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Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point'
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?"
Seriously tho' - take a look at the photo of Bill & Steve answering questions - have you ever seen such defensive body language? I almost felt sorry for them - but then I remembered they were responsible for Windows 95.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
How about right before Mozilla was released?
Property is theft.
His big fat pay cheques and becomming one of the wealthiest men in the world? That's not a highpoint?
They were high when they developed it?
That would explain Windows ME.
The Mothership
How about Windows 2000? I still use it and have no real issues with it, unlike when I've used XP.
Ballmer tried to counter Vista's reputation as a mistake and failure. CBS did not miss this.
The Register has an article 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.
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
The time that Windows 95 came out was probably the transition from him being somewhat known outside of the computer industry, to being really well known (It was the time during which he bacame richest person). So he probably felt that he had a lot more baggage to carry after that and perhaps it wasn't as fun.
I am not a fan boi (IANAFB), but I would say Windows 2000 is Microsoft's best operating system. I know there are those who would disagree, but the reason I say this is:
-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"
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Bob?
But if I were being absolutely honest, I'd probably say that XP was a high point--possibly the high point for Microsoft. In many ways, it doesn't suck quite as much as its predecessors. A lot of people and a lot of companies like it.
Bill Gates can't say that, though, because Vista's biggest competitor right now is Windows XP...
Ubuntu, or Fedora, or RedHat, or choose. Good times ahead. // This is my opinion.
As much as it pains me to admit it, Windows 95 was a big moment in PC history. The death (slowly) of DOS, plug and play, functional networking, Direct X, gateway to 32-bit computing--all were huge at the time. Yes, OS/2 was as good or better, yes, Mac OS was still better in 1995, and yes, BeOS was soon to show everyone up. But for the needs of the many (and the needs of a world who would soon crave the Internet and 3D gaming) Windows 95 was huge: warts, blue screens and all.
Windows 95 actually wasn't that bad. If you ignore all the random BSODs, it was a decently advanced OS for the time. Though just about everyone knew that Macs were better, it offered a cheap, easy-to-learn GUI for DOS that could run older Windows applications. And other then OS/2 (which really wasn't much different then Windows...) and a few obscure variants of UNIX (remember, this was before Linux could be installed without being a technology wizard) you didn't have much choice if you had an Intel computer other then to use '95 and honestly, compared to recent failures, '95 wasn't so bad....
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Anybody who doubts the veracity of this claim obviously isn't old enough to remember Windows 3.1.
>but didn't mention Vista
Curious, but he didn't mention "Bob" either. I would have thought meeting, romancing, and marrying Melinda would rate a mention as well. Might make for a rough night in the Gates household over that.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Well, I don't feel like deciphering the exact context of the assertion (by reading TFA of course), but in a way, yeah, 95 was a high point. I remember all the excitement people had when 95 was about to come out. Long lines, news reporters hyping it up. When, since then, has a new Windows release generated so much genuine excitement? They were rock stars back then.
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.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Windows 95 was freaking advanced. Sure, yes, not compared to the awesome *nix but in the Windows world it was a HUGE step forward. It also laid the groundwork of the awesome delivery of XP.
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
...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.
I always remember Windows NT4 transitioning into Windows 2K. This was the first time I felt like a version of Windows actually worked. I only had to reinstall it once a year to clean up the crud. It most of the time shut down when I asked it to. It for the most part let me run my programs without blue screening. I think others would agree with me it was a high point Windows 2K. I would also bet a lot of people are still using it over XP.
while windows 95 was freaken terrible, it did introduce the windows interface that is still in use today (start button, taskbar, desktop) the interface in vista might be shinier, but the functionality is still about the same.
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!
-I only code in BASIC.-
Has Bill already forgotten about the Softcard. That was a pretty good product from when Microsoft was in their prime.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I thought MS-DOS was the high point ...
I honestly thought NT 4.0 was a great OS; it was the paradigm shifter that brought down OS/2 and really lasted for a while.
As anyone who has actually used Windows knows, Bill wasn't talking about OS quality, features, security or stability; he was talking about adoption rate and profit. Windows 95 rode the new wave of consumer PCs and access to the Internet. MS made bundles of money on it and 98 (which was little more than an incremental update to Windows 95.)
I'd figure the major high point would be Bill Gates buying Tim Patterson's 86-DOS for $50,000 and selling it to IBM and the clones for bazillions.
Before Win95, Apple has a small but real Market, IBM made noise with OS/2, someone was pushing GEOS (came with my multimedia upgrade kit at some point), and most computers booted to DOS and ran Wordperfect 5.1/DOS and or LOTUS 1-2-3 and connected to the Netware box. Even if most OEMs shipped with Windows 3.11, computers didn't always boot it. The real data was a 3270 terminal away. Microsoft's high-end OSes NT Workstation was a novelty, NT Server was an also ran.
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.
Not sure if I've got all the history right, but if I do, I can see why this would be a highlight for dear old Bill. Windows 95 at first shipped without IE, then included it and by 1998, Bill was embroiled in a nice stressful antitrust case with the DOJ. So Windows 95 represents the height of his power-grabbing, smash-the-competition days. Also, Windows 95 was the first time Bill became cool -- remember the Rolling Stones singing "Start me up" over the start button? They were high in those days, for sure -- high and mighty.
Ah, I remember way back when Windows XP was released, all the Lunix zealots tried to paint that as a failure, too.
Kind of ironic how they are now putting it forth as the greatest operating system ever created. But intellectual consistency isn't really that important among the Stallmanistas.
I predict that when the next desktop version of Windows is released, all the Lunix Zealots will be whinging about how terrible it is compared to Vista, and how Vista was the Greatest OS EVAR.
Windows XP is/was nice... but it wasnt really an exciting achievement, I mean it could be said that XP is just an advanced Windows 95...
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...
Folks, honestly, Windows 95 was a high point for me as well....
I started my career in the OS/2 world, as a tech support guy focusing on a real complex banking application that ran on the OS/2 Platform.
When I first had in my hands the Win95 release... I honestly could not believe how innovative it was.
Obviously, Microsoft is losing groung in innovation, however I suspect that Bill's "High Point" was very justified. I know. I shared it with him.
right... the VxD and virtual driver model that 95/98/ME used was a steaming pile of donkey turd. In the grand comparison of things, it was a security nightmare.
But consider that it was the first MS OS (for consumer!) that was 100% GUI. Yes, it was really running on top of DOS 7.0. But it also installed and booted up to a GUI, and all of the configuration/tweaking/etc. was a major step forward.
You need to compare it against the alternatives in 1995, not the alternatives in 2008. Yes, NT 4.0 came out in 1994 and had basically the same user interface, but NT was intended for an enterprise and server environment, and was never marketed towards consumers until Windows XP came out.
So.... yes. Windows 95 *was* a high point for MS. It was an enormous step forward for the company.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
95 was effectively the near-fatal blow to Apple and nearly sent the company into a death spiral. Of course, Vista seems to be their near-death experience.
