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?"

Comments

A crack-high moment.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[pilgrim23]

Bill didn't mention getting his picture taken in Albuquerque? http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-12/34454506.jpg

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Brian Gordon]

It was way better than 3.1..

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Nossie]

but DOS was better than 3.1 ...

Re:A crack-high moment.

[rhombic]

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)

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Opportunist]

I know trojans that are better than 3.1.

Hell, I wrote software the bugs of which were better than 3.1.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

It was way better than 3.1..

The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[v(*_*)vvvv]

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Darkness404]

Year after year, all of their innovations *flop*

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[StreetStealth]

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?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[iminplaya]

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I understand both points of view. It was an amazing improvement over 3.1, but it was never satisfying. I missed good o'le stable DOS. It never crashed on me. It felt like MS just gave up at making the command line more productive. Yes, millions of people could finally realise the promise of using a computer thanks to the intutive interface. And thats an amazing accomplishment. But for me and those like me, it was disappointing because it wasn't for us. It was for everyone else.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[dedazo]

We can go through the entire Debian package repository and make the same point about just about anything in there.

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[slarrg]

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?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[geekoid]

I disagree. the 3.1 interface was pretty good.
wait, WAIT, hear me out.

I'm not tlaking about the smothness of graphics, clearly we're way beyond that.
But look at how it was orginized on the desktop.
Easy to see what you want, you knew at a glance where to go.
Look at how a lot of people use there modern interface. folders with similar(or groups) of links in those folders.
None of this click this button, then move the mouse over to see a list of what you have displayed, then moving the mouse to the correct folder, then moving over to select the correct program.
It is a ridiculous amount of work for what you want to do.

As much as we don't like to admit it, we really don't do much more with our computer then we did then, just a lot more of it.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[roystgnr]

The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.

Are you insane? Windows 95 may have crashed every week or so on average, and it certainly crashed every 49.7 days if you were ever lucky enough to make it that far, but we're comparing it to Windows 3.1 here! Even if you disregard the bugs in Windows 3.1 code itself, the thing used cooperative multitasking and unprotected memory, so your computer crashed every time the buggiest program you ran had a particularly bad flaw. It would freeze up multiple times a day, under any kind of heavy use.

I think it's clear that if your criterion is "improvement over best previously available version", Windows 95 really was the high point of Microsoft development. Stability doesn't outweigh that conclusion, stability is one of the reasons for it.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Locutus]

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

Re:A crack-high moment.

[AnotherUsername]

The Wheel?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[opti6600]

Actually, the Indexing Service has been in Windows for a while now. I've used it before trying to find stuff in messenger logs, etc.

The problem? It's ridiculously slow, direct access to the Indexer is impossible to find, and the normal find-files dialog is so poorly designed that you can't get the best possible use out of the index that was built!

It's all a little silly, but yes, it was in the OS.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[drsmithy]

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.

Benchmarks ? There was still 16 bit code in OS/2 back then (most notably, the HPFS driver). Even discounting that, I sincerely doubt there was anything within a bull's roar of a 2x speed difference outside of a handful of corner cases.

I'd be happy to lay down $100 betting that once you loaded a Windows 95 system with up-to-date drivers and applications, the performance difference would be nearly nil. In that scenario, there was basically zero 16 bit code being used.

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.

Say what ? The PPro was a (very expensive) high-end workstation chip. The overlap between "users who want PPros" and "users who want Windows 95" was miniscule.

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.

That is to say, deliver what customers were asking for.

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?

NT in early-mid 90s was still aimed squarely at workstations and workgroup-level servers (ie: Netware). Markets, it's worth noting, that it went on to dominate.

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.

The limiations of Windows 95 were 100% the result of software engineering constraints, not marketing. Given what it achieved, it was amazing Windows 95 worked at all, let alone as well as it did.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[KillerBob]

The lever? (simple machine, not the soap... though this being /., the soap is probably the more important innovation....)

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

One day I'm going to get a Mac Pro Mini to run Duke Nukem Forever under Wine 1.0 on GNU Hurd.

...but when you've got 'em, you'll still be waiting for WinFS...

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Hal_Porter]

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. 16 bit code does a lot of segement register loads. Loading a segment register with a descriptor in protected mode is slow because the CPU must do protection checks. In the Pentium they added a cache. If you tried to load from a descriptor that was in the cache, the Pentium would skip the checks.

http://www.x86.org/ddj/aug98/aug98.htm
With the Pentium, Intel introduced a 94-entry, two-way set associative cache of segment-descriptor cache entries. Therefore, the phrase "segment-descriptor cache" is now ambiguous, with two possible meanings. Making matters worse, the new segment-descriptor cache was removed from the Pentium Pro design, but reintroduced in the Pentium II. (The lack of the new segment-descriptor cache in the Pentium Pro largely accounted for its poor 16-bit performance.)

