But it depends how you count -- if you only count the time they officially left Beta, Live Search wins by several months.
However, if you count from the first public beta release, Google beat Microsoft by over a year, probably a year and a half. Since we're playing the game of who innovated what, I think that counts as a significant headstart.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a lot of praise thats beign showered on 95, really deserves to be put on 3.1. It was the gateway drug of windows.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:3, Interesting)
Programmers used peak and poke and assumed people would 1 run app at 1 time.
Windows had to support that backward compatibility. One good thing with Windows 7 is that every app will run in a vm to prevent this backsupport hell.
If dos were a real operating system in the first place we never would have had this problem. However I believe the 8086 and 8088 were not capable of protected memory but I cold be wrong.
God it was terrible and IBM picked these processors on purpose so businesses would buy more mainframes if they wanted a *real* stable OS/Hardware.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows 95 promised to run all 32 bit apps in separate address spaces and all 16 bit apps together, so only one 32 bit app or all of your 16 bit apps would crash together and not affect anything else. What a joke that turned out to be. Full machine crashes when just a single app died were persistent until at least windows 2000.
And note that Mac OS X had a life back in 95 when it was still known as OpenStep (or NextStep(?)). A vastly technologically superior system just waiting for it's time to come...
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why folks have to poop on the interview. Your high points in a career can be defined as the best times you had, which aren't necessarily connected to raw sales figures. It could have just been exciting times as the pace of change was picking up, computers were getting better, competition for the desktop had an unknown future, all these neat people had put together open source stuff your for your developers to peek at and get ideas for your product, Apple was floating around the dumper, the Internet was being discovered by many and had seemingly unlimited potential. Hell, it could have been the last time Gates had a good lay.
Stallman has a lucrative speaking career (Score:4, Interesting)
There is nothing disreputable about figures of some renown accepting renumeration for giving talks. Bill Clinton has made literally hundreds of millions during the Bush presidency, mostly for giving short talks at foreign companies for 6 figures each. Far lower on the ladder are public figures like Bill Cosby, or famous academics, etc.
I fully support Stallman's right to be compensated for the value of his services, at any price mutually agreeable to him and his customers. Sadly, he believes it is morally obligated to confiscate the value of my services, and that the laws should be altered to make this confiscation compulsory. Curiously, he calls this state of affairs "freedom".
Quoting from the GNU Manifesto, with the words inserted to make sense of his metaphors, which often involve a lot of setup:
"[Programmers] deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of [the programs they write]."
"[The government] really ought to break them up, and penalize [people who develop proprietary software] for even trying to [restrict access to their software]."
"Pay for programmers will not disappear, only become less."
Then check out his proposal for a Software Tax. Its four paragraphs long, and if you think about it for more than about a minute you'll realize its like hell on earth for software development. Essentially, the idea is that there will be a transnational IRS which determines software development priorities and allocates fundings on the basis of votes of the largest American corporations. (He describes it differently, because he is totally ignorant of economic reality, and I am not.) He argues that this will result in encouraging creativity.
I'm actually with Bill on this one (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 95, with all its warts and issues, was something of a high point. And, honestly, I do consider this from the vantage point of hardware built for Windows 95, running Windows 95 OSR2, or its closely related followon, Windows 98SE.
The launch version of Win95 was awful and nobody was really prepared for it and it caused plenty of problems. It didn't understand USB at all, etc. etc. etc. But, it eventually matured, and it really represented a fundamental mental shift for everyone: DOS is well and truly going away. You could manage things from a GUI. You don't have to set jumpers to install a card.
This was the first Windows that didn't boot into an obvious DOS first. It was the first Windows that started to feel more like a lot more than a graphical version of DOSSHELL.EXE. It was the first version you could credibly manage almost entirely by GUI, rather than editing obscure .INI files to comment out incompatible VXDs.
In terms of bringing the state of PC computing forward, Win95 was definitely one of the larger, more successful steps forward. If I had to rate the more successful steps on Microsoft's part, they'd be, in roughly chronological order:
I'm not sure whether Win2K and WinXP both belong on the list as separate bullets, or if they really kinda form a single bullet point. Their biggest contribution together was to kill DOS and force everyone to finally program with at least some hardware abstraction. <soupnazi>No direct hardware access for YOU!</soupnazi>
At any rate, if I were to name the highlights of the Microsoft path in terms of actually advancing the state of PC computing for most people, those would be the points I pick.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. I was something of a fan, if a bit timid about it, back in the early 90s. I quickly became disillusioned when I got to college and was exposed to UNIX. Here I was with a 386 all to myself that I could barely use without crashing, and I was logging into a timeshare AT&T SVR4 UNIX box with dual 486s, sharing it with 100 other people. In late 1993 I installed Linux and dual booted for a few years, but eventually I was running Linux only. So I'm no Microsoft apologist.
That said, you'd be
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:4, Interesting)
Linus is an university dropout! He definitely did not create linux while he was graduating. In fact he got heck out of university as soon as he got an offer for a job that paid real money.
He then much later went back to the university when he was famous and financially secure to get his degree as a hobby!
I read his interview in some finnish geek magazine years and years ago when he was talking about how nice it was to get out of uni and how he's not going to get caught dead attending that waste of time again.
Personally I even installed very early slackware version around -94 so they already had distros way before -96. However cumbersome horrorshows they were at the time.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is one ironic thing I find about Microsoft. Their client operating systems sometimes cause hair pulling, while they do quite well with their server stuff. I've gone from Windows NT Server 4.0 to Windows Server 2000, to 2003, now to 2008 as operating systems for my main machines (upgrading hardware every 2-3 years, and legal copies of the operating systems), and its been an overall positive experience.