Windows 2000 should get an honorable mention, one most stable OS's they put out to date.
It was a time of hope, promises and expansion.
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.
I can understand how he'd consider 95 a high point, at least in terms of excitement. It was a bit of a cultural phenomenon and extremely popular. It was the first widely-adopted even-your-grandma-can-use-it OS. They had taken Windows beyond a glorified file manager, and it was used by lay-people and techies. There was a zeitgeist around it that I haven't really felt until OS X in the last few years. I'd count that as a high point.
Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"
Could we keep the Micro$oft bashing relevent please. This is nonsense.
No, I don't remember that. I remember the Rolling Stones singing "Start me up" in their 1981 album "Tattoo You". I have that album in four different versions, LP, cassette, CD, and mp3, so I should know.
Fourteen years later, microsoft bought the right to use that music in their marketing, but that's a different story.
For some reason I doubt they love 95 for the technical leap ahead it was. Else they'd probably love 2k more, which was truely a revelation. Finally you didn't have to choose between stability and compatibility. 2k was the OS Microsoft can be proud of.
I think what they love 95 for was the hype it created. It was a huge success, not because it was so terribly good (it wasn't bad, actually, but it was anything but a pinnacle of OS design), but because of the hype surrounding it. Hell, people who didn't even have a computer bought it. It was a hype success if there ever was one. The world loved them. Of course that's something anyone would enjoy.
Since then, the criticism has increased. Before 95, there was hardly anything really noticable of MSs attempt to monopolize everything and use their market share muscle to force companies to do their bidding. And this of course reflects on the reception of their products. Of course people start looking for the bad things. It feels good to badmouth someone you just love to hate.
When 95 came onto the market, they were not hated in the IT community. They were liked by many, actually. They offered an easy to use OS that you could code for in a fairly easy way (if you disagree, you never tried to code for Macs before 2000). What else could you ask for?
The decline of MSs goodwill started after 95. When they muscled into the browser market, when they tried to push Linux off the shelves with adhesion contracts, that's when their star began to decline.
So I can well understand why they see 95 as their favorite OS. Back then, the MS world was all fun and candy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hated win95 and still do. However win95 united a world living in darkness. It is in this collective unity that the power of microsoft would shine. Best of all is that it could run on a 386 with only 4 megs of ram. No major OS since has been able to top that. Win95 opened up an era of peace and love. It is the reason we have what we enjoy today!!! No more would we be mindlessly toiling away at a dos screen. Now anyone could enjoy the desktop. All could be united in a country that had no walls and no limits.
To infinity and beyond!!!!
TFA quotes Gates as saying "We got to dream about a software industry and the greatest tool of empowerment ever - the personal computer - and be part of creating that in terms of the platform and the applications,"
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?
There is something Zen about the parent post.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I was able to run an OS that was like OS/2 Warp but actually had mainstream applications for it.
ME may have sucked more, but XP did suck before SP2
Have you forgotten SQL slammer, sasser & all our other wormy friends already?
Good lord how old were you when Win95 came out? Win95 needed special drivers for everything be it a mouse wheel or sound card, Win95 still needed a form of DOS to boot from, there was NO USB SUPPORT in the initial Win95, keep in mind. Windows XP is a very, very mature OS that has a lot of things built into it that were simply hacked or patched onto the Win95 kernel. The XP Kernel has an almost entirely different (NT) code base. Yes they both have animated boot screens, but other than that they're generations apart in OS design. XP has a ton of UI tweaks, especially at the driver level that you don't really notice until you start working with W2K and XP boxes side by side. Microsoft may be a HUGE company, but it takes years to go back and tweak litterally every part of the OS from basic functionality to help menus and 3rd party driver installs. I'd say XP is what 95 became, after seven years of hard work.
moox. for a new generation.
I'd like to see you switch from Windows XP to Windows 95... you'd be begging to go back after a couple of hours.
No sig today...
Yes?
The best OS from Microsoft was Win2000 (sp4). DirectX, no WGA/paranoia checks, highly polished UI (the standard Windows theme peaked with 2k), true multitasking and real software compatibility (compared to the only other earlier worthwhile OS.. NT4 workstation).
Well, maybe the developers...
XP didn't have WGA or DRM, they were added later (WGA was after SP2).
:-)
>"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"...
No sig today...
"Microsoft sucked at it, but their goal of usefulness for an interface over perfecting the "humanity" of it pushed them ahead."
I wonder why the HELL msoft claims mshlp32.exe doesn't "meet their standards". Could it be it is the new place that the NSA/CIA backdoors reside? Or, is it something else.
I use Lotus SmartSuite 9.5 & 9.8, and they are hamstrung in vista. I am considering ways to ask my computer maker to replace my vista disk with XP, if they'll do it if i send in the original media. I don't know why Lotus Approach is one of those apps that has problems running correctly in vista when most of the other SmartSuite apps work fine (for me, so far as I can tell, and other than any official listings in the Lotus knowledge base...)...
This really is a shame. I wish Lotus would do something... like release to Open Source whatever code they DO own, and let Linux hacks restore the functionality that is missing after removing the non-IBM/Lotus-owned code. If they update the tools making the GUI, then SmartSuite could probably have a resurrection/renaissance of sorts.
But, killing the winhlp32.exe and it not working correctly. I went to:
http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1244222,00.html
and still have not been able to get it to run from WITHIN SmartSuite, but at least the thing runs help files if I click them externally. Seems some of the charting elements are opening slowly. I may have to manually rebuild all my database forms one by one to determine the problem. Would be nice if I could find a GUI that TOTALLY mimicked Approach so I could bolt it on top of any underlying db I want or allow others to use, but be OS agnostic. I may have to resort to some of the tools in Linux, finally. But, man, if only IBM/Lotus would allow a handful of Linux programmers privileged access to help IBM do what IBM seems reticent to do, or too loathe to do it with its own resources. Still, the WordPro and Approach, and even 1-2-3 combo would be nice, and seem to offer more than the resurrected/misnamed Symphony is able to do for most users of SmartSuite.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Win95 was crap, especially if you had a mac. It was a joke so bad it was sickening. Rev C win95 actually worked so then it was just a bad rip-off.
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Seriously, what is the fucking deal with Sharepoint? Why do people really like this thing? At my last job we had just started making headway getting people to start using Wikis and then in comes the Sharepoint servers. The wikis get abandoned and now Sharepoint works great...for everyone using Windows and IE. Everyone using Macs, Linux, and Firefox tough luck.
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!
Windows 2000 took the NT codebase and made it way friendlier, which was far easier than taking the "DOS in Windows" codebase (95/98/ME) and making it stable. Yeah, I know that ME came after 2K, sue me, but it basically was the same deal. It was downhill after 2K, as it was irresistible to Microsoft not to encrust the next operating system with more useless eye-candy and cruft.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Actual quote: When I asked about the high points, he said "Windows 95 was a nice milestone."
His comment might not have anything to do with software quality. It might have had to do with discovering the full value of hype. Win95 got hyped
All you old farts going on about how 95 blows chunks are missing the big picture, Windows 95 was so far removed from 3.1 from a usability standpoint that it made PC's what they are to millions.