When designing the PPro Intel thought that Windows NT would take over from 16 bit Windows. Windows NT doesn't do many segment loads. Threads use FS for thread local data so that is presumably loaded every time the scheduler switch threads, every 10 to 100ms. But that is a very small percentage of instructions. All code and data use the same values for CS and DS - base address 0 and limit 4GB. So Intel removed the segment descriptor cache. But since 16 bit OSs were still popular and those OSs load the CS and DS segment registers much more frequently. In fact they have to, since they were designed to work on the 286 back when 64K was the maximum possible limit. Since datasets and code sizes were way bigger than 64K, the segment registers are loaded very frequently. So in the Pentium 2 Intel reintroduced the cache. It's not a hack, just bad crystal ball gazing.

Actually most of Intel's mistakes are like that. They predict the future badly because of a strange mix of wishful thinking, a desire to get rid of legacy stuff and outright hubris.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[FreonTrip]

Well, let's be fair: Windows 95 was supposed to be able to scale down to 386 CPUs, which were capable of 32-bit code but thrived on 16-bit code. How well it did this is a matter of some debate, and generally you didn't want to do anything "serious" with the OS on less than a 486, but at the time there were a lot more potential customers using a 386 than there were using 686 CPUs, and the codebase indicates as much. :)

Re:A crack-high moment.

[MobyDisk]

First and foremost, the Pentium Pro did not run 16-bit apps slower than 32-bit apps. The chip was optimized for 32-bit, since that is the direction Intel thought things would go. But it was definitely not slower.

At the time, Intel decided to market the Pentium Pro as a server chip, so it was not meant to run Windows '95. It was meant for NT and OS/2 exclusively. The Pentium Pro was supposed to compete with the big iron servers running Unix, and Intel gambled that 32-bit software would replace 16-bit software in time. They were right: But they were ahead of their time. The market was not ready to get rid of the cheap desktop OSs and the vast quantities of 16-bit software.

So Windows '95 was indeed a high point for Microsoft. They were the first to deliver a stable 32-bit-ish graphical OS to Intel PCs. And it was the first OS to integrate well enough with DOS to replace it. Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system. Windows '95 is why we use the term "wintel" and it is why IBM and OS/2 did not win the operating system wars.

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. Microsoft optimized Windows '95 to run on the CPUs available at the time, not the Pentium Pro which wasn't even released yet. If you wanted true a protected-mode 32-bit OS, Windows NT was the target. And it ran well on a Pentium Pro. Perhaps, had Microsoft done what you are suggesting, then OS/2 might be dominating the desktop today.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Kalriath]

I've got a Server 2003 machine that goes years without restarting. I've just set up a Server 2008 machine as well to test whether that's as good.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[hairyfeet]

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

Re:A crack-high moment.

[digitrev]

Ahh, but may I direct you the prior art of round fruit?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[SanityInAnarchy]

"Windows Live Search"? Let's ask Wikipedia...

Live Search was Beta on March 8th, 2006, and 1.0 on September 11th, 2006.

Google Desktop was Beta on October 14th, 2004, and finally escaped beta status (actually 5.1) was released on April 27th, 2007.

Given Google's track record with Beta stuff, it tends to trump Microsoft's released stuff, at least until the first service pack. But it depends how you count -- if you only count the time they officially left Beta, Live Search wins by several months.

However, if you count from the first public beta release, Google beat Microsoft by over a year, probably a year and a half. Since we're playing the game of who innovated what, I think that counts as a significant headstart.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Z34107]

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.)

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, but were any of those trojans written 17 years ago? could they work on a 286? Its easy to write better software decades after its been written.

I think a lot of praise thats beign showered on 95, really deserves to be put on 3.1. It was the gateway drug of windows.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[myth_of_sisyphus]

You should have seen CNN when Vista came out. Gates was giving a presentation of all the new Vista features.

One of the reporters said "Many of these features have been available on Macs for years." Oh man, Bill Gates was stuttering mad. It was great because I think the reporter was totally clueless about the Mac/Microsoft rivalry and just asked the questions on observations he made while watching Gates's presentation.

It was very funny.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[TheRealMindChild]

60mb? Shit. My domain controller is an NT4 TS machine, 486dx2@66 with 4 megs of 30 pin memory on a 72 pin simm converter and a 200MB hard drive. It is going on 10 years old. Best. machine. ever.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[seandiggity]

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Windows 95 was a letdown. OS/2 was already true preemptive mutitasking since the days of Windows 3.1, which was just a dos gui program.

Windows 95 promised to run all 32 bit apps in separate address spaces and all 16 bit apps together, so only one 32 bit app or all of your 16 bit apps would crash together and not affect anything else. What a joke that turned out to be. Full machine crashes when just a single app died were persistent until at least windows 2000.

And note that Mac OS X had a life back in 95 when it was still known as OpenStep (or NextStep(?)). A vastly technologically superior system just waiting for it's time to come...

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Awptimus Prime]

Yeah, I think this fellow was smoking something. I ran Debian and Windows 95 on my PPro200. GlQuake ran very smooth on my 3dfx card and ran the Windows binary faster than my roommate's P200 MMX. This was memorable since I had to hear about all these mutlimedia extensions in his cpu that would make it 20% faster, or some such BS until we ran benchmarks and the PPro came out on top. Photoshop also ran noticeably more responsive when applying filters.

