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?"
A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Funny)
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$'s demise were expressed early on [blinkenlights.com].
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not going to go into the rest of your fabrications, infantile creative spelling and links to - wait for it - El Reg that you think somehow validate your opinion, but even if they're being deliberately obtuse about the above, there's a good point to be made about your claim.
In the beginning, FLOSS was nothing more than a hobbyist movement. It continued to be that for a long time, until corporations like IBM got into the game, and for-profit corporations like RedHat and MySQL AB and others were created around what used to be loosely related FLOSS projects.
This involvement has allowed the end to end quality of FLOSS to skyrocket in the past few years, in the sense that it went from "here's a tarball, run make install on it, perform the specified incantations, pray to Chtuhlu and you're all set" to actually mainstream, usable tools. It's that involvement that not only has employed people who otherwise would be hobby developers as well-paid professionals, but has created an entire ecosystem in which these efforts can be carried out by more and more people.
That doesn't mean that your usual "FLOSS uber alles" claim is valid in any sense, because "non free" (what the hell is that, BTW. As in "non tasty"?) software has also improved and evolved enormously in the past three decades. Some of that has come from "M$", and some hasn't. There's a lot of extremely good commercial software out there about which you have been evidently living in complete ignorance of for about as long as the same three decades I mentioned.
This is maybe similar to the mason guilds of the middle ages, who improved their collective lot by organizing themselves into sponsored groups working on well-defined and focused projects, which in turn served to lay the ground rules for formalized architecture and civil engineering.
twitter, that would be funny if it wasn't so damn dishonest. How many accounts are we at now? 12? Maybe your nemesis [slashdot.org] can jump in here and give us the full list again, and then you can insult him as usual.
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.
I'd second that (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, most commercial software just plain sucks.
There are a few really polished pieces of software out there, but the vast majority of commercial software sucks ass. At least if I find out open source software sucks I'm not out any money. There isn't any truism that works in the software industry, whether commercial or OSS. I've seen good and bad commercial software, good and bad OSS. But if you think commercial is better simply because it costs more, you're deluded. I use GIMP, OpenOffice, Blender...work fine for me. I also use Photoshop, Audition, and Vegas.
Software isn't a religion any more than tools are a religion. Use what's appropriate for the job.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if 99% of people can't fix the problem, having that 1% is enough to save a business. If it's 99.9999% of people who can't fix it, leaving a mere handfull of developers who can (for legal or technical reasons), you're pretty much sunk and have to take the disaster recovery or migration cost head-on.
Open source is a guarantee that things can be fixed legally and practically. You may not need it, but if you do, it can save your business. A lot of companies learn that the hard way, and that's why open source and open standards are growing and growing.
past few years? (Score:5, Insightful)
One pattern does seem clear: once FLOSS gets a start in an area, it appears to attain supremacy within about five to ten years. And once FLOSS takes a niche, proprietary software never takes it back.
There will probably always be proprietary software, but days of Microsoft's primary niches are numbered.
"Win95 was as good as Windows got"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Win95 was as good as Windows got"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Disagree: 2K was THE high-water mark. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, he didn't say that Windows 95 was as good as Windows got. He said that Windows 95 was a nice milestone.
Windows 95 literally changed the world of personal computing. It was revolutionary in a way that little else in the world of software has ever been. Few companies get the opportunity to produce even one product that has the kind of impact that Windows 95 had, yet people point to the fact that Microsoft hasn't had another like it as an indication of failure.
Microsoft has not put out another product that did to the computing world what Windows 95 did, and Bill knows that. But it doesn't mean that he thinks subsequent Windows versions were crap. In fact, I'm betting he doesn't use Windows 95 on his home PC.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint. Though, the upgrade path was from ME to XP for the home users making XP much, much, much better. But for those of use on Windows 2K, XP was just extra bloat. XP also suffered from major security holes, I can't remember how much spyware I remember taking off of people's computers before Service Pack 2 introduced the concept of basic security. Windows 2K also didn't suffer from WGA or other DRM nonsense.
Actually, I don't think that will be the case. I think that MS has learned the lesson that DRM-laden OSes will not sell and remove the DRM and bloat from Windows 7, if it goes according to their plans (which I honestly doubt it will....) it may be a decent OS. But if it is inferior to free products (such as Linux) of course those using it are going to complain.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:5, Insightful)
And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The collective long term memory of the internets is so ephemeral that it doesn't surprise me we have these conversations every time Microsoft releases a new OS, but it does tend to get old.
Win2k WAS the only high point (Score:4, Insightful)
Win2k was the best OS MS EVER made and ever will make and I wish I could still be using it if some apps didn't force XP.