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.
Smoking reefer with all the Apple guys, Doing acid with all the Apple guys, Eating Peyote with all the Apple guys, Drinking enough alcohol to sink a battleship with all the Apple guys, and then stealing all their good ideas!! 1.)??? 2.)??? 3.)Profit!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Like I said, KDE did things better. Any modern Linux distribution is better for me and 99% of all users.
One of the main reasons Linux is better is the choice it gives. Windows users don't really have a choice about which version they use. Hardware and non free software vendors move on and old versions of Windows are left stranded. I might be able to run Win95 in a virtual machine but what would I run on it, Office95? What printers could I use? I have not used Windows at home for years and I have not missed anything. Free software users have dozens of good choices for everything they want to do with their computer.
'95 was really the moment where the hype had to work. And it did. I remember lines out the door at midnight. Had it been less functional or cool than it was, competitors could have emerged and carved a niche, and the Windows lock-in wouldn't have happened. BeOS, unfortunately, was just a little late in the game and 95 was solidly entrenched by the time Be came out on commodity hardware.
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.
To this day, I still think Windows 3.1 was the greatest desktop environment Microsoft have put together.
;)
An unintrusive, simple, clean interface.
Of course, too simple for today, but quality wise, I think it was superior to Windows 95 and the rest.
I preferred its modular design. No built-in network code, internet browser or email client.
Of course, this approach wouldn't be practical in this day and age, as computers are marketed as home kiosks for uninterested people to browse YouTube, Myspace and Facebook...or maybe I'm just being cynical.
Shut the fuck up, twitter.
Probably the best thing they are putting out right now. Microsoft has never focused on it, but they may be beginning to realize its value. If they don't screw it up, Sharepoint could own corporate intranets the way that Google owns the web.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
at our organizaton we have several sharepoint servers. I have to say that as a typical MS product they do not work with anything other than IE and they have problems with Active Directory authentications....highpoint indeed
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I think I'm going to mod you and all the rest of the Twitter-stalkers "overrated" or "troll" too...I think really that _you_ are twitter sock puppets as well.
Windows ME. Harbinger of doom. Up until then, each step forward seemed like sort of a... step forward.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Would you rather that they copy the Mac, or come up with their own ideas. Now that's a scary thought...
I'm no fan of either Apple or Microsoft, but can you please back up your claims of horrible evil on Apple's part? Besides, it's not cute.
95 was certainly the high-point of new features and UI improvements. XP, though, was the high-point of stability and reliability. Vista... yeah, let's not talk about it.
Am I the only one here who thinks that milestone and high point are not synonyms? Windows 95 was definitely one, and definitely not the other.
Windows 95 was awesome... but the first versions were crap the 95b was the best one. But that said Vista is the best OS i have ever used. I am saying that with experience in leopard and ubuntu. Leopard is good and I enjoy using it but its not near the product of vista. And ubuntu is pretty much a joke when compared to the top player OS's. Why do you people hate vista so much? I have no problems and its explorer is revolutionary, its search feature has no equal and of course it is the most compatible OS. What i really love is when people talk about how great an OS is such as ubuntu or osx. Then they talk about how they run windows (vm or whatnot) so if they are so great why do you ever have to run windows? Windows is an OS that you can use and never have to dualboot or run a virtual machine, that only makes it superior. Though its missing expose which i really like but thats about it.
I'd actually have to argue that Windows '98, 2nd. edition was Microsoft's real "high point" - though I get the reasoning behind picking '95. (It was such a big jump from the look and feel, plus functionality of Windows 3.x.)
My experience with Windows '95 was that it tended to "self destruct" due to memory leaks and poor design choices for the internal "stack" it kept. It was pretty typical that a monthly reboot for Win '95 was required, if you didn't want it to progressively get unstable and sluggish.
It seemed like by the '98SE version, they'd hammered out a ton of those types of glitches and bugs. It wasn't perfect, but was probably about as close as they could get on that basic foundation.
"...99.9999% of people who can't fix it, leaving a mere handfull of developers who can..."
That implies that there are companies out there who have a few million employees. Unless, of course, only part of an employee can fix the problem.
Actually NT was the best OS that Microsoft ever created, even though a lot of its C code was "lifted" from other sources. It was an object-oriented DESIGNED OS with NO object-oriented code (Think C, not the crappy C++). It was release several years before Window 95 (i think in 1993) and is the foundation for Windows 2000 and XP. IMO the best OS of all-time is still Unix. I believe the biggest money-making OS is NOT any flavor of Windows, it is actually IBM 0S360 which made IBM billions and billions in 1960s Dollars.
Windows 95 was so high a point for Microsoft that it got Microsoft officially declared an abusive monopoly, violating its consent decree with the Justice Department by the way it bundled and sold Windows 95.
In fact, as abusive and monopolistic as Microsoft might have been before or since, only with Windows 95 did the corporation ever reach that "high" point.
--
make install -not war
No, I'm not smoking anything funny.
The reason why Win95 is fondly remembered by Bill may be because it created or at least gave more strength to the bonds that anchor the users to Microsoft. It was a good OS for that reason (it gave MS the foundations for at least 10 more years of market dominance).
However, with the web evolution, Bill is now sure that no other OS will ever be in that position, therefore it goes for the next best thing: hold the users data locked in Sharepoint server (without easy conversion tools to get them outside) and he may prevent those users from fleeing to Google or other competitors (including Open Source tools). So yes, Sharepoint is to take the same role as Win95 in cementing (as in binding) the Users/MS relationship.
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It was Microsoft's finest product, ever. It made it possible to run CP/M on your Apple ][.
Up until the X box, hardware was what they did best.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Win95 was also my high point because that is what finally convinced me to switch to Linux. Thank you Patrick Volkerding!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I'm talking about the population at large, not specific companies. A company can go to great lengths to hire people, they don't have to be already in the company. Contracts are a very common way to get work done without taking somebody on board permanently.
Sam ty sig.
Windows 2000 was the best they ever did. Well, besides msdos5.
Windows Vista Is 'A Low Point'!
God, who mods these things up so they float to the default page view? I was enjoying this article in Discussion2 until I noticed this useless crap.
Win95 was a high COMMERCIAL point. But NTWorkstation was a much better os to work with. And the Win95 GUI also borrowed heavily from a precious little thing called "Norton Desktop" for w3.1, if anyone cares to remember.
MSDOS 2 was when I thought Microsoft might do the right thing. They really modified their CP/M clone to add Unix/Posix style api, when there was absolutely no business reason, it was only to make it a nicer machine to write software for. And they did it in just a few months.
/dev and thus no file can be named "com" (until they finally fixed that crap about 2 decades after they should have).
Of course they did not really finish it and it has gone downhill ever since. I believe IBM insisted on a totally paranoid level of back-compatability, which is why we have backslashes in the filenames and no escape sequences in the stdio and no
But even seeing what they attempted it was unbelievably refreshing.
