Retired Microsoft Operating Systems Still Popular 645
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Despite Microsoft's recent retirement of Windows 98, News.com reports that many users continue to cling to the company's older operating systems. The study cited in the article suggests that 80 percent of companies still have machines operating on Windows 95 or 98. While Windows 2000 was the most common OS in the study, just 6.6 percent of the desktop machines included in the survey were running Windows XP." The results aren't too surprising. I get a lot of user mail from Netscape 4 users, and it only makes sense that they're running it somewhere.
Windows 98 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Informative)
And unlike M$, Apple has very strong support for those old programs in their new OS (via Classic mode in "OS X").
Plus, if you buy a new Mac, odds are it will run any older "win95/98 only" educational software just fine in Virtual PC (note-Virtual PC does not currently work with G5s).
I also find Virtual PC really useful for testing software I've written on older OSs. I also find I HAVE TO build some software (for win95 especially) in Virtual PC running the target OS or there end up being all kinds of
Re:Windows 98 (Score:3, Interesting)
--Don't do that.
--Seriously, I had a bunch of old DOS games that ran on a Tandy 1000sx, and when I put them on a 286-12MHz they were too fast. The stuff that ran on the 286 (Bushido? sopwith, Double Dragon, etc) were INSANE on a Pentium 100.
Children are not the only '98 target... (Score:5, Insightful)
It took me years to get my father from Multiplan under DOS to Excel with Win98. And some more to get my father trained to 98.
For the sake of my Sanity (already quite low), I don't want to retrain my father to use XP or 2000.
+It just works !!! I don't upgrade what's not broken...(yet...8) I mean I don't fiddle with the computer, and neither do they
Of course, if my parent where to get a P4 (or, more likely, an AMD XP) I might get to install XP or 2000 for them. and get a new Debian server to replace my poor P200 for free...>
Don't tempt me, you insensitive clod 8p
Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows 98 (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand this part. There are lots of places where you can buy a computer without windows installed/have to pay for it.
If you can't find a place, you are not looking or you haven't asked.
Re:Windows 98 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many industries out there which drop support for obselete products as they age. Just recently I needed to have an old oscilloscope serviced - the company no longer supported it so I needed an independant service company to fix it. Also not long ago, I found out that the music keyboard that I play in my band was no longer supported by the company that built it. So the phenomena of obsoleting old products is not unique to Microsoft.
And to expect an OS written in 1988 to work on new hardware 6 years later, and also to expect the company that wrote that operating system to support it on the ever increasing multitude of possible configurations is, IMHO, unreasonable.
In this case, I don't think you can reasonably use the word tax, even loosely.
Of course if Microsoft made the source code of Windows 98 available, so that independant companies could provide the support that Microsoft doesn't want to, it would take the sting out of this announcement for a lot of people.
Re:Windows 98 (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, your oscilloscope actually broke. My Windows 98 hasn't broke, it's still working, it's just now unsupported.
And it's not really obsolete. There are still VERY few software applications out there that won't work on my Windows 98 machine.
The only reason it's "obsolete" is because Microsoft is trying to make it so.
Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Funny)
Tribute money (Score:4, Insightful)
Spare me the explanations of the poor starving software developers; I am fully aware that a software developer seeks renumerations for one's labors, and charging license fees and upgrade fees is a way to amortize the effort required to develop a complex piece of software. That doesn't change the fact that license fees are a kind of economic rent (i.e. money you can rake in because the law grants you a limited monopoly -- you can say that software won't get developed in the absence of such a monopoly, but that doesn't change the material facts that "intellectual property" law has the intent of granting limited monopolies to facilitate collecting economic rents).
I prefer the term tribute money to "Microsoft tax" because "tax" suggests governmental power and some sense of the consent of the governed. Microsoft is not to be dignified by considering it a government -- it is more like such extragovernmental entities such as high-seas pirates, Mafia bosses, feudal lords, and Delaware corporations in that money payed to them to avoid punishment (i.e. lawsuits, getting wacked) is to be called tribute and not a tax.
I also differ with the common usage of "pirate" to denote someone who avoids paying tribute money. I use the term "pirate" to describe contruction contractors that you bring into your house for remodeling and repair work. The reason contractors are pirates has less to do with the amount of money you pay them than the part about when you let them into your house they control every aspect of your life. Yes, it is about the money because whatever contract you sign, there is some uncontrolled eventuality that you have to agree to spending more money once work commences, but even if you are rich enough that the money spent is a minor concern, you become their pirate-hostage regarding letting them in and out of the house at their whim and work schedule.
So construction contractors are pirates simply on the basis that their clients are pirate hostages, and money spent for the XP upgrade when 98 was working just fine for you, thank you, is tribute money.