I don't know why folks have to poop on the interview. Your high points in a career can be defined as the best times you had, which aren't necessarily connected to raw sales figures. It could have just been exciting times as the pace of change was picking up, computers were getting better, competition for the desktop had an unknown future, all these neat people had put together open source stuff your for your developers to peek at and get ideas for your product, Apple was floating around the dumper, the Internet was being discovered by many and had seemingly unlimited potential. Hell, it could have been the last time Gates had a good lay.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Awptimus Prime]

True this. I ran my BBS under WFWG 3.11 and just Renegade, some mail exchange software, and my word processing software being open at the same time 24/7 required monthly nuke and paves.

Desqview was nicer for stability, but had no GUI. It also didn't let me run a few applications I needed at the time.

Windows 95 kicked total butt in comparison to 3.1. The GUI was much cleaner and applications only tended to crash one at a time instead of blowing out the filesystem when a software bug rears it's head.

Hell, in 96, I recall Linux + X not being a very stable desktop by today's standards either.

Windows ME seems to be the last OS I really had much trouble with. But what do I know. I've only got experience with OS7-X, Windows 3.1-Vista, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DOS, and various mutants in the TRS80 line.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[doktor-hladnjak]

Uh, Live Search is not the same thing as Windows Desktop Search.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[mlts]

So far, I have a Server 2008 box that has been up a month or so without anything bad... but I can't claim long uptimes due to patch reboots like I can with my Linux or BSD machines. :/

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. I've gone from Windows NT Server 4.0 to Windows Server 2000, to 2003, now to 2008 as operating systems for my main machines (upgrading hardware every 2-3 years, and legal copies of the operating systems), and its been an overall positive experience.

Had I went the Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, then Vista, I'd probably be singing a different tune.

There are little things with Microsoft's server operating systems that make them nice to run. For example, if I drop in a new hard disk, MS's client operating systems will just assign it a letter. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will wait until you go into the drive manager and assign the letter manually, so it doesn't mess things up. Probably the biggest thing is that MS's server operating systems install almost nothing by default, so anything present on the machine was explicitly installed there by choice.

The server operating systems also have some nice features. Its not Time Machine, but if I lose or corrupt a file, I can use the Previous Versions feature to pull an earlier version from a snapshot, each drive being snapshotted on a different schedule (my data drive being snapshotted almost hourly, the system volume less often, the music collection daily, etc.) Vista can do similar, but its all or nothing with their tool, rather than on an individual volume basis. Plus, its a given that server operating systems will be able to be logged in from remote while for that functionality on clients, it would require XP Pro, or Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate.

This isn't to say that this functionality is in other operating systems, but so far, MS server OSes have lived up to the task of being solid and operable day and day out.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, to say that these features were good at the time just shows you weren't aware of the alternatives. I grew up using an Amiga and those features are hardly impressive considering the Amiga had a decent GUI and good multitasking a long time before that.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Unlikely. Off the top of my head: AJAX, Web 2.0, user-friendly.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Kaenneth]

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...

Re:A crack-high moment.

[jsnipy]

Which today is copied in almost every desktop (albeit by another name).

Re:A crack-high moment.

[drsmithy]

Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system.

This comment gets thrown around a lot, but it's not really true. By Windows 3.1, Windows was doing most things that an "OS" would do - process scheduling, memory management, driving most hardware (video, sound, network). Especially in Windows 3.11, with its "32 bit disk and file access", DOS wasn't a lot more than a bootloader.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Weedlekin]

"um win .1 couldn't run on a 286 it specifically needed a 386 or greater."

The system requirements for Windows 3.1 are at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q32905

"- IBM compatible 80286 or higher (386 recommended)".

Re:A crack-high moment.

[C3c6e6]

I have to disagree. A year or so ago my uncle asked me to transfer some files from/to his old 386. After typing 'win' as the DOS prompt, Windows was up and running in literally one second! All the apps that I opened were very responsive.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[indifferent children]

Heck, us Linux users call that kind of machine a "graphics workstation".

Re:A crack-high moment.

[gosand]

they just don't know what to do with the money anymore. Give Bill credit for giving back.

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 .5% of his. Yes, he donates a lot of money (to a foundation with his name plastered on it)... but as you said, he has more money than he can use... so it's no sacrifice to donate it or just throw it away. So at least something good can come of it, but let's not pretend it's any great sacrifice on his part.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Cro Magnon]

In some ways, I consider DOS 5.0 as the high point. 6.X was mostly 5.0 + utilities, and after that was Windows.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[D Ninja]

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. Your point being?

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.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[petermgreen]

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).

Re:A crack-high moment.

[DECS]

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

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Lonewolf666]

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).

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.

That explains it.

[The Ancients]

Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point'

They were high when they developed it?

That would explain Windows ME.

Re:That explains it.

[metlin]

You mean, like the Ballmer peak?

Re:That explains it.

[NoobixCube]

There was no smoking. Bill stole Steve's Ritalin.

Re:That explains it.