Anybody else have any thoughts about MSDOS 2.0?
I do agree that Windows 95 is their other high point. They really did some innovations in GUI design which you can see if you compare to contemporary X and Mac and NextStep:
1. The task bar which has an "icon" in it for a window *whether or not* the window was "open". *EVERYBODY* else only had the icon when the window was "iconized". This is a HUGE deal but everybody is so used to it now that they don't see it.
2. The start menu. Everybody else relied on searching through folders or using a shell command to start a program.
3. Removal of a graphical line between the resize window borders and the contents. I personally did this a bit earlier on Next (but not using Nextstep) and thought it looked really good, and was both very happy and also a bit mad to see my idea used by Microsoft. Compare Windows95 window borders with earlier ones and contemporary X ones and you will see how much cleaner they look.
Now get off my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Whatever some people say, I LIKE WINDOWS, Because it's the only commercial rootkit available!!!
"RMS is about extending your access control scheme onto my device." Not *your* device, bear in mind that there are places in the world where people work from company owned devices...
in her diaper. Seriously. A wiki, only you have to pay for it and search is broken. WTF?
I think the high-point in Microsoft during Gates' carerr definately has to be when they decided to remove the paperclip from Microsoft Office.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
- what Microsoft's priorities were. Compared to Windows 2 and 3, 95 was a revelation. It looked better, the interface was far better, there were even a couple of technical improvements. W95 is probably what made Microsoft's commercial success more than anything else; I remember a lot of people resisted moving away from it for a long time despite its all too many, all too obvious flaws.
But this comment from Gates really highlights that Microsoft's main priority has never been to produce a technically good product; to them look and feel are much more important. As I recall, they spent a lot of resources getting the user interface right - one can only assume they didn't spend nearly as much on getting it to actually work.
As a communo-socio-anarchist... who can charge five figures per speech.
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.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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
Program Intellivision!
When I installed Windows 95 on a virtual machine (just for the hell of it) I was baffled: that OS was much better than I recalled! I liked Explorer especially: the windows were intelligently sized and as little as it would get the UI would never feel crowded.
Snappy, screen efficient, running decently with as little as 4MB of memory... whoa. Installing using an (USB) floppy was a pain, sure, and I had to install and configure TCP/IP manually, still I was very impressed.
Then at some point for absolutely no reason, Windows decided to install Internet Explorer 4. And I went back to the Windows Experience I recallled...
"Optimising performance..." my ass.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
I'm sure Gates also considers his first billion a high point. And his 5th, his 10th, his 20th and finally his 50th. Also, 50% market share, 80% market share, 90% market share.
Come on people! Anyone here really believes these guys are driven by anything besides greed, for both money and power? The corporate culture of microsoft, its predatory and evil business practice, didn't spring up with Gates fighting it every step of the way. These guys made microsoft what it is, and all its greed and evil is but a reflection of their personalities.
Their high points are very likely related to what's important to them. No surprise not much they could state on record came up.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1) Solitaire
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.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I'm surprised he thinks highly of Sharepoint, it's the buggiest most undocumented framework i've ever had to use. Any project that involves development work often devolves into hacks to work around SharePoints many many many many flaws.
When NT4 arrived I felt that this is the future. It had the features that Windows 95 had combined with stability. It convinced me that Unix would be dead few years and I prepared to switch my professional focus from Unix to NT4. I had seen so many people praising dying architectures (IBM System 36, BTOS from Burroughs, DEC 10/20 and so on).
Luckily a guy named Linus from the other side of the Baltic sea proved me wrong and I have been running Linux as my main OS since about RedHat 6.0 or 6.1.
For a nice date: Call strftime(3C)!
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The purchase of Thawte resulted in a wad of cash that Mark Shuttleworth used to do some nice things with.
!
I find it interesting that some lightweight Linux distros are still cloning the Win95 look and feel, sometimes to pixel precision. I remember when Red Hat was practically a copy of the Windows interface.
Popular? Arguable. A milestone? You bet.
I suppose you have benchmarks to back that claim up...
?
No sig today...
Windows proved to be a very bad horse. If there was a different OS that has become popular instead, then PC would have being adopted more heavily and people were more RELAXED. But common, Windows makes people angry and not relaxed. Here and now is the perfect time for Apple OS to go for the whole market. No need AT&T for that :-)
When you see 5 comments in a row from the same person, then someone else adds one pointing this out, who is causing the bulk of the disruption?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You seem to have no idea what SharePoint actually is...
Windows 95 sucked giant testicles. It was inferior to Apple's System 7, and it was a poor joke compared to IBM's OS/2 Warp 3, and Gates knows it. The only reason Microsoft emerged from the dredge of civilization was that IBM and Apple were run by business suits who knew precious litte about technology or the needs of the average user.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
On a software project I was working on last year, two computers with XP Professional per site had to exchange data via a network share (mapped to a drive letter and treated much like a local drive). Buying server licenses was considered too expensive.
Now, with lots of data in the shared directory, performance sucked. So we did a lot of testing with various Windows versions as "server" and client. Both with the "main" software project and with a small test application one of us whipped up.
XP Professional -> XP Professional was the worst by far. The test application showed delays that depended on filesize, with the filesize/delay curve showing some really weird peaks.
Windows 2000 Professional -> Windows 2000 Professional was better. But still inferior to what I'd expect from sharing data over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Using an actual Windows 2000 Server to serve the data was fastest. This test case actually showed the sort of performance I expected over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Finally and to our surprise, Windows 98 as client performed best with the test application. As if the later versions performed some time-consuming negotiations that Windows 98 simply did not bother with.
I conclude that XP Professional (and to a lesser degree 2000 Professional) has either design issues or the performance was intentionally crippled, to make it less attractive for use as a "small server".
C - the footgun of programming languages
Actually, from Bill's viewpoint, Win95 really was as good as it got. Remember, Bill's a marketer, not a techie. W95 had iPhone style queues of people waiting to buy the new OS. Here in the UK they reported how the first customer to buy a copy got handed a phone so Bill could talk to him, personally. People were excited by the release. They wanted to use it.
It really was a triumph of marketing.
The trouble lay in the aftermath. Outside the hype zone, people quickly discovered that their existing systems weren't powerful enough to run the OS and that their existing software ran either much slower, or not at all - thus setting the pattern for future Windows releases. Of course, once you'd spent the additional money on a new computer, and new versions of the programs you used, there's no question that Win95 was in a great many ways superior to 3.1.1. But I don't think MS have since enjoyed that level of public trust.
