Microsoft Retires Windows 98

prostoalex writes "Complying with the court requirement related to Sun-Microsoft lawsuit over Java, Microsoft is retiring Windows 98, SQL Server 7, Office XP Developer Edition and some other products."

Comments

So?

[dolo666]

Windows 98? But they are on XP now...
So I guess it's no big deal. How does this harm Microsoft? Win98 is (was) a nice and stable gaming platform, but XP is very stable for gaming too. This counts as a win on the record, but it's still too little too late, imho. Sun should be awarded more rights over *current* and *future* Microsoft products, as a penalty. This could get interesting!

Re:So?

[Frymaster]

How does this harm Microsoft?

actually, it helps them. there are millions of administrative assistants and other corporate flunkies who have been happily using win 98 for years.

now that end of life is officially declared, the it deaprtmnt will probably force upgrades on all those people - and, of course, pay the necessary licensing fees to redmond.

microsoft: taking a bad ruling and turning it into a cash cow. again.

Re:So?

[bloodrose]

Cash cow yes bad ruling far from it. Windows 98 was a decent platform for those who didnt want to bother about more advanced topics, but it as many things slowly loose their appeal to support after a while as well as the invention of "newer" technologies, but honestly who reaps the benefit of this "Cash Cow". Not just Redmond. Usually when a peice of software (os or otherwise) is "retired" supporting companies (ISP's, repair shops, etc...) lag behind about a year or more before declaring that they will not support it. For example, this year an ISP I worked for finally decided not to support Win 95 anymore. The repair shops that are in town that still support these "older" technologies will reap the benefits in that users who first turned to microsoft will turn to them instead before even considering to upgrade.

Re:So?

[Ray Radlein]

Windows 98SE is still the baseline gaming platform for Windows gaming, and certainly represented a local maximum in stability -- it is worlds more stable than its predecessors (Win95 and 98 original), and it is also more stable than its immediate successor, WinME. And while the NT branch of the family was sometimes more stable than 98SE (and sometimes not), not until XP has game support come anywhere near being equal to that of 98SE.

98SE is, of course, far from perfect, but I, for one, still use it (don't worry, though -- I dual boot with Red Hat). When my mother-in-law got a new computer with XP on it, I had to spend a couple of weeks hacking and slashing away at its bells and whistles (and security holes and spyware) before it would run acceptably.

XP also suffers from the classic Microsoft "your OS knows what's best for you, and you'd better like it" syndrome. On the other hand, after five years, most of the operational innards of Win98 have been well mapped by generations of hardy explorers, and there are plenty of tools available for tweaking it just so.

Obviously, Win98SE is not the greatest OS of all time; but, in terms of relative stability combined with widespread application compatability, it is certainly the most successful OS Microsoft has ever produced.

I suppose you could look at it as being similar to the late 19th century British cavalry saber -- a form which realized its ideal expression at the same time as it became obsolete.

Hollow victory

[cybrchrst]

The only thing this means is that people that still have their Packard Bells and Dells and the such with Windows 98 OEM copies are not going to be able to do Windows Updates and are basically going to have to upgrade to another PC if they want support. Any guess as to what OS their next PC is going to run?

Nice way of spinning it

[gilesjuk]

Blame Sun for forcing you to retire a product. They would have retired Win98 by now anyway. It's over five years old.

for better? or for worse?

[musikit]

although i think it's for the better. get bad code out of public hands. a couple of reasons why i think it's a bad idea

1. force people to upgrade
1.1 forces people to spend money on something they may not need
1.2 forces people to use that windows activation thing
2. security. no more patches for win98. this means that the small group of people with win98 are always going to be vulnerable to internet viruses. Upgrade you say? what if you can't afford it?

i'm sure there are tons more reasons. in fact i'd like to heard more below but these are the two things that worry me because i have very little money and family/friends still using 98.

Re:Upgrade

[king-manic]

Realistically, only about 0.1% of *nix users ever even think about touching kernel source. For windows users it's be down to about 0.0001% that even know what the kernel is. So the source would be about as useful as a 4000 page manual written in Aramaic, translated from the original babalonian through french then swedish and finally chinese.

Others Should be able to legally support it then.

[Linus Sixpack]

When the car manufacturors stopped making older cars a whole industry sprang up supporting older models. The Car companies had at first said to the consumer -- upgrade its not supported.

Car part companies won a major legal win where they were allowed to make parts, against the wishes of the car manufacturers because there was an over-riding consumer interest.

At what point must the publishers of a de-facto standard publish its source code to allow others to help the userbase when they choose not to?

Re:Upgrade

[glenrm]

I would take that a step further and say what about a useful modification that one of these 0.0001% make that everybody else starts using. Only a few people starting making the MOD to Half-Life called Counter Strike yet it is more popular than the original.

Re:Upgrade

[lightsaber1]

That's not Microsoft's business practice and probably never will be. Just because we like the idea of open source, doesn't mean everybody does. Microsoft can make more money by hiding its source and not allowing modification, so they can pay their developers more, and so on and so on. Just let it be. Those that prefer the closed source model can go there and the rest can go open source...who says everything has to use the same model? It's a free market society (in North America at least), and there are no laws against it.

Re:Truly Sad.....

[Tackhead]

> Seriously, no trolling, I mean it. I made the switch from Windows to Linux after seeing ME being a step back from 98 and XP being not much better. Now I know why I end up in an argument with every other web designer in the group!

While we're at it - Win9x was much more recoverable than NT/XP/2K. If an XP box dies on boot due to a fux0r3d registry, you reinstall because the "recovery console" doesn't actually let you run any executables that might help you "recover".

Win9x has a corrupt registry? No problem! Boot to DOS off a floppy. Add a line to MSDOS.SYS that that says BootGUI=0. Poke around in C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP and find the last 4-5 versions of the registry. Extract somewhere safe, use ATTRIB to deprotect the corrupt registry, and overwrite.

CHKDSK/SCANDISK not cooperating? No problem in 9x. Boot to DOS and image the drive with Ghost before CHKDSK can corrupt anything.

Some twit's stupid installer overwrites MSVCRT.DLL with a borked version that breaks half your other applications? On XP, you're screwed - can't overwrite it 'cuz it's always in use. On 9x, boot to DOS and overwrite it yourself with a known "good" version. The same techniques apply to trivially expunge MS Outleak Excess and other borkware.

In this context, 9x is less secure than XP per se, but when the "security" you're trying to break is keeping you from manipulating files on your own bloody hard drive, sometimes that's a Good Thing.

Somewhere between NT and Longhorn, single-user machines that ran Microsoft operating systems ceased to be Your Computers and became Bill's Computers. Because it was based on DOS, a 98SE box is always going to be Your Computer.