Re:Windows 98 (Score:3, Informative)
It runs surprisingly well on a 450-MHz K6-III with 256 MB of RAM (video is an equally-old ATI Xpert 98 AGP). It takes much less time to boot up than Win2K, too. If you turn off most of the eye candy (I leave only font anti-aliasing and "show windows while dragging" enabled, even on fast hardware) and revert to the pre-XP lo
Not XP, 2K (Score:4, Insightful)
2000 is what the 600E was designed for. It shows in how well it performs. I'm sure if you killed a lot of eye candy XP would be just as nice, but I'm lazy.
Linux also runs beautifully on this machine...this was the one and only machine IBM was going to get certified for Red Hat Linux. It's running Knoppix/Debian and very happy.
Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with that. I have a topographical map program that I often use that won't run at all on any system except Win98. Plus many of the CD-ROMs still on the shelves of the local library won't run on any system newer than Win98.
Plus Win98 is the last MS offering that allows a user to directly access input/output ports. I still have a few ten year old ISA PC cards that interface electronics to PCs. The control programs for these cards directly access I/O as they were written in DOS in most cases. Without Win98, they are useless.
The concept that millions of people are just going to throw away the equipment that they have bought five to ten years ago because of an arbitrary decision of one company in the support chain is simply corporate arrogance.
If Microsoft is no longer going to support an operating system that is still used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, then they should release the source code for this operating system.
Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:2, Funny)
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of...?
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:3, Informative)
The Apple II C's may be perfectly fine for a high school physics lab. The MECC (Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium) produced hundreds of programs for the Apple II C that probably still have use.
A poor mechanic blames his tools.
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
The apple II's had a very common data acquisition mobo that allowed all sorts of physics experiments to be done. You could measure temperature in real time, trace a trajectory, and do other neat stuff. Why upgrade when these experiments work just fine with the old apples?
It's physics, not computer science. The data is important, not the computer that records it.
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is needed, is to have students with an enthusiasm for computers. I think the dot com boom rushed in a lot of people who "learned computers" because they wanted a good job, not because they liked computers. A good computer scientist will know where the RAM is in a motherboard - namely, what sticks of RAM look like - not because he will have had a class where they had to assemble a computer from scratch, but because in his personal interest he's taken the time to upgrade his memory, or to build a computer from the ground up, or to just take the damn case off to see what it looks like inside. Personally, I did all of these things back in my high school days, and the good computer scientists I've met at both my undergrad and grad schools did the same.
While I think it important the universities teach both theoretical and concrete concepts, I think it the hallmark of a good student to take an interest in the concepts outside of class. A university can only provide so much information - the rest is up to the student to hunt out himself.
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem here is that people have stuff that's more than they need. The apple ][gs from 1986 is capable of doing everything the average person does with their pc. So when someone has A Pentium 4 with winxp to run Word I hang my head in disbelief. They only need maybe a Pentium 2 with 98 SE. Companies that think about saving money and actually have brains keep the old stuff that works. Don't upgrade if you don't have to. And if you are just doing office work like word processing and nothin cpu intensive then you should have an old slow machine. It's cost effective. And odds are if the machine is that old and still around it's high quality and wont give you as much technical troubles.
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I see that MS is pushing licensing scheme that makes it difficult to donate old Machines. Schools don't even want the older computers because all they care about is cheap tech support and surfing the internet. How many MSCE have the depth of knowledge to work on an old DOS machine or any apple? But if I were teaching programming, I would rather have enough machines so I could have every student in the school learn the logic of programming rather than just the lucky few who signed up first. Likewise, if i were teaching math or science, i would like every team to have their own computer so that could do their demonstrations and simulations. And I would want them to be old so that is all they could do.
Of course, modern machines are necessary when you are teaching Visual Studio and MS office. For the Vocational training stuff, this is defensible. But for the more basic classes, fast machines are really just a luxury.
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but it takes six months to rip a CD.
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Companies are better off than schools. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd weep, if they didn't have the money for teachers, books, paper, chalk and the like.
I had a CS course at my high-school and they had a Bull Unix Workstation with a single 68k for 12 terminals. And this was the only computer at school for the pupils. And no, I'm not in my 30s or 40s. At that time Pentium processors where state of the art.
At that time, I felt it was a bad cond
Of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of course (Score:2, Informative)
I'd hope that larger companies would realize it's cheaper to upgrade than suffer the wrath of unsupported, unpatched windows boxen!
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course (Score:2)
Re:Of course (Score:2, Informative)
Mostly it's impossible arguing with people who think like that. They just want the new version, because it's available. No need to say that those people hardly believe you if you can do something better and cheaper for them (example : dynamic webdesign : "YOU can do future updates, without having to pay anyone for it". They don't believe you
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Your a small business and run Win98 machines with Office 97. Good enough you would say. That is until your largest customer is sending you files done in Office XP and you can't open them. The short term answer is to call them up and ask them to save it in an older format. Boy does that make you look like a shabby outfit. The other solution is to go out and upgrade the Office suite. Which may requrire you to upgrade the OS. Of course now you are running XP on a 200 MHZ PII and it runs like crap.