No wonder Bill sees it as a high point. Happier times for Microsoft all round.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
To be frank Win95 was a necessary evil but ultimately a LOW POINT for many of us who actually used the old systems (dos / Win 3.1) and many of their apps. Even though Win95 had it's technical merits. It didn't get better till 98 and finally 2K / XP basically got to where Win95 should have been earlier in terms of stability, etc. The early versions of direct X were just downright shameful, try loading up an old copy of Mechwarrior 2 for windows if you want to see what I mean. Lots of old programs did moronic things (like try to forcefully install old versions of direct x, etc). There was a lot of BS windows caused IMHO in the shift to win9x/NT and it's children. The introduction of the windows registry is BY FAR the most evil thing windows brought into existence, no longer were applications EASILY migratable by a simple directory copy, you had to worry about programs migrating a bunch of BS in the registry, and the accumulation of "windows cruft" which slowly slows down the MS os's until one has to reinstall, even XP needs a re-install now and then if you are a heavy user constantly moving apps into and out of your system. Who here is annoyed that programs are no longer self contained and have their own copy of .dll or whatever special library/drivers/etc they need?
I think people here are forgetting all the awful crud that Win95/98/2K and XP introduced us to: The mammoth registry system and apps being able to secretly write to registry without your permission or say so behind the scenes, how many registry entries that perform different functions are named with those god awful {ABC123-XXXXZ-NNN} etc registry keys? There is a lot of cruft IMHO with the registry system and there was still DLL hell (and other similar things like it) until windows XP.
I know I haven't FORGOTTEN about all the BS.
The question is not whether his speeches remain libre, but whether he can be compelled to make them libre. I write OSS. That isn't good enough for Stallman -- he wants everything I write to be "free software", including the stuff I have not chosen to release under OSS licenses. (Like, say, the stuff that pays the rent.) Stallman makes some speeches available free as in beer. In one of them, he lays out his grand theory of IP.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_Software_and_Beyond:_Human_Rights_in_the_Use_of_Software
Way down in that document, he divides IP into 3 segments, and says how he would deal with them.
1) Useful IP: Programs, recipes, instructions on how to do things, must be free.
2) Works that state the views of certain parties: Stallman's speeches fall here, as well as op-eds, etc.
Let me quote directly: "Now here my answer is different, I don't think modified versions of these works contribute to society, all they do is misrepresent the authors. So I propose a compromised copyright system which says that everybody is free non-commercially to redistribute exact copies. But modifications require permission and commercial use require permission."
So there you have it, Stallman is free to remix, derive from, and commercially exploit the fruits of my labor (whether I like it or not), but I am not allowed to modify, derive from, or commercially exploit the fruits of his labor (unless he lets me). That sure sounds fair.
Not relevent to the discussion, but for completeness' sake:
3) Arts and entertainment: movies, paintings, & etc. 10 year exclusive rights to modification and commercial use.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
He said it in that interview with Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs: Before Win95 there was still a debate wether text UI or grafical UI was the way to go. After Win95 that debate was concluded in favour of the grafical UI.
The Windows line since 95 has one thing going for it (and I really can't believe I'm actually saying something like this) in that is has a strange way of rounding up all the manufacturers. Wonder why Vista is such a performance hog? So vendors can justify selling new hardware. That's why they go along with it. Remember when those bizar Windows Keyboards popped up all over the place with Win95? Same thing. Now they are commonplace.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Anyone remember Windows 95 B or whatever it was called? I think I even have one of the installation discs lying around somewhere. That "milestone" was so brilliant that they had to make and sell an updated version of it. Not even service pack, new subversion. Just stop doing business with Microsoft, Mkay?
Seriously, sharepoint? Costs way too much, is buggy, hard to extend (workarounds workarounds workarounds) and looks like crap.
Some people make a bunch of money because they 'know' SharePoint... they are SharePoint 'developers' or even SharePoint 'Architects'
(rethorical)Did you ever came across a well architected, customized, extensible SharePoint implementation?
For a usability/stablity prospective I think I have to agree with most that 2000 Pro was the high point. I think in some ways VS .Net/.Net Framework should be on the list too. It gave them a competitor to Java, a multi language virtual machines, and after several revisions still remains a solid competitor.
I'm guessing you replied to the wrong post?
-The search engine in sharepoint is crazy powerful. Read up on it. It's very programmable and has some of the best full text capabilities on the market (without paying hundreds of thousands) and 2007 added the ability to powerfully query structured data as well. You do know that MS has actually spun off the search engine as a seperate product, right? And that there's a LOT more to sharepoint search than just the little search box, right?
-What do wikis have to do with sharepoint? WSS 3.0 added the ability to add a wiki to a site, but it's neither the focus of sharepoint nor something you'd use in most situations. It's like saying, about ubuntu (what I'm posting this from...):
"Seriously. A program that lists the files in a directory, only it takes an hour to install and my mouse is broken. WTF?"
While ubuntu does have the "ls" command, it is not what ubuntu is about, and if you don't plug in your mouse it won't work. Does that mean your daughter shits out better software than ubuntu as well?
I know I'm feeding the troll, but flat out FUD is pointless.
GUI elements from NeXTSTEP, TrueType from Apple :)
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I always liked the Weird Al version.
http://www.mp3-download-lyrics.com/music/Weird-Al-Yankovic/Windows-95-Sucks_220634.html
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
BUT, the reason why Gates liked Win95 was that it marked the beginning of their illegal contracts with the OEMs, which prevented the OEMs from putting any other OS or desktop on their PCs, thus beginning 13 years of monopoly which created the massive stockpile of cash that made Gates the richest man in the world.
...
Win 3.11 FWG offered 32 bit protected mode, true apartment model multitasking, built in networking, remote desktop connections, and minimized the need for DOS. It was much better than Win 3.1 and, as history has shown, was superior to Win95 in speed and stability. Win95 was SO buggy, unstable and insecure that the ONLY WAY they could force people to stay with it was to make sure that it was their ONLY CHOICE. Monopolies do that.
Where was the FTC and the DOJ while this was taking place?
During Clinton's last term the DOJ brought action against Microsoft, not for violating the Sherman-Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which they surely did, but for "bundling" some apps with the Win95. Regardless, they won the case and the appeal, and Judge Jackson was sure that the only way to protect the American public was to break up Microsoft, just the way AT&T was broken up some years before.
Bill Gates must believe in miracles because he got one. George Bush defeated Al Gore and one of his first acts was to replace the successful DOJ team with a new team and changed their mission from one of prosecution to co-conspiracy.
Seizing the opportunity, and being the scofflaw that they are, Microsoft created a phony "grass roots" campaign (James Pendergrast led it and it became known as "astroturfing") accusing the government of "attacking" Microsoft because it was a "successful" corporate enterprise and the government was infested with anti-capitalist socialist. Congressmen even received letters with signatures of people whose place of residence were cemeteries! Despite that blatant abuse, and through political back room deals and payoffs, they got Judge Jackson replaced on the bench with a hyphenated name judge who was more compliant and had been given paid vacations to resorts where "law seminars" were taught on how to circumvent, from the bench, the codified restrictions on illegal and/or immoral business practices. This replacement judge was "successful" (how hard could it be to give up?) in negotiating an "agreement" with Microsoft which was so weak it was worthless precisely because it was toothless. And, to make sure Microsoft abides by this "agreement", the judge assigned three monitors to watch over Microsoft to be sure they didn't violate the "agreement", even though it was toothless. Microsoft didn't mind because they were given the privileged of choosing two of the three monitors. Not only that, the monitors were given offices on Microsoft's campus, where Microsoft could watch over and control them! Such a deal. One every convicted felon could only wish for. Not only that, the "agreement" effectively ended any chance of prosecuting Microsoft for other crimes and gave them carte blanc to continue similar crimes without fear of prosecution.