Windows has always come across as the Volga (Russian car) that we are forced to buy.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Well-written apps should have worked equally well on both branches, by sticking to the common subset of Win32 that was available on both, but in reality they didn't; there was common software that would run on 9x but not 2K, and vice versa. Windows XP's major achievement was to unify those branches into a single NT-based OS that was both shiny enough and compatible enough to serve as a 98/ME replacement for average consumers.
Maybe the eye candy was "extra bloat", but I do think it helped attract customers who would've stuck with ME otherwise. And that's a good enough goal in itself: the DOS branch was fundamentally less reliable and less secure than the NT branch. If a little bloat is what it took to get people off of the weaker branch, giving them a more solid OS and making developers' lives easier, then so be it.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:4, Funny)
In general though, Windows 2K is much faster then XP and so if more bloat == complete then I guess I know why Vista is so Bloated... I mean complete.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:4, Funny)
emerge --sync && emerge -uND world -av ; etc-update
Ahh.. the daily dose of GCC output...
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know why you named those four people; at least three of those four have been or are currently being compensated for their most famous "free" projects.
A common thread among those people is that they all started their major projects during college or grad school and found financial backing as they were leaving academia. Or in Larry Wall's case, he had a day job at JPL while working on Perl. I think you'll admit that college/grad student life can't realistically go on forever. Eventually your parents will stop giving you money and/or the university will stop paying your room and board, and you'll have to find a "real job" to support yourself and your family. I think lots of people in the open-source community are employed by the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, OSDL, etc. for their work. No, I don't feel like finding more references.
The message might be that we need to fund more people in grad school to work on pet projects, or that Microsoft needs to fund them, but in general I agree with Mr. Gates - development on large-scale projects can't continue indefinitely without some sort of compensation.
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.
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:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, I wrote software the bugs of which were better than 3.1.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
9x was a dirty hack but a nessacery one, it gave good compatibilty with badly behaved dos/win16 apps while having much better support for modern 32 bit apps than 3.x. It also introduced plug and play which really made life easier for anyone adding/removing hardware.
2K was the birth of modern windows, it brought together the stability of the NT line with the ease of use and hardware support of 9x.
Since then windows seems to have largely stagnated. I belive this is simply because it now does it's job easilly and pretty reliablly and there haven't been any really radical design changes to the PC architecture (the most radical was x64 but given the previous alpha port I bet most of microsofts core code was already 64 bit ready, driver updaing must have been a bitch though).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
Are you insane? Windows 95 may have crashed every week or so on average, and it certainly crashed every 49.7 days [microsoft.com] if you were ever lucky enough to make it that far, but we're comparing it to Windows 3.1 here! Even if you disregard the bugs in Windows 3.1 code itself, the thing used cooperative multitasking and unprotected memory, so your computer crashed every time the buggiest program you ran had a particularly bad flaw. It would freeze up multiple times a day, under any kind of heavy use.
I think it's clear that if your criterion is "improvement over best previously available version", Windows 95 really was the high point of Microsoft development. Stability doesn't outweigh that conclusion, stability is one of the reasons for it.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 95 was great for doing one thing at a time. Anythig more than that, and it would crash for more often than once a week.
IMO, Win NT 4 was the top of the line for stability. Small memory footprint (60MB or so), and it would go for months without restarting.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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: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
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.x86.org/ddj/aug98/aug98.htm [x86.org]
With the Pentium, Intel introduced a 94-entry, two-way set associative cache of segment-descriptor cache entries. Therefore, the phrase "segment-descriptor cache" is now ambiguous, with two possible meanings. Making matters worse, the new segment-descriptor cache was removed from the Pentium Pro design, but reintroduced in the Pentium II. (The lack of the new segment-descriptor cache in the Pentium Pro largely accounted for its poor 16-bit performance.)
When designing the PPro Intel thought that Windows NT would take over from 16 bit Windows. Windows NT doesn't do many segment loads. Threads use FS for thread local data so that is presumably loaded every time the scheduler switch threads, every 10 to 100ms. But that is a very small percentage of instructions. All code and data use the same values for CS and DS - base address 0 and limit 4GB. So Intel removed the segment descriptor cache. But since 16 bit OSs were still popular and those OSs load the CS and DS segment registers much more frequently. In fact they have to, since they were designed to work on the 286 back when 64K was the maximum possible limit. Since datasets and code sizes were way bigger than 64K, the segment registers are loaded very frequently. So in the Pentium 2 Intel reintroduced the cache. It's not a hack, just bad crystal ball gazing.
