Slashdot Mirror
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?"
How about Windows 2000? I still use it and have no real issues with it, unlike when I've used XP.
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!
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...
He has so much money that the amount of money he has is no longer relevant to him. He is much more interested in how successful his efforts are.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Anybody who doubts the veracity of this claim obviously isn't old enough to remember Windows 3.1.
It may not be, its generally only people who dislike their jobs that consider their paycheck a high-point.
If someone likes there job, the completion of the task is the high-point, the money is a benifit, and when the income gets to a certain point, especially in cases such as Bill Gates, the money becomes self-sufficient, and therefore completely arbitrary, and taken for granted, like breathing air, its only when you dont have it that it becomes precious.
It was way better than 3.1..
but DOS was better than 3.1 ...
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.-
I'm definitely not a windows fanboy (Mac at home & work, had to push at work to get a mac in an XP shop). But windows 95 was not bad at all. In many ways more functional & easier to get stuff done that MacOS at the time. Did you install linux back in 95? Because I remember all sorts of fun in getting Slackware to fire on my Gateway. Compared to a modern linux or OSX, it's a dog. But in the day it wasn't that bad. I'd even go along with calling it a high point (especially when followed by ME)
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
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.
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...
Microsofts ability to become a defacto monopoly by utilizing some pretty heavy handed tactics... AND get a settlement in court that actually improved its market share. Now THAT is a high point. Most companies that end up in court as a monopoly end up getting cut up into smaller companies, but not Microsoft. Nope. They actually were able to write parts of their settlement. They "gave away" software... as part of the "monetary" settlement. Which shows that not only did M$ master the market economy, but the judicial system as well (creating customers for life via lock ins). Did I mention that after a certain period of time those "customers" had to start paying to continue to use the software???
20th century Marxism is not progress...
It was way better than 3.1..
The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Actually, a Windows release is greeted differently between home users and companies.
Home users usually shrug their shoulders with a "meh. I'll buy it with my next PC".
Companies usually greet it with a sigh and a "great. What breaks this time?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint. Though, the upgrade path was from ME to XP for the home users making XP much, much, much better. But for those of use on Windows 2K, XP was just extra bloat. XP also suffered from major security holes, I can't remember how much spyware I remember taking off of people's computers before Service Pack 2 introduced the concept of basic security. Windows 2K also didn't suffer from WGA or other DRM nonsense.
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.
Actually, I don't think that will be the case. I think that MS has learned the lesson that DRM-laden OSes will not sell and remove the DRM and bloat from Windows 7, if it goes according to their plans (which I honestly doubt it will....) it may be a decent OS. But if it is inferior to free products (such as Linux) of course those using it are going to complain.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Great! Another ass hat spelling Microsoft as M$. What are you? A Greenpeace member? Do you still live in the 90's? That got old about 10 years ago just in case you hadn't noticed.
I honestly thought NT 4.0 was a great OS; it was the paradigm shifter that brought down OS/2 and really lasted for a while.
Bullshit. Or don't you remember. Anyone who shipped OS/2 on a PC lost the ability to ship Win95 (or received outrageous pricing).
NT4 Sucked donkey balls on a 16Meg Pentium machine compared to OS/2 on the same hardware.
Stop rewriting history.
I'm not going to go into the rest of your fabrications, infantile creative spelling and links to - wait for it - El Reg that you think somehow validate your opinion, but even if they're being deliberately obtuse about the above, there's a good point to be made about your claim.
In the beginning, FLOSS was nothing more than a hobbyist movement. It continued to be that for a long time, until corporations like IBM got into the game, and for-profit corporations like RedHat and MySQL AB and others were created around what used to be loosely related FLOSS projects.
This involvement has allowed the end to end quality of FLOSS to skyrocket in the past few years, in the sense that it went from "here's a tarball, run make install on it, perform the specified incantations, pray to Chtuhlu and you're all set" to actually mainstream, usable tools. It's that involvement that not only has employed people who otherwise would be hobby developers as well-paid professionals, but has created an entire ecosystem in which these efforts can be carried out by more and more people.