Strangely, Enron Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay publicly stated that the best way to view Enron was as the Microsoft of the energy field. Let's trust Lay, a Ph.D. economist, and examine Enron through a Microsoft-style window.
The most important tool Enron used to inflate its earnings was its ability to pay wages and other expenses in stock rather than cash.
More than 90 percent of all the wages paid to Enron executives were paid in stock, not cash. Investors often forget that all it takes to create new stock is a resolution of the board of directors and a photocopier.
Remarkably, the Internal Revenue Service allows a tax deduction for wages paid in stock, yet these same wages are not required to be charged as an expense to the income statement the public sees.
If you were operating a business, wouldn't you love to give your banker an income statement that excluded half of your wage ex
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It does indeed work alright for very simple customizations, but beyond that it falls flat on its face. Try decompiling it sometime and see what a joke it is. You don't even have to go that far really, just look at the libraries. The utilities namespace might as well be named SharePoint.IDoNotKnowWhereThis MethodGoesButWeNeedITBecauseOtherwise TheProductDoesNotWorkAlsoIUseItToReinventTheWheelEvenInMyOwnAPI.
As an interesting aside, I wrote some SP code for MS internal. Our code had to code through strict reviews and panels. The code analysis tools and review boards told us we had problems. When I asked, they said the following assemblies failed: Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, Microsoft.Office.Server.dll, etc. My reply of course was that MS owned the code in those assemblies, not my group, so take it up with them. Our code passed with flying colors and several internal people actually "asked" for our source (read: copy and steal). Funny they can't even pass their own code reviews.
I'd like to see you try to implement a forms auth SharePoint deployment properly and get all the functionality to work. It's documented by MS that it doesn't. Part of the reason is how windows auth works with their products, and another part has to do with the fact that when they went "gold," we found out that no one had properly tested forms authentication. I know this because I was on a call with their dev team at the time trying to implement an internal MS product that required it. Our call incited a shouting match with their own people for not testing it. It's still broken to this day.
I have no doubt that it works for your purposes which is great, but if you're out there doing a lot of complex implementations, you will soon find that there are so many wtfs you lose count. It seems to me you're judging without the proper experiences to back it up. Personally, I really do wish it worked like you said, but I can point to specific code that has no prayer of ever working. For instance, there are blatant logic and statistical errors in the KPI web parts, the SPDateTime control is all but broken for post backs and dates before 1900, the event model for lists and list items is almost useless by design, and the workflow engine crashes randomly because there are too many errors to even begin to count, That's just a short sampling. Shall we continue?
-What do wikis have to do with sharepoint? WSS 3.0 added the ability to add a wiki to a site, but it's neither the focus of sharepoint nor something you'd use in most situations. It's like saying, about ubuntu (what I'm posting this from...):
"Seriously. A program that lists the files in a directory, only it takes an hour to install and my mouse is broken. WTF?"
While ubuntu does have the "ls" command, it is not what ubuntu is about, and if you don't plug in your mouse it won't work. Does that mean your daughter shits out better software than ubuntu as well?
I know I'm feeding the troll, but flat out FUD is pointless. I agree there is some fud there, but......
1. The wiki is next to useless. I've never heard of anyone who has used wikipedia (which is also not the greatest) and has been satisfied with SharePoint's wiki.
2. The search engine can index a variety of content, but you also need to build an i-filter for a lot of things which isn't exactly something you do in 8 hours in most cases.
3. The search engine can barely search structured content. It's an entire long project in itself to get that capability to a place where it's easy for an average user. Further, you have to spend a lot of time to set up things properly for a lot of external structured data. For example, you'll have to use the BDC, get the data in there in a meaningful way that can produce results that aren't just an access style view into a SQL table, and then deal with the authentication situation (if you're not using kerberos, so help you god).
4. There is next to know fuzzy search, ngrams capability, etc. I hardly call that powerful. I agree it's great for exact matches and simple wildcards, but how hard is that?
5. It searches and indexes Microsoft formats rather well. Other formats, not so much.
6. The UI is horrendous and slow. You can customize it, but once again it requires time like all things. Most people don't have time.
7. The indexer has a hard time crossing authentication boundaries without some substantial adjustments to systems and/or trickery.
8. To some of the other wtf search people, you know you can create search scopes to achieve cross-site queries, search more specific content, etc?
9. It is a good search for the price if you need other capabilities. Buying it for the search alone still seems silly to me vs. other offerings.
...Gates' perfection of vapour-ware when he sold DOS before it was created. I think that THAT was the high point.
*** Don't be dull.***
Open source is a guarantee that things can be fixed legally and practically.
That depends on your company size, though. If you're big enough, your SLA with the vendor says that they will fix the problems legally, practically, and quickly (and you've probably got the source in escrow, just in case). With open source, you have to hope that the code base is transparent enough that you can find someone to understand and fix it.
I remember times when we had problems with the operating system of a large, high-end vendor; they flew out the "father of the OS" to troubleshoot on-site and fix them for us. Try doing that with Cyrus IMAPD. Sure, there are some open-source projects where you can do that; there are also many you can't, because the authors have day jobs, college careers, existing contracts, etc.
There's a reason Apple bought CUPS; it's because their OS depends on it, and they want to make sure they have someone who understands the internals on staff. But if you have to buy out every open-source project you use, you've lost the advantages of open-source.
No one checked the documentation in three years, so it was a shock that it was written in the DOS / Win95 era. (What was the original thought when you bought the software and saw that the documentation was written for systems 10+ years older than current OSes?)
No one followed up with the vendor, perhaps to keep current on support contracts, over the course of the past three years? (Do you even *have* a support contract?)
Only a year into the use of this "critical program", database backups ceased to be performed by your company.
And it's the vendor's fault, and the vendor who offers a crappy product??? Riiiight....!
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
If you call finally managing to make Windows not work with Novell Netware or drDOS ..)
:)", Jim Allchin 1991
"the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity", Brad Silverberg 1994
"drdos has problems running windows today. And I assume will have more problems in the futire" Brad Silverberg
"You should make sure it has problems in the future
davecb5620@gmail.com
Windows 2000, stablity speed, eyecandy with window blinds installed. Easy to administer, and office 97. It has all been downhill in the Windows world since then.