Had I went the Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, then Vista, I'd probably be singing a different tune.
There are little things with Microsoft's server operating systems that make them nice to run. For example, if I drop in a new hard disk, MS's client operating systems will just assign it a letter. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will wait until you go into the drive manager and assign the letter manually, so it doesn't mess things up. Probably the biggest thing is that MS's server operating systems install almost nothing by default, so anything present on the machine was explicitly installed there by choice.
The server operating systems also have some nice features. Its not Time Machine, but if I lose or corrupt a file, I can use the Previous Versions feature to pull an earlier version from a snapshot, each drive being snapshotted on a different schedule (my data drive being snapshotted almost hourly, the system volume less often, the music collection daily, etc.) Vista can do similar, but its all or nothing with their tool, rather than on an individual volume basis. Plus, its a given that server operating systems will be able to be logged in from remote while for that functionality on clients, it would require XP Pro, or Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate.
This isn't to say that this functionality is in other operating systems, but so far, MS server OSes have lived up to the task of being solid and operable day and day out.
Windows vs. Linux in the 90s. (Score:5, Interesting)
Compared to the Microsoft software du jour, that's an entirely different story.
Usually, buggy software caused *some* application to stop abruptly. In worst-case scenario the whole K Desktop Environment would crash, bringing down you whole GUI and throwing you back to the shell. Nonetheless, everything running in the background kept running, completely unaffected by whatever problem you had with the GUI : The Samba shares, the Squid Proxy set up to share the modem connection, telnet & ssh, etc...
On Windows 9x/ME, whenever it crashed, you got a bluescreen and *absolutely everything* was down with it. In addition you could really do a lot of things with it. It was supposed to be multi-tasking, but you couldn't load more than a couple of apps at the same time anyway. Loading a CD Burning application and an Office Suite and a web browser was beyond its capabilities.
Windows 95 was the reason I switched to Linux.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Interesting)
This actually underlines the fact that Windows crashes are almost never caused by the Windows OS itself, and almost always by buggy third-party drivers, and even buggy hardware, especially for things like video, which evolve rapidly.
Servers tend to be stable because there's no need to run the latest drivers for things like video and audio, and even if they are installed, they aren't exercised very heavily. Clients tend to crash because buggy drivers and/or hardware from firms like NVidia, ATI/AMD and Intel actually get exercised heavily, which exposes the bugs.
There's actually a slight argument for some form of open source here, since if NVidia, ATI, Intel, et al were willing to give the source code for their drivers to Microsoft, to include in the Windows OS builds, it would almost certainly lead to much higher reliability, since Microsoft would be able to spot a lot of these bugs through review of the code and stress testing (in contrast to the "many eyes" nonsense, Microsoft developers actually would be able to spot and fix bugs). However, these drivers are generally viewed as secret (eg NVidia don't want ATI to see their driver code and vice-versa, so neither will give sources to Microsoft), so Microsoft can't fix the bugs, but still get the blame when things go pear-shaped.
Microsoft's business model of supporting a huge range of disparate parts that can be combined into innumerable configurations has a lot of strengths, which is why it killed off most of the proprietary systems, but it does have weaknesses too. The reliance on drivers written by hardware vendors is probably the single biggest technical challenge Microsoft face, and also the single biggest issue that tarnishes the reputation of their software (arguably unfairly, except to the extent that they could make it easier to write device drivers).
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system.
This comment gets thrown around a lot, but it's not really true. By Windows 3.1, Windows was doing most things that an "OS" would do - process scheduling, memory management, driving most hardware (video, sound, network). Especially in Windows 3.11, with its "32 bit disk and file access", DOS wasn't a lot more than a bootloader.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows vs. Linux in the 90s. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My daughter regularly produces better software. (Score:1, Interesting)
It does indeed work alright for very simple customizations, but beyond that it falls flat on its face. Try decompiling it sometime and see what a joke it is. You don't even have to go that far really, just look at the libraries. The utilities namespace might as well be named SharePoint.IDoNotKnowWhereThis MethodGoesButWeNeedITBecauseOtherwise TheProductDoesNotWorkAlsoIUseItToReinventTheWheelEvenInMyOwnAPI.
As an interesting aside, I wrote some SP code for MS internal. Our code had to code through strict reviews and panels. The code analysis tools and review boards told us we had problems. When I asked, they said the following assemblies failed: Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, Microsoft.Office.Server.dll, etc. My reply of course was that MS owned the code in those assemblies, not my group, so take it up with them. Our code passed with flying colors and several internal people actually "asked" for our source (read: copy and steal). Funny they can't even pass their own code reviews.
I'd like to see you try to implement a forms auth SharePoint deployment properly and get all the functionality to work. It's documented by MS that it doesn't. Part of the reason is how windows auth works with their products, and another part has to do with the fact that when they went "gold," we found out that no one had properly tested forms authentication. I know this because I was on a call with their dev team at the time trying to implement an internal MS product that required it. Our call incited a shouting match with their own people for not testing it. It's still broken to this day.
I have no doubt that it works for your purposes which is great, but if you're out there doing a lot of complex implementations, you will soon find that there are so many wtfs you lose count. It seems to me you're judging without the proper experiences to back it up. Personally, I really do wish it worked like you said, but I can point to specific code that has no prayer of ever working. For instance, there are blatant logic and statistical errors in the KPI web parts, the SPDateTime control is all but broken for post backs and dates before 1900, the event model for lists and list items is almost useless by design, and the workflow engine crashes randomly because there are too many errors to even begin to count, That's just a short sampling. Shall we continue?