I think as a home user you can get away with an older OS but it is difficult to as a business.
To the 80%... (Score:3, Funny)
NT popular in the enterprise (Score:3, Informative)
CB
Re:NT popular in the enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't laugh, it works. Despite all the whizbang marketing from Redmond, most busineses are extremely pragmatic. If all you need is a {print,file,login} server, linux will happily work on hardware later Microsoft OSes have no hope of running on.
Prediction: there'll be huge uptake of linux when Microsoft kills off support of nt4 server, because no one is going to want to take the double hit of replacing all the hardware and buying all new OS licenses. Not to mention new and different security headaches due to exponential increases in complexity, increased lock-in, restrictive EULAs, etc.
Re:NT popular in the enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, the last couple of years haven't exactly been an economic cakewalk. Lots of companies have better things to do than spend money on new computers when their existing ones are working just fine.
For the record? I still use NT on my desk. Actually, I have two machines - the second runs Linux. Why can't I upgrade NT? Because the machine only has a P2/300 processor in it, and I'm fairly certain that a 'newer' OS will slow it down to something unbearable.
Why don't I care? Because I do all my real work on the Linux machine. The NT box is merely for Outlook, and testing our app using IE. I don't need anything faster, and frankly if the company was spending money, I'd rather have a raise than a replacement for that box.
I figure most people who are still using NT or 9x are probably using it for similar things. If all you're using is Office, why do you need to upgrade when everything works just fine on the machine you've got? And yes, I get irritated that our sales folks always have the newest, shiniest computers on their desks while I have old machines on mine trying to do software development, but I've been able to make do just fine. Perhaps I could use a new machine more than they could, but it's not a battle I would win.
At least for Linux we can use OpenMosix to get some improved performance. The suckers using Windows don't have anything like that.
Re:NT popular in the enterprise (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NT popular in the enterprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Does the current system work
Will the current system work in one year
If either of those are yes, and in some cases both, the will to upgrade gets shot down the tubes. It makes little to no sense to upgrade a station if it is doing its job, before the argument ever gets to money.
Features are one thing that can supercede both the Is it working / money arguments, but
EBay market for W2K will explode (Score:3, Interesting)
Being the last Windows that let you do this easily, I have a feeling that in a few years W2K will be going for a mint on eBay.
Re:EBay market for W2K will explode (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:EBay market for W2K will explode (Score:3, Insightful)
If anything I think there will be a booming black market in cracked WinXP disks, a record number of BSA audits, and perhaps even raiding of private residences if the lobbies push hard enough.
Th
Re:The lesson to be learned here (Score:3, Insightful)
Not if it's a reinstall it isn't. Not if it's a change of motherboard it isn't.
Also, what if you scrap one machine, and re-use its licence on another? That's made a lot harder by things like making the OEMs stick the licence number to the original machine case, and enforced limits on product activation.
There's a reason people call it the microsoft tax, it's because microsoft acts like it is owed a fee
Re:The lesson to be learned here (Score:3, Informative)
The clickwrap 'contract', other than the flaw of it being a contract of adhesion ('take it or leave it') it also offers nothing to a user.
For a contract to be valid, it must offer consideration --- both parties must obtain something that I would not otherwise have. The clickwrap 'contract' doesn't. It *was* claimed that it offers me the ability to copy the software from disk media into memory, but that was explicitly ruled not copyright infringement. Therefore, the 'contract' offers
Win 95 at Work (Score:3, Interesting)
Until just recently (read: months), our standard desktop was still Win95! They just finished switching everyone to Win2k. However the KUKA robots we use to build cars still run Win95 for the GUI, and probably always will, as the hardware won't support much higher...
Why "up"grade? (Score:4, Insightful)
The alternative is to throw everything out, buy all new hardware (do you really want me to try to run XP on a Pentium 200 with 64Mb of RAM?), get stuck with a lease on the software, and then to get locked into whatever upgrade cycle Bill thinks is best for Micro$oft.
Microsoft has chosen the greedy path, and eliminated themselves from the list of viable true upgrade paths. I'll upgrade those machines when RedHat (or someone else) gets their act together, supports the still functional Office 97 standard, and does it for less than $60/machine/year. All we need are bug and security patches!
--Mike--
Re:Why "up"grade? (Score:2)
lets see uptime for my win98 box... 37 days & 62 days respectivly (had to reboot finally last night because of trying to open a doc file with macros while iRate (Java) was running... I dont blame it for locking up)
Re:Why "up"grade? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a house. The dirt that surrounds that house works quite well. It's good dirt, and grows stuff I want, quite nicely. But, it's old dirt. In fact, it's as old as the planet. Should I upgrade it? Will new dirt somehow "add value" to my dirt-needs, even though my existing dirt fills those needs (and is more than I need) already?