That doesn't mean that your usual "FLOSS uber alles" claim is valid in any sense, because "non free" (what the hell is that, BTW. As in "non tasty"?) software has also improved and evolved enormously in the past three decades. Some of that has come from "M$", and some hasn't. There's a lot of extremely good commercial software out there about which you have been evidently living in complete ignorance of for about as long as the same three decades I mentioned.
This is maybe similar to the mason guilds of the middle ages, who improved their collective lot by organizing themselves into sponsored groups working on well-defined and focused projects, which in turn served to lay the ground rules for formalized architecture and civil engineering.
twitter, that would be funny if it wasn't so damn dishonest. How many accounts are we at now? 12? Maybe your nemesis can jump in here and give us the full list again, and then you can insult him as usual.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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.
There is something Zen about the parent post.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The collective long term memory of the internets is so ephemeral that it doesn't surprise me we have these conversations every time Microsoft releases a new OS, but it does tend to get old.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What innovations? I haven't seen a MS product that was original yet! Just about everything has been taken from either A) Mac B) Other programs which the MS equivalent has killed such as IE from Netscape C) Unix or D) Other programs that have done it better then the MS implementation. Even Bob seems to have roots in various child-friendly applications. And if you don't believe me just tell me one MS innovation that doesn't have roots in other programs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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...
To be honest, MacOS was just starting to get kind of iffy right around then.
Its glorious early lead as not only a GUI-based OS but one with a smart design team behind it was beginning to fade as the technology in and around it began to grow too complex for its architecture while Copland became something of a Longhorn (to anachro-neologize) and Gil Amelio didn't seem to know what exactly to do.
In 1995, Windows 95 was really something of a breath of fresh air -- it brought into one place a number of UI conventions that turned out to be quite enduring, had some pretty decent design behind it (compare a screenshot of 95's visual simplicity with Vista's ostentatious baroqueness some time), and was more up-to-date technologically than MacOS 7.1.
It's funny; 12 years later, despite only mildly changed marketshares, Leopard and Vista kind of reversed those roles, didn't they?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
And if you don't believe me just tell me one MS innovation that doesn't have roots in other programs.
Find me any "innovation" that is entirely original.
What?
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
There's precious little revolutionary innovation nowadays, in any field. The vast majority of it is evolutionary.
Search engines, semantic algorithms, large distributed systems and web crawlers existed before Google, after all. But I don't see anyone arguing that Google has not innovated, because they have. Curiously the goal posts seem to move every time the topic is Microsoft.
In any case, that doesn't seem to stop people from trotting out the "LOLOL MS has never done anything worthwhile!!!", which besides being ridiculous it usually means you have an agenda in your shoulder and a chip in your bag - or you're a twitter sockpuppet. I hope it's the former.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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.
Well-written apps should have worked equally well on both branches, by sticking to the common subset of Win32 that was available on both, but in reality they didn't; there was common software that would run on 9x but not 2K, and vice versa. Windows XP's major achievement was to unify those branches into a single NT-based OS that was both shiny enough and compatible enough to serve as a 98/ME replacement for average consumers.
Maybe the eye candy was "extra bloat", but I do think it helped attract customers who would've stuck with ME otherwise. And that's a good enough goal in itself: the DOS branch was fundamentally less reliable and less secure than the NT branch. If a little bloat is what it took to get people off of the weaker branch, giving them a more solid OS and making developers' lives easier, then so be it.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
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.
In a remarkable coincidence, the best way to secure any OS is to unplug the network cable. Your claim is true, but meaningless.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
It's more fun to remember the song contains the ever appropriate lyrics "You make a grown man cry".
For a business relying on critical software, being able to legally and practically hire a contractor to fix a problem in open source software is a huge advantage over having to track down a developer legally and technically able to fix a problem.
Even if 99% of people can't fix the problem, having that 1% is enough to save a business. If it's 99.9999% of people who can't fix it, leaving a mere handfull of developers who can (for legal or technical reasons), you're pretty much sunk and have to take the disaster recovery or migration cost head-on.
Open source is a guarantee that things can be fixed legally and practically. You may not need it, but if you do, it can save your business. A lot of companies learn that the hard way, and that's why open source and open standards are growing and growing.
Sam ty sig.
