Slashdot Mirror
The Relevance of Windows
Josh Fink writes "ZDNet has up an article exploring whether of not Windows is still relevant. In the age of 'Web 2.0' both older folks who remember the days before Windows and younger folks who have never known anything else are beginning to see Microsoft's offering as old news. From the article: 'Before closing the books on the Age of Windows, however, let's not get too caught up in the fashion of the moment. The water-cooler crowd may take a dim view of "Win-doze" for all the right reasons. Still, Microsoft's archrivals continue to view it as a product with a potentially make-or-break impact on their businesses. In fact, two of them--Adobe Systems and Symantec--are lobbying European regulators to get tough on Microsoft. The European Union already has an unresolved antitrust dispute with Microsoft, and Adobe and Symantec would be silly not to play that card for all it's worth. So this is what they're doing.'"
This article is somewhat out there. How can an operating system with such market share be irrrelevant ?
And herein lies... I'll take the OS I hate if it means that I can play my video games. And I'm not the only person who thinks that way. Until hardware manufacturers start taking Linux seriously and come up with decent video drivers (the sound and networking drivers for all of my systems work fine), then Linux won't be a player in the games market. Likewise... even if there's decent video drivers for Linux, there's still the problem where game producers don't take either Linux or MacOS seriously. Software like Cedega will probably do wonders for that situation in the long run, but you still have the problem of decent video drivers.
Overcome those hurdles, and Windows will no longer be relevant. Until that time, though, it's very much relevant, and no amount of OSS evangelism is going to fix that.
You are right about one thing, though... the connection to the Internet is a deal-breaker. It's just that every OS is the current generation has the ability to connect to the Internet, and a wide variety of options for software that uses it. Heck... most of us can probably get the Internet on our phone. It may be a deal-breaker, but it's an irrelevant one.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Adobe and Symantec are perfect examples of why Windows isrelevant. Software companies are not properly supporting other operating systems. Although Adobe still builds graphics apps for the Mac, they support for Linux is, at best, tepid; they rarely even bother supporting Mac on non-graphics applications, such as Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro, which they acquired years ago). Symantec's support for non-Windows operating sytems is anything but legendary (ex. management console for corporate AV is all Windows).
I second this. As someone who has tried all three 'flavors' (Windows for general use, Mac for art, Linux for development), I can safely say there is still a 'need' each OS provides, that general Internet usage and cross-platform capabilities don't account for. I whole-heartedly think each OS has a strength that 'tunes' itself for a specific task, and so using Linux or Mac for work (while leaving Windows for more time-wastable tasks) is a fair shake.
I see Windows as an unabashedly 'generic' OS, and hence it doesn't lend the same spark to it that Mac or Linux do. I think people are perhaps taking the WIMP interface for granted, sure, but Windows begs to be fucked-up in ways that the other two don't.
Windows is fine if it came with the PC. Otherwise, I'd probably use Linux or Mac.
First, this idea of a web-only network computer type world is great for the readers of Slashdot and ZDNet where complaints of my 6Mb pipe getting enough throughput. People tend to forget that broadband is not universal in this country even for businesses. 70% percent of all US businesses are less than 10 people which equates to 1 Trillion dollars in revenues, this is the foundation of our environement. Only about half of these small business have broadband access, so you expect them to dial up to use a AJAX version of QuickBooks? Go out side the US and it gets worse, there are major manufacturing firms in Asia and India who power is still an issue let alone bandwidth. ASP, SaaS, and Web 2.0 is not an option for a large segment of businesses worldwide and will not be for years to come. Local OSes will be needed for the decade to come for most businesses. Businesses drive the majority of software revenue.
This is why windows will still be relevant, I just ordered my mom a dell system with a monitor for $500. It comes with windows, I unpack the computer hook it up, install office, subscribe to anti-virus subscription, and make sure windows updates are set to automatically download and install. After this I bet I will never have to touch this computer for her again until she is ready to buy a new one. She will be able to telecommute to work, she will be able to surf the internet, get email, do her taxes, edit he pictures from her camera and do it quickly, reliably, and with no hassle at all. For most people this is the reality of windows, it isn't this unstable, BSOD throwing, pile of crap everyone makes it out to be. With a little caution towards security on the users part there is nothing it cant do for the average computer user.
There's nothing stopping major improvements to the kernel. As I understand it, the problem is that the kernel maintainers seem to have a specific desire to *not* maintain a stable interface against which drivers can be written, the reasoning being that if the drivers are open source, then the changes required by the new interface will be trivial to implement. So, the kernel maintainers make a point of not bothering to maintain a stable interface for driver developers over the long term to discourage binary-only drivers.
Guess what - those hardware manufacturers who are releasing binary-only drivers aren't going to suddenly decide to release open-source drivers. They have a lot of intellectual property in there that they either cannot afford to be disclosed to their competitors, or cannot disclose due to licensing requirements from 3rd parties.
If the kernel wasnt such a moving target, it would be easier for hardware vendors to release one set of drivers that will work on a large range of kernel versions. I'd imagine having to maintain multiple releases of the same driver for different point releases of kernel contributes a lot to the perceived apathy of hardware vendors towards linux. Before this gets marked as a troll, think about the number of 'i upgraded my kernel from x.y.z to x.y.z+1 and ABC stopped working' comments that accompany so many kernel release announcements