I have a hammer in my basement. It's a nice one, pounds nails quite nicely. Perfect balance, excellent weight, comfortable to use. It's also about... 80 years old. A new hammer will somehow "add value" to what I need it to do?
I have NT all over my shop. We have these machines in our shop because of some specialized software that we need, and the software works quite nicely. The stuff in the racks all run NT, the majority of desktops all run NT. Upgrading will somehow "add value" to what I need them to do?
Not hardly. The biggest problem with NT is that 70% of the crap it comes with is completely irrelevent to what we need. Worse, this 70% is where all of the exploits lie... so I can't just ignore it, instead I'm forced to maintain this "baggage".
AS2003 is even worse. Internet Connection Wizard? Where's the option for being a quad-homed box with multiple DS3 lines? Ooo! MSN! On a rack mounted box! And LookOut Express! Irrelevent, and unwanted. Let's see... we're now up to an OS footprint of over an entire gig. And, I'm gonna actually need to use... uh, 20 megs of it to pound these nails in. And the nails end up pounded in exactly the same as NT does it. Yep, that's value...
Don't confuse an OS with an Application. If "everything that comes with the OS" is all you need... you probably don't actually need a computer. On the other hand, if you need to drop a few million for a real application to run on that OS, then you'll quickly discover how f*cking irrelevent that specific OS is.
People are figuring out the real use of computers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, most people (managers especially) have a decade or more of computer use experience under their belt, perhaps even two, and can get a good idea for themselves of what a computer can actually do for them. Ten years experience seeing that a two-yearly upgrade cycle just leaves you with More Of The Same instead of something really new means people are seeing computers as just the tools they are, rather than something awe-inspiring that can solve their every problem
It's like Graphic User Interfaces - they're a hell of a lot more complex now than the original Mac, but that's OK. The original mac was introduced to people who'd never seen a computer before, let alone a GUI. Nowadays, by the time someone buys their first computer with their own money, they're buying a machine with an interface they already have YEARS of getting used to using, and the extra complexity has been learned into them from age 5.
That's a bit sad, in a way. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd bet the reasons users retain the older operating systems have more to do with familiarity and the difficulty of upgrading than with the pricing (which was my first reaction) -- although Windows 2000 and XP offer a stunning level of compatibility with older hardware and a greatly enhanced user experience, the ability to migrate applications from an old system to a new system leaves something to be desired when compared to the DOS days where one could simply copy an application over.
Microsoft may do well to adopt practices that increase the ability for users to upgrade painlessly, such as by doing away with their authentication system and promoting a means of moving a software package (with its associated configuration and data files) to a new Windows installation or to a different computer.
Re:Quantum Leap? (Score:2, Troll)
Nothing other than satisfy the immature need to have a newer toy.
--Mike--
Re:Quantum Leap? (Score:3, Insightful)
Original CD prices going up! (Score:5, Insightful)
The market's a funny thing. Give your customers crappy features like DRM, and they'll find a way to tel you they're not interested... like back-grading to your previous versions.
You watch... i predict that soon Microsoft will find some way to prohibit the sale of these original CDs. A law will get passed, probably under the guise of national security.
prof. h.
Re:Original CD prices going up! (Score:4, Informative)
I took advantage of the Windows XP Pro downgrade rights [microsoft.com] to run Windows 2000:
I still think Windows 98 SE is preferable for games, but I don't miss it too much.A lot of Mac users on OS 8.x and 9.x, too (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that when people buy a computer, they expect the software to last as long as the hardware.
ME? (Score:2)
Simple reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen in many stores computers with config like: 2GHZ CPU, some Radeon gfx card, DVD, 5+1 audio card and to all that 128MB RAM (DDR). And of course Windows XP Home Edition. How fast will all that run when it has to use swap memory all the time?!
Solution 1: Install more ram. And void warranty by doing so, because there's a warranty sticker on the case and no internals can be changed.
Solution 2: Install some OS for which 128M RAM is more than enough. Like W98SE or such.
Re:Simple reason... (Score:3, Insightful)
Another reason to run Windows 95 (Score:5, Interesting)
Her machine had 32 megs of RAM and a P166 MMX processor.
As it turned out, Windows 95 plus Internet Explorer ran blazing rings around Debian Linux plus Mozilla, which was almost unusable, even after I switched her over to icewm and rxvt rather than the much heavier KDE environment. Eventually I found Skipstone [muhri.net], which made her machine usable again, but only barely. To be quite honest, there is no Linux/browser combination that compares with the performance Windows 95/Internet Explorer can offer on that class of hardware, and there's no good reason to throw away a perfectly nice older laptop.