Until you wanted to connect a modem. Am I the only one who remembers the horrible process necessary to connect the early Windows 95 to a modem?
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
Most of Microsoft's innovation isn't particularly evolutionary, though -- it's either static or devolutionary. Not true of everything, but most things...
That's why, I think. It's the irritation of seeing really good ideas elsewhere reduced to lowest-common-denominator crap on Windows.
Simple example: Google Desktop Search, and later, Spotlight. Indices had been used, and they'd been used on desktops. They hadn't been used to search an archive of personal files, though.
What has Microsoft done that approaches that?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
Actually, he didn't say that Windows 95 was as good as Windows got. He said that Windows 95 was a nice milestone.
Windows 95 literally changed the world of personal computing. It was revolutionary in a way that little else in the world of software has ever been. Few companies get the opportunity to produce even one product that has the kind of impact that Windows 95 had, yet people point to the fact that Microsoft hasn't had another like it as an indication of failure.
Microsoft has not put out another product that did to the computing world what Windows 95 did, and Bill knows that. But it doesn't mean that he thinks subsequent Windows versions were crap. In fact, I'm betting he doesn't use Windows 95 on his home PC.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Comparing SGI and NeXTSTEP to Windows - the price point was multiples higher and it's apples to oranges.
Windows and OS/2 3.0 is a fair comparison. There was no real difference in the hardware req's, but one of them required users to edit text files on a setup disk to install from a CD and the other didn't. Guess which one won?
"Microsoft 'won' because they ran on cheaper hardware. In no way was their software superior."
Is nonsense where Warp is concerned, it was first to market, was simillar in price, and ran the same software. Windows beat it because it was easier to set up, easier to use, and had better marketing. IBM lost fair and square.
Note quite.
Good functional commercial software is "end of lifed" all the time. (soon XP for example). Visual Basic 6 for another. SQL 2003 for another.
Open source can't be. If it is needed and used, the source is there.
Otherwise agree with your post.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Windows 95 was great for doing one thing at a time. Anythig more than that, and it would crash for more often than once a week.
IMO, Win NT 4 was the top of the line for stability. Small memory footprint (60MB or so), and it would go for months without restarting.
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.
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
If you're going to break backwards compatibility with Windows, why not just run Linux? Like you said, you can have adequate legacy support via WINE et al.
That's Microsoft's problem actually. Their only real value now is legacy compatibility. They can't keep going with Windows because it's become broken and unmanagable even for its end users, much less its own developers. They can't break away from Windows, because without the compatibility, they're suddenly in direct competition with vastly superior systems like Linux and MacOSX which now have their own ecosystems and maturity. The best Microsoft could do is release their own compliant Unix based on BSD, essentially a Microsoft OSX, and even then they'd be years behind.
And now we have an announcement that Windows 7 will be at best an incremental evolution of Vista, which means they're sticking with backwards compatibility, the one thing that's becoming less and less important in an increasingly heterogenous industry.
This is the single most important reason why Microsoft can only die from here on. To dig its way out of this hole, it'll have to replace its entire business model and corporate culture.
Sam ty sig.
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.
I think you're confusing innovation with invention (this was precisely parent's point).
If Vista becomes better than it is to the same extent that XP did, then I'm sure everyone will. it's not there yet, and until it is it sucks.
As for people pointing out that 2k->XP was exactly the same... yeah, XP blew nuts when it came out. I refused to even install it until Vista was a few months from (actual) commercial release because my early experiences with it could be best summed as "just like 2k, except that it's complete shit and does nothing useful." With that said, once I used it significantly in 2006/2007 I found that it simply blew my 2k install out of the water, and prejudices which hadn't been updated since 2003 evaporated in a few days.