[tcdk]

In a strange coincident, worthy of Douglas Adams, "Stole" actually translates to "chairs" in Danish...

2k?

[sunami]

How about Windows 2000? I still use it and have no real issues with it, unlike when I've used XP.

Re:2k?

[mrbluze]

How has this post been modded Offtopic? All he did was say Windows 2000 is a high point.

I think it's due to the degree of cognitive dissonance involved in the idea that the same company that made Windows 2000 made Windows 95.

Very defensive about Vista.

[Odder]

Ballmer tried to counter Vista's reputation as a mistake and failure. CBS did not miss this.

Both Gates and Ballmer were asked about the success, or lack thereof, of Windows Vista, with Walt Mossberg asking if Vista was a failure or a mistake.

"It's not a failure and not a mistake," responded Ballmer. "With 20/20 hindsight, there are things we would do differently." Ballmer said Vista has sold 150 million units so far, but he did say that business customers will be able to request a "downgrade" to Windows XP after the company stops selling XP in June - obviously a response to the fact that many customers prefer XP to Vista.

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.

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software.

Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[Darkness404]

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software.

Perhaps Mr. Gates should look to such people such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Ian Murdock, Larry Wall, etc.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[mrbluze]

Win95 was as good as Windows got. Yep. A graphical shell running on top of DOS that didn't multi-task properly and invariably killed your computer, given enough time. What a POC it was.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[dedazo]

Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.

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.

No, I'm not Bill Gate's sockpupet.

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.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[Darkness404]

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.

Honestly, most commercial software just plain sucks. Not from a "I can't copy this or modify the source" way but the fact that it breaks, has outdated documentation, gives cryptic error messages. For example, the other day I was using some software that is critical for the business that I was at. It was a Windows program and worked fine for about 2-3 years and then it just suddenly stopped working. So I pull out the documentation (now granted the company bought this software about 2-3 years ago) it was in a spiral book and the first steps were of installing it... in DOS!!! Now the system that this was installed was a low-end XP notebook, and so none of the documentation was even remotely relevant (they did tell you how to use it in Windows but it seemed like an afterthought and it only covered Windows 95!) and this was the only software for the job (it was to enter in data for a remote system to control access). So I tried to reinstall it, didn't work. So I thought about uninstalling it and reinstalling it until I realized that the database (which you couldn't export without the program working) backups were made in 2006!!! So in the end I was left with cryptic error messages, a program that would install but still have the same problem, and the company that sold us the software changed hands so many times that Im not even sure what it is called anymore.

About the only commercial software I would call "good" would be some proprietary games. The rest either suffer from not enough documentation, cryptic error messages, lack of company support, a program that can easily be replaced with a F/OSS solution or a horrible UI.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[Godji]

And Daniel Robbins! Definitely Daniel Robbins!

emerge --sync && emerge -uND world -av ; etc-update

...

Ahh.. the daily dose of GCC output...

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[setagllib]

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.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[Rary]

I agree with Gates, Win95 was as good as Windows got.

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.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[AcidPenguin9873]

I don't know why you named those four people; at least three of those four have been or are currently being compensated for their most famous "free" projects.

• Linus went to Transmeta in 1996 shortly after his Master's degree, and Transmeta paid him to work on Linux.
• Ian Murdock founded Debian during college, then was a part time student and staff programmer at the University of Arizona before founding Progeny (and presumably getting VC funding for it). One thing Progeny did was produce a commercially-saleable derivative of Debian. Then after that he went to Sun.
• Larry Wall was at JPL after grad school, and I'm sure he's made plenty of money off the Perl books he publishes through O'Reilly.
• I don't know about Stallman; he's some sort of communo-socio-anarchist and may survive on ramen handouts from the local organic food store, so you might have me there.

A common thread among those people is that they all started their major projects during college or grad school and found financial backing as they were leaving academia. Or in Larry Wall's case, he had a day job at JPL while working on Perl. I think you'll admit that college/grad student life can't realistically go on forever. Eventually your parents will stop giving you money and/or the university will stop paying your room and board, and you'll have to find a "real job" to support yourself and your family. I think lots of people in the open-source community are employed by the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, OSDL, etc. for their work. No, I don't feel like finding more references.

The message might be that we need to fund more people in grad school to work on pet projects, or that Microsoft needs to fund them, but in general I agree with Mr. Gates - development on large-scale projects can't continue indefinitely without some sort of compensation.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[AcidPenguin9873]

Linus was in school until 1996, during which time he was working on the first incarnations of Linux which you downloaded. Oh, and it turned into his Master's thesis too. Did you even both to read the part of the post where I said "started their major projects during college or grad school" ? And then as soon as he finished school, he got a job at Transmeta.

You have completely missed *my* point - that people can work on their hobby projects in school, or while holding a day job, but development can't continue like that forever. I guess I've been trolled by an AC. Oh well.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[olman]

What the..? All right, I'll be modded to oblivion by saying this but it doesn't make it any less true.

Linus is an university dropout! He definitely did not create linux while he was graduating. In fact he got heck out of university as soon as he got an offer for a job that paid real money.