"so far, MS server OSes have lived up to the task of being solid and operable day and day out"
.. :)
Why is it that here we keep having to remake exchange profiles and the fax server keeps crashing. Not a good sign for a multi-national consultancy. I suppose you are also one of those people that never got a virus
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Windows 95 was awesome... but the first versions were crap the 95b was the best one"
.. :)
Yea, it finally got back to a buggy version of Xtree, drDOS, Novell Netware and Win3.11 Yea I know you could do it with Citrix, but MS bought out Citrix didn't they
The main innovation being you could no longer load WinDOS from a Netware server onto a diskless client, you had to buy licenses and upgrade the memory and install a harddrive on each client, costing a lot if you were cash starved college.
davecb5620@gmail.com
For all that it was and was not, Win95 was the platform most of us were using the first time we logged on to the Internet and used a browser (probably Netscape). The web would have developed differently and more slowly without it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Deep down Bill Gates knows that he's about as innovative as duckweed.
Proverbs 21:19
You would think meeting her would qualify as a high point for Bill :)
If you're able to make Win95 more secure than Win2K+.
So you are saying that, about 2-3 years ago... they purchased a DOS program? DOS was as much a legacy OS then as it is now.
It was SO critical for their business... that they were running it on a low-end laptop?
Are you saying the problem with this alleged poorly written software (which is only 2-3 years old but is made for DOS or Windows 95, depending on what point in your story we look at) is that it's a poorly written commercial application, rather than a poorly written FOSS application?
Or are you just claiming it's Microsoft's fault that this company staked their future on a DOS (or Win95) application written 2-3 years ago, and was running it on a low end laptop, and not running backups?
Because if your point was supposed to be that FOSS is a magic panacea, I fail to see how this company would have succeeded choosing FOSS instead. Last time I checked, there was plenty of FOSS with poor documentation and cryptic error messages, and plenty of FOSS projects which change hands so many times one can't even know what it's called anymore, or who is maintaining it.
then that you subscribe to ID then? :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I agree that Bill's philanthropy is nothing amazing.
My wife and I give ~15% of our before tax income to what we consider worthy causes. We occasionally have to make hard choices to be able to do that, but we're committed to doing it so we're willing to make some trade offs. I'd be willing to bet that Bill never even notices an effect from his contributions in his daily life.
On top of this, my wife and I do all our donating anonymously. (Note I've posted this AC). Bill has his BMGF (not the "Gates" foundation, note--the "BILL and MELINDA Gates" foundation) and seems to go out of his way to talk up the "good works" he's doing. I don't have a problem with people enjoying the good works they do, but when you're doing it (at least in part) for the publicity, that cheapens it, IMO.
On the other hand, at least he does something. There are a lot of wealthy people out there who NEVER participate in anything other than gratifying themselves. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how little the richest people in the world give.
umm...the UK NHS or Nation Health Service which also happens to be the largest employer in the WORLD uses SharePoint internally as well as for their public facing website infrastructure. I think it looks good. I agree, out of the box, SharePoint needs better templates.
http://www.nhs.uk/
sorry i meant "National" not "Nation"
If 2000 supported Cleartype. Ugly LCD text on 2000 is the only reason to run XP.
"Honestly, most software just plain sucks"
GO Mac and u won't go back!
We're talking about Bill Gates here-- remember that the quality of the OS is probably not his measuring stick-- Windows 95 was probably when they signed a bunch of lock-in deals with PC manufacturers. Also it was likely the last OS they shipped before they finally got dragged kicking and screaming into creating a QA department (according to G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper!" anyway)-- with all those extra employees and shipping delays!
He's not saying Win95 was the best OS that Microsoft ever released. I think we can all agree that 2k and XP are far superior, and really, Vista is as well.
But Windows 95 was a high point, a nice milestone, any way you slice it. It was the first OS that was readily accepted by the masses, I believe -- before that, consumer-level computers, whether at home or at the office, were basically limited to DOS or 3.1 (which was DOS anyway), and a few random cranks with these "Mac" things nobody paid attention to. They were a pain to set up and a pain to use and except for those of us who grew up to be Slashdot users, nobody wanted 'em if they didn't need 'em.
Then here comes Windows 95, which for all its retrospective faults, was astonishing at the time. Want a hardware upgrade? Jam the hardware inside the box and let Windows figure out the drivers, IRQ settings, and everything else. Maybe use an installation disk or CD for drivers. It didn't always do it perfectly, but it was decent, and leaps and bounds ahead of toggling jumpers with toothpicks and trying to remember which comm port mapped where.
It brought the PC up to date and made it accessible to the masses, who by now have made "Windows" synonymous with "computer", at least to them. It came out at a time when the internet (and the Web) were becoming to seep into the conciousness of society at large, and made it possible for any schmuck to experience it without knowing a lot about computers. Business was booming, people liked the product for the most part, and the main competitor, Apple, was a nobody. A huge economy was growing around Windows 95, from games to business applications to support, and market penetration was off the scale.
Definitely sounded like a good time to be in Gates' position, or to be involved with Microsoft at all.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Just to agree with some of the other posters; Windows 2000 was an amazingly fantastic time to be a windows user. Somebody on here stated that 2k was bad simply because Microsoft was trying to market ME to home users at around the same time, but I don't see how that makes 2k bad.
Lots of people here are discussing XP as the upgrade path from ME, but I don't believe that at all. EVERYBODY I knew who had used ME jumped ship years before XP came out. They either reverted to Windows 98 Second Edition or upgraded to Windows 2000. Don't forget that Windows 98 was selling very well at the time and was liked for its stability (compared to 95 and ME) and adored for its compatibility (lots of people were still avoiding NT at the time).
The way things worked out, it's as if ME never existed. People were upgrading from 98SE directly to XP, and that's only if they didn't have 2000 already (those who did avoided XP for a good couple years after it came out).
Looking back on all this, it strikes me as a bit humorous how, with the release of every MS Operating System, there seems to be this little game of "what can we do to avoid upgrading?"
It may be that Windows 95 really was their high point since it seemed to have the best reception.
To be frank Win95 was a necessary evil but ultimately a LOW POINT for many of us who actually used the old systems (dos / Win 3.1) and many of their apps. Even though Win95 had it's technical merits. It didn't get better till 98 and finally 2K / XP basically got to where Win95 should have been earlier in terms of stability, etc.
.dll or whatever special library/drivers/etc they need? I think people here are forgetting all the awful crud that Win95/98/2K and XP introduced us to: The mammoth registry system and apps being able to secretly write to registry without your permission or say so behind the scenes, how many registry entries that perform different functions are named with those god awful {ABC123-XXXXZ-NNN} etc registry keys? There is a lot of cruft IMHO with the registry system and there was still DLL hell (and other similar things like it) until windows XP. I know I haven't FORGOTTEN about all the BS.
The early versions of direct X were just downright shameful, try loading up an old copy of Mechwarrior 2 for windows if you want to see what I mean. Lots of old programs did moronic things (like try to forcefully install old versions of direct x, etc).
There was a lot of BS windows caused IMHO in the shift to win9x/NT and it's children. The introduction of the windows registry is BY FAR the most evil thing windows brought into existence, no longer were applications EASILY migratable by a simple directory copy, you had to worry about programs migrating a bunch of BS in the registry, and the accumulation of "windows cruft" which slowly slows down the MS os's until one has to reinstall, even XP needs a re-install now and then if you are a heavy user constantly moving apps into and out of your system.
