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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."
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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!
Best news since 1998!!!
I read that as "Microsoft Retries Windows 98" and I thought, "Didn't they learn the first time around?"
Fact: Windows 98 is dying
It is common knowledge that Windows 98 is dying. Everyone knows that ever hapless Windows 98 is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which Windows 98 is the worst off of an admittedly suffering Windows 98 community. The numbers continue to decline for Windows but Windows 98 may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
All major marketing surveys show that Windows 98 has steadily declined in market share. Windows 98 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Windows 98 is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes Windows 98 is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: Windows 98 is dying
cpeterso
IAALS.
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?
-=*(CC)*=-
...one day they'll be back. Trying to coax 98 out of retirement for 1 more mission. At first, 98 will be adament that he is retired. But then, they will tell him about an evil so great...
Blame Sun for forcing you to retire a product. They would have retired Win98 by now anyway. It's over five years old.
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.
I walked him through the process and told him that Win 98 support was going out the window at year's end. This isn't the first time this story has graced /.. He didn't seem to care and has no plans to upgrade until the hardware gives out and the harddrive fails or something like that.
Then he's buying a mac...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Let's look on the bright side, Windows ME is still in circulation.
Long life to an OS which filled my life with the joy of rebooting, freezing and hardware failure blue screens (since the day of its presentation).
It will be missed! :'-(
... Microsoft is not retiring Win98 SE, only versions of Win98 prior to SE. See this.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Who are we going to call for support of our office machi... oh... right... we never did get any support did we...
Flamebait?
A Win98SE box runs no services. No DCOM, no RPC, no IIS, no "Remote Support", no MSN. With a couple of tweaks to rebind (or unbind) NetBIOS, it listens on no ports.
Use a third-party email client and a third-party browser to avoid the Outleak/IE holes, and the poster's right. For a clued-in user (i.e. someone smart enough not to click on every stupid attachment some bozo mails him), Win98SE is more secure than XP.
Is Win98 a good operating system? Hell no. It's a glorified DOS shell. Get your trojan running anywhere on that machine, and j00 0wn t3h b0x. But in order for that to happen, the end user pretty much has to cooperate.
...but what about those of us who speak Aramic?
The point is that it's there for those inclined to see, to do, to touch, and to modify. And it makes all the difference.
-Sara
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?
But they can. No joe user would dwelve into kernel editing, but with linux a developer can, without having to pay $1000s to microsoft. In fact, the tools required to edit the kernel come with the linux distribution. Just because it's only 0.000000000001% of the users doesn't mean that it's still not a good thing.
What if MS released the windows 98 source code under the GPL or a BSD or Apache style license? Probably that 0.000000000001% of developers who care enough will take it, fix some of the annoying bugs and features in it and create a windows 99 release that can be used by anyone to patch windows98 and create a useable free version (think dr-dos being released and now used as a minimul dos environment by various companies, ie: apple's virtual pc uses it as a base dos install).
Maybe that wouldn't happen, maybe it would. Without he code being available, it *can't*.
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.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
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.
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.
Alright, you can go ahead and make your millions supporting Win98. But here's a few less painful ways to make a living:
1) Break your own legs in front of audiences. Every night.
2) Test new versions of salt and its ability to make paper cuts hurt.
3) Test the newest Windows UIs until your eyes bleed. Part time only; no one could do an eight-hour day.
4) Try to get Mobsters to pay protection money.
5) Become a mercenary and invade China. Alone.
6) Do an undercover report on how to get out of a Mexican Prison by doing so first hand.
Good luck!
- The Amazina Llama