Eventually, though, she upgraded to a Dell Latitude XPi which runs Linux much more comfortably -- although I still switched her to icewm and streamlined her startup drastically to get a reasonable boot time.
Re:Another reason to run Windows 95 (Score:3, Interesting)
Mozilla in 32 meg technically starts. But they recommend 64 meg minimum for good reason. Its arse is a certain size.
Re:Another reason to run Windows 95 (Score:5, Informative)
if you would ahve installed vector linux it would have downright screamed and MozillaFirebird would work great if you had 128 meg of ram.
I have 5 machines I have given to friends that are P166MMX and it is very VERY useable with Vector linux.
Wordprocessor is ABI word.. which is 9000% faster than open office.
Spreadsheet is Gnumeric, and it also is a billion times faster than Open office.
you have a choice of about 4 built in tight window managers and you can install gnome or KDE is you desire.
Give it a try.... Vector Linux. it is pretty impressive that they can take the fastest distro- slackware and make it faster and add a "apt" style of installer but is GUI based.
Re:Another reason to run Windows 95 (Score:3, Informative)
FYI:
Linux tends to want memory over processor speed.
Memory for laptops isn't too expensive on ebay. (I upped my old p166 laptop from 32M (16 onboard + 16M) to 80M (16 + 64M) for about 30 bucks.
Well worth it. Galeon is pretty quick on OpenBSD now. I remember it being slower under Debian Woody, which is odd, since I was running a pretty stripped down install of it.
If it works, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried WinXP, and found it very frustrating. Rather than learning how to configure things, such as installing software to be accessible to all users, disabling that damn "You've got too many icons on your desktop" message and dozens of other annoyances, I decided a WinXP computer was not for me and instead kept my older machine.
Of course, I do understand that some people need certain features that are available only in better operating systems, but let's face it: productivity software has very little new to offer, and sticking to an older version is not only cheaper, but also more efficient, as the user is already used to that particlular interface and features.
As a free lance, computer repair guy... (Score:5, Insightful)
If companies realized just how much money they dump into fixing all of the problems Windows 98 is privy to, they'd all be on Windows XP.
When I upgrade users to Windows 2000/XP I immediately stop getting Operating System related calls. Suddenly my only work is occassional malware, "my network is down", etc..
Windows 98 is a horrible product, and it's a liability to most small businesses. Most of my clients would have saved hundreds of dollars to make the jump.
Clif
Re:As a free lance, computer repair guy... (Score:3, Flamebait)
and as a freelance computer guy you are not a very good one.
What you said there is so horribly bad advice it's glaring.
if they are running windows 98, I know they aren't running it on P-4 computers with 1.8ghz or higher and 256 meg of ram.
they are running on older machines that CAN'T run windowx XP worth a damn let alone probably at all. so now to upgrade to windows X
The Winner Is... (Score:3, Interesting)
For the average user, what do they really gain to moving to XP? A lot of fluff.
What does the techy user gain from staying with 98? A closet full of games that still work.
Some companies rely on particular apps (Score:2, Insightful)
One still uses DOS 6.22 on 486 based PC's for a few of their users.
I have run the app in DOSEMU on Linux, but have problems with network support.
I wish they would agree to migrate to a newer app.
Windows 2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I know MS sucks, but they did a great job with Win2k.
Re:Windows 2000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Well with a little tweaking, you can make Windows XP look like Windows 2000 as well.
"Yes, I know MS sucks, but they did a great job with Win2k."
I have been running Windows XP Professional for a while now and although I am, as well, not too fond of the way Microsoft goes about business, (I hate them with a particularly fiery passion regarding their purchase of Bungie Software...) I admit that Windows XP, if used correctly will work better than Windows 2K, dare I say, even good enough for me to get stuff done, and even on a regular basis.
My computer is a custom build, I leave it on all the time, and I do all sorts of wierd things to it. It has survived - there is life after Microsoft. My ability to do this (leave it on, have it work under stress) actually increased after upgrading to XP (and a bit more when upgrading to XP pro) and increased a lot when I ditched my HP Laptop and went to this custom rig.
Of course, I also get MS Windows XP Pro from my college bookstore for $6.00, so if it weren't for the piracy busting price, I would be all over linux like a bum on a ham sandwich.
here: google survey differs from the 'news' survey (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that major difference 6.6 % of XP users versus 38 % of XP users is caused by a very simple thing: win95/98 users are not connected to internet thus, they are not using google.
based on this, news's survey is very likely to be true
Re:here: google survey differs from the 'news' sur (Score:3, Informative)
Cost and Familiarity (Score:5, Insightful)
I think alot of people on
One other thing to keep in mind is that most mid to smaller level companies do not have onsite IT people. They will either higher outside integrators who charge by the hour or just wing it and hope that the existing set up continues to work for as long as possible. In both situations the company is very very hesident to upgrade as it will cost a ton of money to effectivly get the same results as now.