He then much later went back to the university when he was famous and financially secure to get his degree as a hobby!

I read his interview in some finnish geek magazine years and years ago when he was talking about how nice it was to get out of uni and how he's not going to get caught dead attending that waste of time again.

Personally I even installed very early slackware version around -94 so they already had distros way before -96. However cumbersome horrorshows they were at the time.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[|DeN|niS]

He enrolled in Helsinki in 1988, announced Linux in 1991, got the BSc in 1995, and the MSc in 1997 (having worked odd jobs at the University) and only then moved to the "real money job". I guess we missed the part where he moved back from silicon valley to finland "much later" to study for a few more years?

Its probably more personal for him

[suso]

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.

Not a fan boi...

[lordsid]

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"

Re:Not a fan boi...

[Darkness404]

"It was easier for Apple to make Linux user friendly than it was for them to fix Windows"

Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly, because OS X is mostly BSD with a nice GUI and although Linux is very similar to BSD (and other UNIX variants) OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD.

Re:Not a fan boi...

[Mr2001]

"It was easier for Apple to make Linux user friendly than it was for them to fix Windows"

Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly [...] OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD. And of course, Apple computers didn't run Windows anyway. The quote should be: "It was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly than it was for them to fix Mac OS 9."

Re:Not a fan boi...

[Monkeys with Guns]

Actually, the original quote is accurate. Apple considered licensing the NT kernel to run under their own interface.

I'd've said 98se, if I were going that route...

[foxtrot]

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...

Re:I'd've said 98se, if I were going that route...

[Nossie]

I agree....

XP SP1 or SP2 was a good solid OS

Actually so was Win 98SE

Just proves MS cant do anything right first time

Re:How about..

[maxume]

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.

It WAS a high point

[Trenchbroom]

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.

Re:It WAS a high point

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:It WAS a high point

[stewbacca]

I include Mac, since they drastically lost market share afterwards Simply not true. Macs 'enjoyed' roughly the same market share (around 5%) from the early 90s all the way until their recent increases (no doubt due to the same reasons they never were mainstream in the 90s...Intel architecture).

leaps and bounds...

[Alonzo Meatman]

Anybody who doubts the veracity of this claim obviously isn't old enough to remember Windows 3.1.

Re:leaps and bounds...

[krelian]

I always thought of 3.1 as a souped up Norton Commander.

Re:leaps and bounds...

[Nimey]

Indeed. Back in the day I'd run everything from MS-DOS and let the family suffer with Windows 3.1. The command line was actually /easier/ for me, who learned on an Apple //c.

Not to mention our PC had only 4MB of RAM back then, so Doom, Duke3D, Descent, Aces of the Pacific, and so on wouldn't run too well or at all with Windows, and with as crappy as 3.1's serial driver was, going on the local BBS was faster & more reliable using Telix inside DOS.

95 wasn't quite what it was hyped to be, but it was still a major improvement.

Re:How about..

[Vectronic]

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.

At least they had fans

[sayfawa]

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.

Re:At least they had fans

[Opportunist]

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?"

My ideas on their milestones

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:My ideas on their milestones

[setagllib]

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.

Considering what came before it...

[kungfoolery]

...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.

Windows 2K mostly worked

[friskyfeline]

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.

win 95

[theheadlessrabbit]

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!

Re:win 95

[NoobixCube]

Yeah. Huge innovation in GUI design. Apple had a bar at the top for years, and a trash can. Microsoft put a bar at the bottom, and a recycle bin. I'll be modded down for this, I know, but to me, Windows 95 marked the beginning (or maybe a little later than the beginning) of a long tradition of copying Mac OS. Poorly.

Re:win 95

[bigstrat2003]

The trash can was stolen from Apple, but the taskbar wasn't. Taskbar: useful. Bar at the top of Mac OS: the biggest crime in GUI design ever perpetrated, singlehandedly making Mac OS more difficult to use than anything else. They just don't even compare.

Re:win 95

[snowraver1]

You just make the last line of autoexec.bat "win".

I did that on my comptuer when I was younger. You flick the switch it loads into windows, just like magic! My family loved it, as they were having trouble managing the mouse (double clicking can be a bitch), let alone the OS.

Re:win 95

[steelfood]

And MacOS and Windows 2.0 copied the windowing idea off of Xerox's Parc. What's your point?

Until OSX, I found elements of MacOS to be clunky, annoying, and counter-intuitive. For example, trashing a disk (or disc) to eject it? I want to eject my disk, not erase its contents. What, the little apple icon at the corner is actually click-able and is important? What would make a novice user realize this? At least Windows had a raised motif over the start button, and the actual words "Start" on it to tell you to start there.

Windows 95's interface was much easier to use for multitasking. Alt-tab not withstanding, the taskbar that summarizes all of your open programs so that you can just click to go to that particular program.

Let's talk starting up programs. 95 had a programs list to quickly get to all the installed applications. MacOS, not so much. In 98, the quick launch toolbar made it just a click of a button to start up commonly-used programs. By your reasoning, OSX's dashboard is just a copy of the taskbar and quicklaunch combination.