Actually most of Intel's mistakes are like that. They predict the future badly because of a strange mix of wishful thinking, a desire to get rid of legacy stuff and outright hubris.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
At the time, Intel decided to market the Pentium Pro as a server chip, so it was not meant to run Windows '95. It was meant for NT and OS/2 exclusively. The Pentium Pro was supposed to compete with the big iron servers running Unix, and Intel gambled that 32-bit software would replace 16-bit software in time. They were right: But they were ahead of their time. The market was not ready to get rid of the cheap desktop OSs and the vast quantities of 16-bit software.
So Windows '95 was indeed a high point for Microsoft. They were the first to deliver a stable 32-bit-ish graphical OS to Intel PCs. And it was the first OS to integrate well enough with DOS to replace it. Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system. Windows '95 is why we use the term "wintel" and it is why IBM and OS/2 did not win the operating system wars.
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.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Informative)
Desqview was nicer for stability, but had no GUI. It also didn't let me run a few applications I needed at the time.
Windows 95 kicked total butt in comparison to 3.1. The GUI was much cleaner and applications only tended to crash one at a time instead of blowing out the filesystem when a software bug rears it's head.
Hell, in 96, I recall Linux + X not being a very stable desktop by today's standards either.
Windows ME seems to be the last OS I really had much trouble with. But what do I know. I've only got experience with OS7-X, Windows 3.1-Vista, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DOS, and various mutants in the TRS80 line.
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:Windows vs. Linux in the 90s. (Score:4, Informative)
Loading a CD burning application and any other intensive software was beyond any system from that era's abilities. If the writer didn't get data at a certain speed, it would screw up the burn.
Also, what's the difference in losing an hour's work due to Windows crashing while working on a paper and X crashing while working on a paper? Not much, the whole system might as well have tanked in both cases. I also consider word processing and office applications from the mid 90s superior to Linux applications under X from the same era. It's only been since the early 2000s one could scrape by in a Windows house without a Windows box.
System stability from the mid 90s in both Linux and Windows is what prompted me to go entirely BSD until a couple of years ago.
KDE was also unusable garbage in 96. It took a few years before it matured into anything remotely like you see today. WindowMaker, in my opinion, was the best thing going at that time.
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.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm. I've never liked this stance. Yes, he gives back a lot of money. But do this little exercise: Take Bill's net worth, then calculate what percentage of that a million dollars is. Then take that percentage of your net worth. That is what a million dollars is like to Bill. Last time I did this several years ago, it was about $2.
Comparatively, it's even worse than that, because I couldn't survive on 50% of my net worth, but he could survive on
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Find me any "innovation" that is entirely original.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's precious little revolutionary innovation nowadays, in any field. The vast majority of it is evolutionary.
Search engines, semantic algorithms, large distributed systems and web crawlers existed before Google, after all. But I don't see anyone arguing that Google has not innovated, because they have. Curiously the goal posts seem to move every time the topic is Microsoft.
In any case, that doesn't seem to stop people from trotting out the "LOLOL MS has never done anything worthwhile!!!", which besides being ridiculous it usually means you have an agenda in your shoulder and a chip in your bag - or you're a twitter sockpuppet. I hope it's the former.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why, I think. It's the irritation of seeing really good ideas elsewhere reduced to lowest-common-denominator crap on Windows.
Simple example: Google Desktop Search, and later, Spotlight. Indices had been used, and they'd been used on desktops. They hadn't been used to search an archive of personal files, though.
What has Microsoft done that approaches that?
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Aww... Ragging on Windows 3.1 brought a little emo-tear to my eye. I grew up and learned computing on good ol' DOS/Windows 3.11. (The "-point-eleven for workgroups" part made all the difference, I'm told, as it didn't have the same memory leaks.)
Do you guys have any idea how amazing Windows 3.11 was? With a 386, you could run multiple DOS applications - at the same time! What did you have to do before that? My trusty Borland Turbo C (and Lotus apps too, I'm told) would helpfull start another command shell over the current one, and hope that whatever you did in the second shell didn't obliterate the first one.
Windows could overlap! That was spiffy. 3.11 was a far sight better for networking than DOS ever was, and I never had any problems with it crashing. (Of course, I mostly used Microsoft Word 6, if anything, in Windows. Most games I booted from specially-crafted DOS boot disks so I could get the memory management just right.)
But to say 3.11 was dismal? What did Gnome look like then? And what were they charging for Macs? (This is in 90s dollars, mind you.)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its glorious early lead as not only a GUI-based OS but one with a smart design team behind it was beginning to fade as the technology in and around it began to grow too complex for its architecture while Copland became something of a Longhorn (to anachro-neologize) and Gil Amelio didn't seem to know what exactly to do.