Johnson & Johnson (Score:3, Interesting)
They rolled out Windows 2000, during 2002 and 2003, with a lot of thought, using its administration features for IT to gain much more control over individuals' machines--Administrator access to one's own PC is now a rare privilege. At least our desktop computers are less wonky now.
There's no way the company will "upgrade" to XP; probably we will migrate to Windows 2005 in 2008 or so, if there is some compelling reason to do so.
Users exist in spacetime (Score:4, Funny)
Well observed, CowboyNeal.
Well what did they think they would find? (Score:4, Interesting)
As the economy picks up, win XP (which is a far cry from the miserable ME experience) will start to be adopted more and more. MS has to overcome the bitter taste left in the mouth of consumers when they tried to foist ME on us. Oh yeah, and businesses REALLY didn't like ME (I know of at least 2 companies that would purchase dell laptops, and would wipe and reload 98 on them when they arrived).
A couple of axioms for the MS marketing people to remember
AngryPeopleRule [angrypeoplerule.com]
Misread! (Score:3, Funny)
I have a simple explanation for why end users aren't jumping on XP.... Perhaps they think "Windows 2000" must be better than "Windows XP" because 2000 is a really big number! Har har. Seriously, I bet that does have a bit of an impact on the end user. I mean, look how much MHz/GHz numbers impact sales. I think a lot of people simply see a big number and think it must be better.
As for those still stuck on win9x... well, they have my pity, but I can understand them. Who really wants to pay $100+ for a new OS, especially in a sluggish economy?
I'm pretty happy with XP. I think the fact that it was only $20 through my school helped me like it more. ;)
Inotherwords, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, computers will break down and die or get too slow for their owners needs, or finally drive them insane, and that's where I'm seeing the majority of the market coming from in the coming years; upgrades and repairs. We've got the infastructure, now we've got to maintain it. Few if anyone is going to go for bleeding edge stuff, they want perfected, mature hardware and software. We're also going to see a lot of old people working, since the baby boomers who make up a large percentage of our economy are going to go into retirement and the companies they're going to be getting pension checks from are probably going to go under.
I'v also noticed a trend in the computer industry; MS's software has been getting more expensive. In 1998, a copy of win95 went for about $99, upgrade ed of win98 $99 and full ver of win98 $149. Now, in 2003, winxp home ed costs a whopping $199, and the corp edition costs $299 which for some computers is half the price of the machine. Is longhorn going to cost $499? I MS wants to know why sales of their latest OS is dismal in the corperate and goverment enviroment, mabye it's because it's too expensive to justify.
XP to intrusive (Score:5, Interesting)
It took about two years and $5M dollars in hardware costs and MS License fees, plus the costs of 3rd party software replacements, to switch our organization from Win3.11FWG. Currently we replace a couple of PCs a week, and they come with W2K pre-installed, so our Win95 counts are dropping as our Win2K counts rise.
Our XP count remains minicule. We cannot use XP on most workstations because of its EULAs which demand that MS and certain 3rd party vendors be given remote access to our hardware to 'add or remove any software' they wish -- for 'security' reasons, of course. A very big Federal agency refuses to allow us to allow that, not suprisingly, so that their data remains safe while in our keeping.
That means that when the EOL for W2K has passed, and the channel is emptied of W2K shrink-wraps, our new PCs will come naked or with Linux pre-installed. Our bulk licenses allow us to move Win OSs around, but the new PCs will have hardware for which no Win95 or Win2K drivers exist. When that day arrives Microsoft will have truely locked themselves out of our shop. That scenerio would change over night if Gates modified his EULAs and didn't require remote access, but I doubt his greed or paranoia would allow such a policy change.
WPA, eye candy and spyware--not worth it. (Score:5, Informative)
Had the organization stayed with Win2K, this never would have come up.
Realistically, Windows 98 is probably the last version of Windows that can be reasonably kept from calling home, and has a higher probability of not having some kind of government back door. You think MS got a slap on the wrist in the antitrust action for free?
Windows 98 Works? (Score:3, Funny)
It's just not worth it (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen this before, the Microcrap forced upgrade-o-rama. In the past they grumbled but did it anyway. This time is different for some reason. Instead of just biting the bullet and making the upgrade they started asking if there were any other web servers that didn't have to be upgraded and patched so often that would work on their old hardware. As a matter of fact...
At home I've got one 98ME laptop and one Win2K box left, everything else is Linux. Haven't loaded XPee at home and never plan to.
winders versions on older boxen (Score:3, Informative)
My son uses win2k and I have a machine with NT 4.0 on it. I presently have a machine that runs 95 too - but it is an old P90 and it is turned on only once in a blue moon.
