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...
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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