In 1995, Windows 95 was really something of a breath of fresh air -- it brought into one place a number of UI conventions that turned out to be quite enduring, had some pretty decent design behind it (compare a screenshot of 95's visual simplicity with Vista's ostentatious baroqueness some time), and was more up-to-date technologically than MacOS 7.1.
It's funny; 12 years later, despite only mildly changed marketshares, Leopard and Vista kind of reversed those roles, didn't they?
Re: (Score:3)
That explains it. (Score:3, Funny)
They were high when they developed it?
That would explain Windows ME.
Re:That explains it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That explains it. (Score:5, Funny)
2k? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:2k? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's due to the degree of cognitive dissonance involved in the idea that the same company that made Windows 2000 made Windows 95.
Its probably more personal for him (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a fan boi... (Score:4, Insightful)
-Win2k was an improved no non-sense version of WinNT 4.0
-No special "genuine" advantage program
-No DRM
-It has all the features of XP, but none of the "rest power from the user" sludge
but alas I no longer use Microsofts products. I now work in place that has all macs (not a fan boi there either) and recently converted my household to Ubuntu with no side effects.
A favorite quote of mine that I don't know the author of:
"It was easier for Apple to make Linux user friendly than it was for them to fix Windows"
Re:Not a fan boi... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly, because OS X is mostly BSD with a nice GUI and although Linux is very similar to BSD (and other UNIX variants) OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD.
Re:Not a fan boi... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly [...] OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD.
Re:Not a fan boi... (Score:4, Informative)
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"...
I'd've said 98se, if I were going that route... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates can't say that, though, because Vista's biggest competitor right now is Windows XP...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
XP SP1 or SP2 was a good solid OS
Actually so was Win 98SE
Just proves MS cant do anything right first time
It WAS a high point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It WAS a high point (Score:4, Informative)
leaps and bounds... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:At least they had fans (Score:5, Insightful)
Home users usually shrug their shoulders with a "meh. I'll buy it with my next PC".
Companies usually greet it with a sigh and a "great. What breaks this time?"
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
Re:My ideas on their milestones (Score:4, Insightful)
That's Microsoft's problem actually. Their only real value now is legacy compatibility. They can't keep going with Windows because it's become broken and unmanagable even for its end users, much less its own developers. They can't break away from Windows, because without the compatibility, they're suddenly in direct competition with vastly superior systems like Linux and MacOSX which now have their own ecosystems and maturity. The best Microsoft could do is release their own compliant Unix based on BSD, essentially a Microsoft OSX, and even then they'd be years behind.
And now we have an announcement that Windows 7 will be at best an incremental evolution of Vista, which means they're sticking with backwards compatibility, the one thing that's becoming less and less important in an increasingly heterogenous industry.
This is the single most important reason why Microsoft can only die from here on. To dig its way out of this hole, it'll have to replace its entire business model and corporate culture.
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)
win 95 (Score:5, Insightful)
While everything up to 3.11 was just a fancy shell for DOS, windows 95 was (almost) a real OS. (mainly because you didn't have to type 'win' in a DOS prompt after start-up, it loaded on its own, like magic)
While 2000 and XP were huge steps forward, from a general users perspective, they weren't much different than 95. the start menu is in the same place, the taskbar is the same. the clock and system fonts are all the same.
as far as visuals and GUI design are concerned, win95 was a highpoint, and they haven't really moved beyond that.
as far as stability is concerend, windows 2000 was the highpoint. when one program crashed, the rest of my system didn't crash with it! amazing!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:win 95 (Score:4, Insightful)
Until OSX, I found elements of MacOS to be clunky, annoying, and counter-intuitive. For example, trashing a disk (or disc) to eject it? I want to eject my disk, not erase its contents. What, the little apple icon at the corner is actually click-able and is important? What would make a novice user realize this? At least Windows had a raised motif over the start button, and the actual words "Start" on it to tell you to start there.
Windows 95's interface was much easier to use for multitasking. Alt-tab not withstanding, the taskbar that summarizes all of your open programs so that you can just click to go to that particular program.
Let's talk starting up programs. 95 had a programs list to quickly get to all the installed applications. MacOS, not so much. In 98, the quick launch toolbar made it just a click of a button to start up commonly-used programs. By your reasoning, OSX's dashboard is just a copy of the taskbar and quicklaunch combination.
And, you could navigate to every UI element with the keyboard alone.
My point isn't to be inflammatory. My point is that it is ridiculous to claim that just because certain UI elements were taken from MacOS, that the MacOS actually deserves any of the credit for the user experience in Windows. And to base the claim that the Windows GUI wasn't innovative only on the elements that were copied, and ignore all the other major improvements and advances in UI design is extremely shortsighted.