And, you could navigate to every UI element with the keyboard alone.

My point isn't to be inflammatory. My point is that it is ridiculous to claim that just because certain UI elements were taken from MacOS, that the MacOS actually deserves any of the credit for the user experience in Windows. And to base the claim that the Windows GUI wasn't innovative only on the elements that were copied, and ignore all the other major improvements and advances in UI design is extremely shortsighted.

Re:win 95

[toddestan]

The menubar serves the foreground application. The windows taskbar was, and is to this day, a weird hack of functional confusion designed for a world of screen-filling maximized windows. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good.

And the menubar on the top of the screen is a incredibly dated concept that dates back to the days of small 9" monochrome screens, and is inconvienent and confusing in these days where large screens and multi-monitor setups are common. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good.

What?

[msauve]

Has Bill already forgotten about the Softcard. That was a pretty good product from when Microsoft was in their prime.

What about NT4.0?

[Aslan72]

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.

More accurate high point == buying DOS?

[Sparky9292]

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.

Maximum point of dominance

[alexhmit01]

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 95 -- right before the DOJ stepped in

[Julie188]

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.

Re:Windows 95 -- right before the DOJ stepped in

[Skybyte]

It's more fun to remember the song contains the ever appropriate lyrics "You make a grown man cry".

Re:High Point?

[Vectronic]

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...

Re:How about..

[antirelic]

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???

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Darkness404]

Ah, I remember way back when Windows XP was released, all the Lunix zealots tried to paint that as a failure, too.

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.

Windows 95 was a good time

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Windows 95 was a good time

[bigstrat2003]

In a remarkable coincidence, the best way to secure any OS is to unplug the network cable. Your claim is true, but meaningless.

I wonder if it bothers him?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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?

Micro$oft+bashing+relevant

[denzacar]

Could we keep the Micro$oft bashing relevent please. This is nonsense. Using Micro$oft, bashing and relevant in same sentence to COMPLAIN about the lack of said relevance regarding the aforesaid bashing of mentioned company. On Slashdot?

There is something Zen about the parent post.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[dedazo]

Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint.

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.

"Win95 was as good as Windows got"?

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:"Win95 was as good as Windows got"?

[setagllib]

You have to take it in context. Windows 95 may be useless now, but back at the time it offered features other systems didn't, if not in its own code, then through the third-party ecosystem it created.

Re:95 wasn't so bad....

[LaughingCoder]

Come on! When Win95 came out, with preemptive multitasking, Macs were still using "cooperative" multi-tasking, which is really just a toy by comparison. In many ways Win95 was quite an advance as a true preemptive multi-tasking OS that ran on off-the-shelf hardware. And it also maintained very good compatibility with the old DOS and 16-bit Windows applications (games) at the same time. Quite an achievement actually.

Re:How about..

[Lehk228]

maybe most people on slashdot. if you start talking about breezy badges, gutsy gibbons, and hard herons in the average convenience store most people will just think you are some kind of pervert

Re:High Point?

[log0n]

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).

WGA and DRM came later...

[Joce640k]

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"... :-)

Win2k WAS the only high point

[bussdriver]

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.

Sharepoint

[mrbooze]

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!

Re:Sharepoint

[Richard_at_work]

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. Hmm, interesting - I just fired up our SharePoint (MOSS 2007) Intranet site in FireFox and got .... exactly the same site as I do in IE. There are a couple of minor things that do not work because they rely on ActiveX, but nothing that stops me using the site.

Sorry, but I don't know where your comment comes from - the site layout is identical in both IE and FF (FF 3 RC 1), document libraries work identically, lists work identically, even adding and removing webparts works fine (apart from dragging them around to the position you want).

From what I have just seen, I would have no trouble using the SharePoint site with FireFox as my main internal browser.

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. Thats an implementation issue, you could have the exact same issue with any other prepackaged Intranet system out there. And yes, cross-site search does indeed exist, if your admin sets it up.

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! Create a SharePoint list then, thats what they are there for. No need to load up Word or Excel, and a lot of functionality included by default.

Re:Sharepoint

[Anonymous Coward]

SharePoint is a strange animal. I've rarely run into someone who has liked it after using it for a few weeks. Any developer who likes it has never written anything substantial, period. It seems it sells really well to decision makers who get a quick demo. I agree it looks nice at first, until you actually try to do something with it beyond entering textbox data.

Let me preface the rest of my comments by saying I work frequently with MS, but I'm not an MS employee. I'm also one of the more respected SharePoint developers internally in the MS business community, though many might not know my name, but certainly my work. I've also worked directly with the SharePoint dev team on several occasions.

If SharePoint is a high point, I might as well retire because it's all downhill from here. I can think of few products worse than SharePoint overall.

Let me start with the good things about SharePoint:

1. If you use the built-in functionality, it gets you a lot of typical features valuable for intranet users including: document check-in/check-out, simple search, ability to do some basic customizations to the organization and contents of pages, easy to enter vertical data.