Who here is annoyed that programs are no longer self contained and have their own copy of
I personally feel if they held off and introduced Windows 95 with the same "upgrades" as Windows 98, it would have been better. I am surprised NT 4.0 was not mentioned. Flame-bait aside, I used that before I went to Windows 95, and I personally had a better overall experience. All I did was do term papers, go on a few BBS's and my system really was fine doing next to nothing. Everything since then has been pretty much a fix upon a fix IMHO. I haven't really "experienced" much of an improvement, and the GUI has generally looked the same since I was at NT 4.0 give or take a few modifications here and there. I went OSX a few months back, and that works for me too. It seems whenever I introduce games to any environment I am in, that's when things get unstable. Since I used to work for a gaming company, I generally blame the game makers themselves for not doing a thorough enough QA process before a release, but I understand ultimately a lot of things get fixed after a few patches. Windows 95 pretty much brought over the Windows games (more than they had ever been), so I guess I can agree. XBOX 360 is doing alright, so maybe that's why it's Bill Gate's high point. I say stick to a console for games, though.
lets face it, the rest of us have to hold down jobs and respect copyright, whereas Stallman doesn't even need to buy SOAP or pay a WATER bill. Not everyone can get 6 figures for speaking idiocy while looking and smelling like a goat.
Hm,
remember that year. I was forced to used Linux back then (without even knowing *it* was Linux), and considered it bullshit.
Wasnt until 98 until i actually installed it on my own box. Geesh, you wouldnt even believe the reason i tried it. While waiting during a job application i read some stupid manager magazine. The only article that was interresting was about some strange OS, which was free of charge and better. Well, i disliked Windows since 3.1 (the first version i used, i at first thought my computer was defective because of the poor performance of windows).
Well, only a dial-up connection back then, so i bought a copy of SuSE.
With my DOS background it took a while to get used to this new thing. After getting used to bash this was really getting fun. I pretty soon realised the real multitasking (even Novell DOS only had Task-switching) and was getting really excited.
About a week later i recompiled my kernel to get audio and video to work and eventualy started my first own X-Server. Boy, i was suprised to see the fvwm2 i used in the uni. But from that day on i already knew enough to take advantage of the power of linux (unlike the uni-days where i considered it some "wierd windows").
From that time on the only reason to use Windows was for gaming, and even that is a point that is growing increasingly irrelevant.
Yes, 95 probably was the high time of windows.
People are already asking about linux in the small computer shop i work. Not everbody wants it, sure, but its getting more popular by the day.
It was the first sign that Microsoft had lost their way when they added product activation. If that hadn't went in, I would still be a Microsoft fan, but as it is, they betrayed us and let paranoia/greed get in the way of good decision making (ie listen to your supporters for ideas and direction.)
The high point was when Gates bought the source code that formed the basis for MSDOS. He paid less than $100K and made billions.
As a programmer, .NET was certainly a high point for me, not only introducing a vast array of coding and web standards to the development environment - as well as actually providing an environment in the first place - but pretty much introduced a whole new paradigm to online development.
.NET at all? As a milestone, I'd put it up there with the first introduction of Visual Basic for Windows.
:)
That's my take anyway; but exaggeration or not, no mention of
Perhaps the audience wasn't into that back-room stuff so it didn't get a mention. hmph.. story of every programmer's life.
OS/2 was not just a little better that Window 95. . .it was YEARS ahead. Microsoft didn't even start to catch up with 1994 vintage OS/2 until they released Win2k, and in a number of respects, they still have not caught up.
OS/2 users were on the Internet before Windows users even knew it existed. In fact, most Windows users can't even tell you the difference between the Web and the `Net, even now. Essentially, Windows and AOL users were the same crowd. When Microsoft finally patched W95 so that it could get on the `Net, it was like someone had unlocked the gates to the trailer park and all the trash spewed out and polluted the place. Windows users are now, and have always been, the lowest common denominator of computer users.
Sure, this post is flamebait, but these comments about how great W95 was are pure historical revisionism. People need to face up to the facts, stop making excuses for their past stupid behavior and realize that they were suckered by a slick campaign that leveraged their own ignorance against them. They bought the snake oil, and in order to avoid facing the fact that they allowed themselves to be taken by con men, they pretended that the crashes never happened, the maintenance was easy, the performance was stellar, the interface was "intuitive", etc. Like the simple townies in Samuel Clemens "Huckleberry Finn", they were "Sold". They bought into "The King's Camelopard" and the only way to save face was to make sure everyone else was "sold" too. Thus the perpetual and repeating "Windows is GREAT" campaigns, and the "OS/2 is dead", "BeOS is dead", "Macs are dead", "Linux is dying", "The next version of Windows will fix EVERYTHING" campaigns.
Face it, folks, you were "Sold". The next version (or the next, or the next, or. . .) of Windows NEVER delivered what you were promised in 1995. To this day, Microsoft has not delivered what they promised you'd get if you held off committing to an architecture (OS/2) until Win95 shipped. Still, with every version, you bought the hype and then made lots of noise that, unlike the previous version, "This one doesn't suck!" Now, a few years on, you idiot Windows users are claiming that W95 was the best?!?! Perhaps it was the best thing Microsoft ever produced, but it was still garbage and you were all ignorant suckers for buying into it.
You Windows users who are actually old enough to remember Win3.1, yet are still faithful: Tell me how much more 'responsive' Vista is on contemporary midrange hardware (with the required virus scanners, trojan sniffers, malware cleaners running in the background) than Win3.1 was on a 386SX with 1 meg of memory doing typical tasks (editing documents/email, surfing the Web, etc). Actually, don't tell me. . .tell yourself. I already know.
Sure, now you can do stuff like render video animation on a Windows PC. . .stuff people did on Amigas a decade and a half ago. Go ahead and brag about it, morons. You have a one-size-fits-all word processor with tens of thousands of features that almost no one ever uses, but in which it takes you fifteen minutes to figure out how to change the line spacing (BTW, don't bother trying to memorize that sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to change the line spacing as the next version of that word processor (which you will be convinced that is an absolute NECESSITY that you have) will have a completely different sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to do the same thing).
Sure, bleat that the bandwagon you jumped on didn't turn out to be the right one down the road, but it was a good one at the time. . .You know that's bullshit and I know that's bullshit. Windows has NEVER been any more than what it is now: Barely functional trash. You were scammed, and the scammers co-opted you into defending their scam. Give it up, already, and move on.
The version of NT that came out the same year as Windows 95 was NT 3.51. It still had the old Program Manager interface, but under the hood, it was truly and completely 32-bit (except some accessories, like Write.) Windows 95, OTOH, was a hybrid of 16-bit and 32-bit, much like its predecessor Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
One could argue that NT4 = NT 3.51 with 95's UI, but that would be oversimplifying things. Your other points are quite valid.
I agree that Win2k is the best windows that microsoft ever made - I'm even writing this reply on a Win2k box. However, I would say that if you want the best OS that microsoft ever wrote, you just need to put a D in front of OS.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.