What I've found is that my son has had a great deal if difficulties with win2K. He has re-installed more than 5 times. The OS loses its network printers regularly. He whines about it of course and threatens to get a copy of XP.
I don't think his machine will run XP very well so if he does that he may as well throw out the present machine. Talk about crap eh?
Meanhile I've pretty much abandoned my NT machine and am now using the Debian Linux machine virtually 99% of the time. I may even install VMware and if I do this - I may be able to go back to only one machine. It will save me a bit of electricity.
So an effect that I presonally predicted several years ago is happening - that effect is that old copies of microsoft software are competing directly with newer versions. Given this - I am surprised to see that Microsoft revenues are holding up... or are they?
If the revenues don't materialize, Microsoft shares could erode in value at an unprecedented rate. This would be due to the fact that the number of shares Microsoft has issued is mind boggling.
I personally do not see Microsoft as a growth company at all. While I will not short them, there is no way I'd invest in them either.
A Win98 Story (Score:4, Interesting)
I knocked up a quick program to read the raw data off the socket and just log it so we could get a wfew days sample of data to make sure it was conforming to the format they specified and check for unforseen glitches (of which there were, in the end, many). I left that running, but when I came back the next day the "constant stream" had cut out at 6am. I had only written a very simple logging program to collect, so I hadn't bothered t o handle the case that the server was going to close the socket connection on me, so I had no data after 6am. So much for a days worth of collection. The reason, I found, was the the "very old program" that they were using was a DOS program, which didn't run properly on Win2k (so they claimed) so it was on Win98. The reason I kept getting holes in the stream at 6am (I fixed the logger to handle socket closures, wait till it was back up and start logging again) was that they had to reboot the box every morning at 6am. Well, not had to - but they felt a regular scheduled reboot was a lot better than the slightly less regular unscheduled reboots they used to get.
In the end We wrote our proper socket collection code to just shut down at 6am, which was when we fired up our data processing on the nightly collection, then picked up again at 6:02 when the reboot was done.
Jedidiah
Older is golder (Score:3, Interesting)
At home, I have two Pentium1s with old 14" monitors and Windows95. The OS runs well with 32-64MB ram and many nice old games some of which require DOS interrupts, others that access the framebuffer and soundblaster buffers directly, work very well. I have yet to find ways to run those old nice games on Windows2000 or XP.
The newer computers that we're buying nowadays are shipped with Windows2000. We do not prefer XP and will certainly avoid the upcoming 2003. As the older computers with Windows2000 will become obsolete, we'll use their licenses on newer workstations with Pentium4 2.2GHZ and 512mb ram, should work nicely.
I just dont like what Microsoft did with XP onwards. They tried to make the OS smart on its own and guess network configurations, which becomes a nightmare for net admins. We'll eventually move to XP, after the next OS after 2003 ships. Till then we'll try our best to keep the Windows2000 copies around, while using Windows95 with Terminal Services where it works for us.
It makes sense actually (Score:3, Interesting)
Joe Sixpack doesn't care about keeping up with the latest and greatest. Take my parents for instance. The use their pc for browsing the web, e-mail, AOL instant messenger, word processing and CD burning. Their current system is fast enough for what they need to do, all the software runs fairly well and they have no real reason to upgrade anytime soon.
I'm sure a lot of corporations, especially small businesses, are the same way. If the system runs the software they need at an acceptable speed there is really no reason to upgrade. I service a lot of small businesses happily running Windows 98 (I don't see too many systems with 95 any more) on several systems and they don't plan on upgrading anytime soon. The larger businesses I service, on the other hand, are largely running Windows 2000 with some XP systems in the mix mainly do to the additional security and for group policy.
If your running Windows 98 and everything is working alright for you, there really isn't any incentive to upgrade to Windows XP IMHO. I can't think of any single must have feature for the average computer user. If corporations are using Windows 2000 or 2003 Server there are some incentives to running Windows 2000 or XP on the client end.
I do feel that your going to see more and more users upgrade, albeit at a slower rate than Microsoft is used to. There are applications being released (iTunes springs to mind) that simply will not run on Windows 98 and Me. I have a feeling that this will increasingly be the case. Eventually users will come across an application they need, or an upgrade to an existing application they run that has some new feature they want to use, that simply will not run on 98/Me and they will be forced to upgrade.
Good Enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most very small businesses do the same thing. My dry cleaner has a 486 running a DOS-based database program that keeps track of my drycleaning. I remember using something very similar on a job in 1988.
Many companies don't bother going with the latest and greatest. It's just not worth it to churn their computers and operating software every 2-3 years. Unless they're in IT, it doesn't matter much which version of MS Office they're using.
The heck with Windows... (Score:3, Informative)
During my tenure at Boeing, I saw a number of CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine-control applications in the factory that were all DOS-based. In the electronics labs, many design or data-acquisition tools are DOS-based. And here, in my home lab, I've got a blort-load of radio service software that requires a pure DOS platform or it simply won't run.