2. There is at least an API, however bad it might be.

3. The new version is a less of a wtf since it's really just an ASP.NET 2.0 application, but it still wants to takeover a server to some degree

4. There is finally a semi-decent way to encapsulate fields in a reusable way (content types)

5, It looks ok with the built-in templates and installation.

6. Whoever claims SharePoint doesn't work in firefox is just creating FUD. It does in 2k7 and there's a version compatability chart you can check in MSDN if you don't believe me. That said, the chart shows that indeed some features don't work. I'm looking at you explorer view.

As you might imagine, each of the items I listed above also have very long wtfs associated with them. Now on to some basic wtfs off the top of my head.

1. Without using .NET reflector, the API is worthless since it is so poorly structured, coded, and documented. Since beta, I have found several hundred bugs. Only a few dozen have since been officially patched. If you look at the code, reflectorisms aside, a second year computer science student would not even write code this bad. Object oriented design escapes these people entirely. Think eternal love of the switch statement, methods that span hundreds of lines, objects that you would want to serialize but can't, inconsistent error handling, calls you need to make but are marked as internal, hundreds of lines of code that can be replaced by 2 short polymorphic classes, ridiculous inheritance trees, etc. A favorite of mine is that the built-in date control doesn't understand dates older than about the 20th century. This is related to a SQL server issue to some degree, but it's not so funny if your customer is a museum.

2. CAML, Sharepoint's XML format. Anyone who has used this in real customizations and applications knows what a giant wtf this is. Every Microsofty seems set on using XML as the tool of the gods. For simple changes, you'll often write hundreds of lines of kludgey XML with javascript, vbscript, HTML, and CAML mixed together. It reminds me of coldfusion without any real functionality. Yes, I do know how to use CAML quite well.

3. CAML. This has to be a wtf again it is so bad. Instead of creating an ORM mapper or some nice query API, we instead are again treated to constructing queries using CAML. Yes, this language is used both for UI, conditions, logic, and queries! Brilliant. Not only does this reinvent the wheel from SQL, but it ensures that constructing queries requires painful string building with wtf treatment of many data types (see datetime). If you need an and or or condition in your query, there's different rules depending on how to structure your XML after 2-3 conditionals. How fun indeed.

4. No real concept of relationships. It's great having a list, but pret

Disagree: 2K was THE high-water mark.

[MsGeek]

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.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Mr2001]

Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint. I disagree. Recall that before Windows XP was released, there were two different branches of Windows: an NT-based "professional" branch (NT 3.x -> 4.x -> Win2K) on the one hand, and a DOS-based "consumer" branch (95 -> 98 -> ME) on the other.

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.

It was amazing to a twelve year old

[gregbot9000]

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.

Re:It was amazing to a twelve year old

[LWATCDR]

Sorry but I am one of the old farts. Yes Win95 was a big deal. I was so excited when it came out. But like every program it did suck.
Win 95 sucked but it sucked less than win 3.1 and dos.
Win 98 sucked but is sucked less than Win 95.
Win Me sucked... It just plain sucked.
Win2k sucked but it sucked a lot less than Windows 98,
XP was W2k with a Fisher Price look and feel but people wrote games that worked on it so it sucked less than W2K for games.
Vista.....
Well Vista like ME just doesn't seem to suck less than XP....

All operating systems suck. The goal is that each version should suck less.

Re:Did they also say why?

[theurge14]

You're completely ignoring their episodes with OS/2 and DR-DOS.

Other High points

[certain death]

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!

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Darkness404]

No it wasn't. XP was a finished version of 2000.

In general though, Windows 2K is much faster then XP and so if more bloat == complete then I guess I know why Vista is so Bloated... I mean complete.

Re:95 wasn't so bad....

[Joce640k]

>"it was a decently advanced OS for the time."

Only by Mocrosoft standards.

At the time 95 was launched, SGI was putting 64-bit IRIX machines on people's desktops.

OS/2 3.0 ("Warp") released in 1994 was better then Win95.

Then there was NeXTSTEP, Apple Mac, etc. - all better then Microsoft.

Microsoft "won" because they ran on cheaper hardware. In no way was their software superior.

Halfway decent Windows

[Average]

'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.

Sharepoint is actually a pretty good product

[spike2131]

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.

Re:95 wasn't so bad....

[awitod]

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.

ME

[conureman]

Windows ME. Harbinger of doom. Up until then, each step forward seemed like sort of a... step forward.

I'd second that

[HangingChad]

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.

Re:99.9999%

[setagllib]

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.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Miseph]

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.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Hal_Porter]

But for those of use on Windows 2K, XP was just extra bloat. XP felt much faster than Win2k on my machine, and that wasn't even that quick.

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. Most home Windows machines are infested with spyware. People that understand it can avoid it, on any version of Windows.

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. Look, you can release an OS with no WGA and people will pirate the hell out of it. Or you can release one with WGA and people will complain. But less people will pirate and more people will pay. Microsoft is a business, and they don't care if people complain or not so long as most people pay for the OS they are using.