Re:win 95 (Score:4, Informative)
I did that on my comptuer when I was younger. You flick the switch it loads into windows, just like magic! My family loved it, as they were having trouble managing the mouse (double clicking can be a bitch), let alone the OS.
What? (Score:3, Funny)
What about NT4.0? (Score:3, Interesting)
More accurate high point == buying DOS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maximum point of dominance (Score:5, Insightful)
With Windows 95, they took over the desktop... DOS was hidden, OS/2 defeated, and with Office 95 shipping WELL before Wordperfect ported to Win32... With Win95 they grabbed a desktop monopoly, Office monopoly, and pushed NT Server as highly competitive with Netware and inevitably overtaking them.
It'd be another 2 years before Netscape made Microsoft wet-itself, panic, and get itself into anti-trust trouble... the SAME anti-trust trouble that caused IBM to use a third-party OS and off-the-shelf processor when creating the PC.
Microsoft's profits might grow, Win2K might have gotten NT capable of replacing the DOS/Windows combo (XP with XP Home edition finally banished it), but the high water mark was hit. When Win95 launched, everyone was excited, the cheap PC Platform got a lot of expensive Mac/Amiga capabilities. The next few years, Microsoft spent floundering around for expansion (most of which didn't pan out), focused on suffocating competitors like Netscape, and Bill Gates spent time being deposed for court cases...
So yeah, it was the pinnacle of their success financially, and the peak for him before he went from geek hero to generally appreciated business hero, before his downfall as tech villain... It was the end of his being able to focus on technology and products, and the beginning of managing legal problems.
Windows 95 -- right before the DOJ stepped in (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Windows 95 was a good time (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Sharepoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and every little department got their own Sharepoint site, which you needed to be separately granted access to, only they never remembered that and would constantly send out Sharepoint links that nobody else had permissions to access. And we had no cross-site search facilities (I assume *that* at least is possible, our people just didn't implement it) so if you didn't know which of a dozen different sharepoint sites your document was on, tough luck.
Yeah there's nothing I like better than wanting to look up a list of networks, which should be nothing more than a few lines of text, but instead I get to download an MS Word document or an Excel Spreadsheet and load up the respective clients, in my browser, from my office 2,000 miles away from the Sharepoint server. Several minutes later I can now read a dozen lines of plain text! WOOO!
Thanks, Bill!
It was amazing to a twelve year old (Score:4, Insightful)
When my parents threw out their dos disk-boot comp and brought home a packerd-bell with 95 it was a new world. AOL, and computers, were like a whole new branch of literacy. Things like Encarta were just boondoggling. I can see why this would be a high point to Gates, to me it was a high point, when comps. were like like exploring a forest full of unknowns.
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.
High-point of Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
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
Microsoft High Points: (Score:4, Informative)
2) Windows 98 se
3) Windows XP sp1
4) Getting that contract with IBM
5) Strong arming governments through bribes
6) Bundled monopolism (Internet Explorer 5)
7) Copying Apple
8) Not being brown like Ubuntu
Other than that, I don't really see many MS high points, and I've kind of been watching them the whole time. I kind of liked Qbasic for a minute. It was handy, but I think they bought that from somebody when it was mostly feature complete, then fucked it up later. I can't remember now.... Oh the weary and toil of years of tech support have ravaged me, Microsoft, you bloated, retarded, retarding, evil, slow, relentless monopoly. Would somebody please make a Linux distro to put you to rest indefinitely.
Re:How about.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone likes there job, the completion of the task is the high-point, the money is a benifit, and when the income gets to a certain point, especially in cases such as Bill Gates, the money becomes self-sufficient, and therefore completely arbitrary, and taken for granted, like breathing air, its only when you dont have it that it becomes precious.
Re:How about.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whereas Windows 95, was a HUGE step over DOS and Windows 3.x
The first time you drive a Ferrari, its exciting as hell, the second Ferrari you drive is nice, but not quite as exciting. You'd need to climb into an F1 to get that thrill back, and... Microsoft really hasnt done that since 95...
Re:High Point? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:95 wasn't so bad.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:95 wasn't so bad.... (Score:5, Informative)
Only by Mocrosoft standards.
At the time 95 was launched, SGI was putting 64-bit IRIX [wikipedia.org] machines [wikipedia.org] on people's desktops.
OS/2 3.0 ("Warp") [wikipedia.org] released in 1994 was better then Win95.
Then there was NeXTSTEP [slashdot.org], Apple Mac, etc. - all better then Microsoft.
Microsoft "won" because they ran on cheaper hardware. In no way was their software superior.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)