"Retired" OS's are popular for a variety of reasons, just as older test equipment is often favored over much newer stuff. One of those reasons is that the underlying principles of what you're trying to do never change: Only the degree of complexity needed to get it done does.
Too frikk'n expensive! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Only bugfixes... (Score:2)
Typing that from W98SE. Didn't crash (by itself, without help of 3rd party programs) for 3 or more days. But recently crashes after maybe 6 hours of activity because of some 3rd party drivers.
Re:Windows 3.1 (Score:5, Informative)
It was abandoned by MS at 1.2 so that 3COM's 3+Open and IBM's PC Server OS's that built on top of it would have to react and lose market share.
MS was in an agreement with IBM and 3COM that allowed them to take advantage of the developments of the other two while leaving them in the cold. IBM tried to pick up development of OS/2 (including WARP), but that is a different story.
NT, Win2K, and XP all use the "net xxx" commands that were the heart of 3COM's OS even before the "alliance" with Microsoft. I think this is why Bob Metcalfe seems to hate Gates with such a passion.
"Come into my den said the spider to the fly."
Re:you can run netscape in winxp? (Score:5, Interesting)
Corperate still has a outright BAN on windows XP. It is not allowed, we are not migrating to it, they deemed it a waste of time and money as it offer's zero value.
they may upgrade to it when MS EOL's Windows 2000. but they are also looking at alternatives, there are 2 groups testing Linux in the corperate environment with using wine and wineX to run the vertical apps that are windows only we rely on.
Most companies are pissed off at Microsoft, and users are pissed at microsoft because it seems that at every turn it's microsoft's fault for a problem they have.
90% of the time that precieved fault of microsoft is really something that is misconfigured, or a under engineered network causing the trouble... but MS get's the bulk of the blame.
Windows XP has nothing that Windows 2000 has for the corperate environment that is worth a damn... and that was stupid of microsoft to do. They had an opportunity to make a corperate OS that could have solved many of the problems out there.
Re:you can run netscape in winxp? (Score:5, Interesting)
My company is standardized on windows 2000. When we evaluated XP, the only real benefit was the built-in terminal server which allows the helpdesk to connect to the clueless user's computer to see what is really going on.
Aside from that, no upside. The downside is large (software cost, activation hassle, necessary hardware upgrades) so we're sticking with win2k.
Re:you can run netscape in winxp? (Score:3, Informative)
The Windows XP file system is crippled. (Score:4, Interesting)
From the parent post:
"90% of the time that precieved fault of microsoft is really something that is misconfigured, or a under engineered network causing the trouble... but MS get's the bulk of the blame."
I think there are huge problems with Windows XP that are the fault of Microsoft. For example, the Windows XP file system is crippled. Unlike Windows 98, which can make a bootable full hard disk copy with the XCOPY.EXE program, Windows XP cannot copy all of its own files: Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software? [slashdot.org]
Can you accept an operating system which does not allow you to make a full hard disk backup? Yes, I know about third-party tools and Sysprep. They ALL have verified problems. The version of Sysprep that comes with Windows XP sometimes causes failure of the Windows XP Recovery Console: 'The Password Is Not Valid' Error Message Appears When You Log On to Recovery Console in Windows XP [microsoft.com].
Even when using the "Recovery Console", you cannot access some files on a hard drive. Windows XP is very crippled.
Not only that, but do you want to run the risk of using an operating system that puts most of the configuration settings in one file of more than 20 megabytes (the "Registry")? If something goes wrong, it is necessary to re-install ALL of your programs and patches and updates, not just the operating system.
Everything mentioned here has been verified several times by Microsoft tech support employees.
Re:you can run netscape in winxp? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is very true and I think it will come back and bite Linux in the ass eventually. Most people switching to Linux from MS right now are knowledgable. They are the people that know how to set up a proper network and keep it running. As the common people switch to Linux, they will encounter many of the same problems they encountered on Windows, except they won't have any idea how to deal with them. They will end up switching back to their Windows boxes because they at least have an idea how to deal with things on that.
I think we'll see a lot of people switch to Linux, but then we'll see a decent portion of them switch back as they realize their problems weren't caused by MS, but by their own lack of knowledge.
Re:The thing I always wondered is (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Win95/ office 95 still in use (Score:3, Informative)
Especially the system administration tool, YaST2, will crawl on 64MB of RAM.
Actually it's more straightforward than that. (Score:5, Informative)
Windows is supposed to run slower with each new version, so you will have to buy current hardware to run it, at new-technology prices, so that the cost of the Windows OS, as a proportion of the total price of the delivered computer, will stay below a level they figured is likely to trigger a consumer revolt.
There's nothing accidental about it.