Vista may be worth installing some day, but for this moment, if you need or want Windows installed, XP is simply better than it and every other version currently available (including those available only in backups). One day Vista might get there itself, either that or it actually will turn out to be ME 2.0: now with more shiny.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
So I'd guess WGA will stay. It's hardly draconian anyway. WGA on XP meant you can still use your pirate OS, and you will still get security updates. What you couldn't do was download IE7 or any other optional stuff from the Microsoft site. But if you paid for the OS you could. Being genuine is an advantage, as the acronym suggests. I know people that used pirated XP for ages. They had to wait for a crack before they could install each service pack, but they installed both of them in the end. Actually I think MSFT will tighten it up so you can't use a pirate OS in future. People will crack it of course and Microsoft will patch to defeat the cracks. So if you really, really want to use it and not pay you will be able to but it will take a lot of your time. But most people will opt to pay instead because it is more convenient.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Windows 2000 was the best they ever did. Well, besides msdos5.
Aww... Ragging on Windows 3.1 brought a little emo-tear to my eye. I grew up and learned computing on good ol' DOS/Windows 3.11. (The "-point-eleven for workgroups" part made all the difference, I'm told, as it didn't have the same memory leaks.)
Do you guys have any idea how amazing Windows 3.11 was? With a 386, you could run multiple DOS applications - at the same time! What did you have to do before that? My trusty Borland Turbo C (and Lotus apps too, I'm told) would helpfull start another command shell over the current one, and hope that whatever you did in the second shell didn't obliterate the first one.
Windows could overlap! That was spiffy. 3.11 was a far sight better for networking than DOS ever was, and I never had any problems with it crashing. (Of course, I mostly used Microsoft Word 6, if anything, in Windows. Most games I booted from specially-crafted DOS boot disks so I could get the memory management just right.)
But to say 3.11 was dismal? What did Gnome look like then? And what were they charging for Macs? (This is in 90s dollars, mind you.)
DATABASE WOW WOW
That's why, I think. It's the irritation of seeing really good ideas elsewhere reduced to lowest-common-denominator crap on Windows.
Simple example: Google Desktop Search, and later, Spotlight. Indices had been used, and they'd been used on desktops. They hadn't been used to search an archive of personal files, though.
What has Microsoft done that approaches that? I call bullshit on this one.
Did you know that before Google Desktop and other search indexes, Microsoft had a native way to do this in Windows 2000? The microsoft Index search service. Queryable. It works.
MS didn't really sell it, but it was there before Google "innovated" here.
Well, the whole point is really that MS has a ton of resources. A ridiculous amount of resources and control and information. And what have they done with all that power? Not much.
If I had all the bricks in the world and I built a few decent houses with it, and a lot that crumble, no one would call me an innovator. Especially if almost everyone had to rent one of the crappy houses I built.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
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."
Unlikely. Off the top of my head: AJAX, Web 2.0, user-friendly.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Do RMS speeches stay free (libre)? If no, then he contradicts his ideals, if speeches are available and without restrictions, everything is ok.
The point is that Windows had an indexing and search service years before Google or Mac OS X. In typical Microsoft fashion, however, the usability was poor -- so poor that hardly anyone even knew the feature was even there.
Microsoft have a lot of bright technical people (and some dim ones), but user interfaces and marketing have never been their strong point, with a few exceptions like Windows 95 (a triumph of marketing, which had ones of the best GUIs for its time too). Apart from these rare exceptions, Apple repeatedly put Microsoft to shame when it comes to marketing features in a way that make the public actually interested. Ironically, this is often the case when Apple are marketing features that were in Windows first (but ask the average Mac user, and he'll be utterly convinced that Apple "invented" the feature in question).
Well, a blue screen isn't an application crash, it's a driver/kernel crash...
just that applications could cause those crashes to occur indirectly (for example, by passing bad pointers to the system)
Which is what the signed drivers for 64 bit Vista are about. (nothing to do with DRM really)
When windows 95 first came out a >LOT of programs (AOL, Simcity...) would take a 32 bit value given by the system, and cut off the top 16 bits, and pass it back, and boom. Blue light special.
So, how many applications out there take a 64 bit value, and truncate it to 32 bits? It'll never be a problem on a machine with less than 4 gigs of RAM, but once you cross that line, you're screwed.
So, small hardware company makes a cheap device (webcam, bluetooth, USB humping dog...) and makes cheap drivers. Maybe they actually test them, on a machine with 2 gigs of RAM... or even on an 8 gig machine, but without anything else running... so they don't see the bug.
