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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?"
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and it represents Microsoft at its high point. All the world (figuratively speaking) was happy to get windows 95, it was such a clear advance over windows 3.11. It was a job (relatively) well done. Investors were happy. Customers were happy. It was the product that would push them into the clear winner position in the PC market (and by PC in this case I include Mac, since they drastically lost market share afterwards).
Then anti-trust investigations started up. Windows 98 was an incremental update that had to be dumped for windows NT. Security issues started to matter. This open source stuff became a threat. Now everyone is trying to knock them off the mountain. And may very well succeed.
Qxe4
Exactly. 95 truly conquered the *world*. The OS of mass destruction.
Really, no one needs to feel sorry for Bill or Steve. They are on top of the world, and they have nothing to be defensive about.
They'll do their job and promote their latest mediocre products. But who cares, we'll end up with Vista anyway when we buy the latest Sony or Dell, and sure enough a couple hundred dollars flies from our pocket to theirs. Don't you think they know that?
Year after year, all of their innovations *flop*. Yet Office and Windows keep raking in billions, and they just don't know what to do with the money anymore. Give Bill credit for giving back.
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?
'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.
but Windows 95 was just plain BAD on the Pentium Pro which was fully optimized for 32 bit. Remember that 150MHz was the top end back in those days and IIRC, UNIX rocked on the PPro. And OS/2 ran most apps at close to 2x faster on the 150MHz PPro compared to 150MHz Pentium. Windows95 ran much SLOWER on that 150MHz PPro compared to the P150. That's right, Windows ran slower on the new 32bit CPU and Intel was pissed at Microsoft for this. It set Intel back about 2 years and helped AMD grow. They had to hack 16bit optimizations into a new chip and to make it interesting, added new DSP-like registers(SSE) so they could sell it as a new CPU. Otherwise it was just the old stuff dumbed down to run 16bit code better.
Bill Gates says that Windows 95 was a high point for him because he beat IBM in the marketing wars and solidified their monopoly once and for all. They had a huge party when word was sent throughout Microsoft that IBM signed the license deal for Windows 95. It was on the day it was released IIRC. So a technical flop but a marketing marvel is what Bill calls his high point. Yup, I remember seeing the video of a bunch of Microsoft employees in a hallway with a bowling ball and at the other end were 10 software competitor's products lined up like bowling pins. OS/2 was at pin position #1.
I guess NT was supposed to take all of the server market but reliability kept UNIX going and by the time people figured out how to make a whole bunch of Windows PCs replace UNIX, Linux came in and really messed up Bill and Steve's plan for world domination. Where's Bill's tech leadership legacy? Windows 95?
Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
While NT was good,IMHO I'd have to save Win2K Pro was the best OS they ever released. With SP4 it is rock solid stable,supports just about every kind of hardware out there and is a screaming demon on anything with 256Mb of RAM and up. I am typing this on an 8 year old Win2K Pro box that originally came with WinME(EEK!) and it has never let me down or given me a BSOD. That is why i am glad you can still get motherboards with Win2K drivers,because if this one ever dies or I pass down my current gamer rig to the netbox role it will be running Win2K Pro. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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!
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 ]
This is one ironic thing I find about Microsoft. Their client operating systems sometimes cause hair pulling, while they do quite well with their server stuff.
This actually underlines the fact that Windows crashes are almost never caused by the Windows OS itself, and almost always by buggy third-party drivers, and even buggy hardware, especially for things like video, which evolve rapidly.
Servers tend to be stable because there's no need to run the latest drivers for things like video and audio, and even if they are installed, they aren't exercised very heavily. Clients tend to crash because buggy drivers and/or hardware from firms like NVidia, ATI/AMD and Intel actually get exercised heavily, which exposes the bugs.
There's actually a slight argument for some form of open source here, since if NVidia, ATI, Intel, et al were willing to give the source code for their drivers to Microsoft, to include in the Windows OS builds, it would almost certainly lead to much higher reliability, since Microsoft would be able to spot a lot of these bugs through review of the code and stress testing (in contrast to the "many eyes" nonsense, Microsoft developers actually would be able to spot and fix bugs). However, these drivers are generally viewed as secret (eg NVidia don't want ATI to see their driver code and vice-versa, so neither will give sources to Microsoft), so Microsoft can't fix the bugs, but still get the blame when things go pear-shaped.
Microsoft's business model of supporting a huge range of disparate parts that can be combined into innumerable configurations has a lot of strengths, which is why it killed off most of the proprietary systems, but it does have weaknesses too. The reliance on drivers written by hardware vendors is probably the single biggest technical challenge Microsoft face, and also the single biggest issue that tarnishes the reputation of their software (arguably unfairly, except to the extent that they could make it easier to write device drivers).