Dell sells a deluxe quad core, 16 gig machine to somebody, who then attached the device... crashes will then eventually, randomly occur... it random modules, since random memory is getting overwritten... only when the machine is heavily loaded... who gets the tech support call?, Dell?, Microsoft?, or the little company the user can't even remember since he threw out the packaging...
Which today is copied in almost every desktop (albeit by another name).
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
Hmm. I've never liked this stance. Yes, he gives back a lot of money. But do this little exercise: Take Bill's net worth, then calculate what percentage of that a million dollars is. Then take that percentage of your net worth. That is what a million dollars is like to Bill. Last time I did this several years ago, it was about $2.
Comparatively, it's even worse than that, because I couldn't survive on 50% of my net worth, but he could survive on
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
In some ways, I consider DOS 5.0 as the high point. 6.X was mostly 5.0 + utilities, and after that was Windows.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I never understand the "Microsoft never innovates" rant that goes off here on Slashdot. What big business in this world TRULY innovates anyway? Most of them spend their time packaging (read: selling) and marketing other ideas in a such a way that makes people want to use those products.
Microsoft's strong point is not their technology (at least not from a "new technology/innovation" standpoint). Their strong point lies in their marketing department.
not really, windows 3.x (I really don't know what previous versions offered but I know they were never very popular) brought us PC users the very usefull ability to run our apps in a multitaskin environment albiet a cooperative one. By 3.1 they even had the ability to run multiple dos apps at the same time provided you had a 386 or higher CPU.
9x was a dirty hack but a nessacery one, it gave good compatibilty with badly behaved dos/win16 apps while having much better support for modern 32 bit apps than 3.x. It also introduced plug and play which really made life easier for anyone adding/removing hardware.
2K was the birth of modern windows, it brought together the stability of the NT line with the ease of use and hardware support of 9x.
Since then windows seems to have largely stagnated. I belive this is simply because it now does it's job easilly and pretty reliablly and there haven't been any really radical design changes to the PC architecture (the most radical was x64 but given the previous alpha port I bet most of microsofts core code was already 64 bit ready, driver updaing must have been a bitch though).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The problem isn't so much whether Microsoft's innovation lies with marketing rather than engineering, but how the company has used its "innovations" to hold back the progress of technology.
It wasn't "wrong" for Microsoft to develop upon ideas Apple originated in graphical computing (just as Apple itself built upon existing ideas already in development). It was however fairly scandalous that Microsoft chose to repeatedly screw over its hardware partner, and certainly disappointing that the company delivered a shoddy, poorly designed imitation in Windows, and then used its market power to stop superior products from competitors from entering the market.
In 1991, Microsoft was extolling a vaporous vision of Cairo, what it planned to deliver after NT, as a copy of ideas from 1988's NeXTSTEP. But the company didn't even deliver NT until 1993 and never really shipped Cairo and the features it was supposed to deliver, apart from a few things that showed up a decade later around 2000. Microsoft didn't beat anyone in delivering technology, it simply lied about what it could do and used its clout to prevent real products from finding a market. That's "innovative" marketing, but certainly isn't praiseworthy.
Microsoft did the same thing in web browsers, in dev tools, in office apps, in server operating systems (NT vs Unix) and attempted to continue into media players, DRM licensing, and smartphones, the latter of which it is failing in.
The real problem with Microsoft isn't that it copies and refines existing ideas and builds upon them, but that it just copies ideas poorly and supports them with marketing lies, resulting in inferior products that are forced into the market as the only option for many buyers.
This has happened so frequently that the industry and now customers are well aware of what's going on, and its no longer working in a variety of new markets Microsoft is trying to enter.
From Vista to Zune: Why Microsoft Canâ(TM)t Sell to Consumers
I think we will see over the next years if Microsoft or Linux developers are better:
ATI/AMD is now giving away specifications for their chips, and the Linux community is willing to work with that documents and create drivers. Microsoft has the opportunity to do the same.
Eventually, Linux will have mature ATI Open Source drivers and there can be a direct comparison to drivers for Windows. Microsoft can choose to compete or keep relying on the drivers from ATI to save money. Either way, there won't be many excuses left if the Windows drivers look bad by comparison.
C - the footgun of programming languages