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.

win2k

[drwho]

Windows 2000 was the best they ever did. Well, besides msdos5.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Billly Gates]

The problem was dos apps were little operating systems. Games, WordPerfect, Autocad, lotus, etc had their own drivers. If you had Novel Netware then you had redirectors and other drivers that all conflicted in non protected memory.

Programmers used peak and poke and assumed people would 1 run app at 1 time.

Windows had to support that backward compatibility. One good thing with Windows 7 is that every app will run in a vm to prevent this backsupport hell.

If dos were a real operating system in the first place we never would have had this problem. However I believe the 8086 and 8088 were not capable of protected memory but I cold be wrong.

God it was terrible and IBM picked these processors on purpose so businesses would buy more mainframes if they wanted a *real* stable OS/Hardware.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

past few years?

[mkcmkc]

This involvement has allowed the end to end quality of FLOSS to skyrocket in the past few years I'm not sure what you mean by end to end here. Obviously FLOSS has moved into different domains at different times--some areas decades ago, while other areas may never see FLOSS.

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.

I like windows

[ELTaNiN]

Whatever some people say, I LIKE WINDOWS, Because it's the only commercial rootkit available!!!

High-point of Microsoft

[sinewalker]

I think the high-point in Microsoft during Gates' carerr definately has to be when they decided to remove the paperclip from Microsoft Office.

Stallman has a lucrative speaking career

[patio11]

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.

Re:Stallman has a lucrative speaking career

[Tranzistors]

Do RMS speeches stay free (libre)? If no, then he contradicts his ideals, if speeches are available and without restrictions, everything is ok.

I'm actually with Bill on this one

[Mr Z]

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:

• MS-DOS/PC-DOS 2.1x: First widely deployed and long-lived DOS iteration. Adds subdirectories, device drivers and the EXE format, IIRC. Powered the generation of IBM PCs, PCjrs and the first wave of compatibles that really began to put the PC on the map.
• MS-DOS 3.3: Probably the highlight of the DOS networking era. As I recall, this is the peak of the early LanManager attempts at networking PCs. Also brought many ideas from XENIX back into DOS.
• MS-DOS 6.2 + Win 3.1x: DOS reaches its pinnacle, with proper online help, a decent compiled BASIC and highmem support. Windows finally begins to become something worth putting at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT for many people. Some of this started happening with MS-DOS 5, but it didn't really reach maturity until MS-DOS 6.2x.
• Win9x: Win95 was a much needed upgrade in interaction with the PC. Established a new UI that'd hold with minimal changes through XP (though it got a graphical refresh for the default XP theme, classic was still available). It finally made it reasonable for most people to dump DOS. It made managing the system entirely from the GUI credible. Though flawed, it brought us the first instance of Plug-and-Play and the end of the jumper. This alone was a pretty huge step. Combine it with USB, and you have a rather noticeable shift in ease of use at the hardware level. Granted, much of this didn't stabilize until around Win98SE, but in many ways Win98SE was really more of a Win95 SP4.
• Win2000: This put the NT kernel on the map for most people, and many still run it. This set the stage for the successful release of WinXP.
• WinXP: For all practical purposes, killed DOS dead for good by bringing the NT kernel to the masses.

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

Re:I'm actually with Bill on this one

[awitod]

"It didn't understand USB at all, etc. etc. etc."

The USB 1.0 specification came out in 1996. You couldn't find USB devices on the market until 1997ish.

Microsoft High Points:

[crhylove]

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.

Windows vs. Linux in the 90s.

[DrYak]

Hell, in 96, I recall Linux + X not being a very stable desktop by today's standards either. Compared to modern linux distribution, it wasn't very stable.
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.

Re:Windows vs. Linux in the 90s.

[gsking1]

Thats about how I remember it also. 95 did crash, but for daily word processor stuff it wasn't so bad. ME was the WORST and crashed constantly. I was so pissed after paying $80? to "upgrade" from 95 to ME. Somewhere around 98/99 is when I started playing with Linux. It had that remarkable stability that was missing in Windows, even if the KDE at the time was a little buggy. Then I switched to XP for a couple years, which was pretty good. The main thing that XP solved were the crashes. Now I'm back to Linux (Ubuntu) for the past 2 years on my home machine. It's so much more fun and I've saved tons of money on software.

Re:Windows vs. Linux in the 90s.

[Awptimus Prime]

On Windows 9x/ME, whenever it crashed, you got a bluescreen and *absolutely everything* was down with it. Though it is a guarantee to get +5 for saying what you said, it's not the complete reality. Many programs would just GPF and the system would carry on just fine. Note how I said Linux + X, not Linux. DOS and Desqview were entirely stable for that era in their own rights, it was just a matter of what applications you could get away with running.

Loading a CD burning application and any other intensive software was beyond any system from that era's abilities. If the writer didn't get data at a certain speed, it would screw up the burn.

Also, what's the difference in losing an hour's work due to Windows crashing while working on a paper and X crashing while working on a paper? Not much, the whole system might as well have tanked in both cases. I also consider word processing and office applications from the mid 90s superior to Linux applications under X from the same era. It's only been since the early 2000s one could scrape by in a Windows house without a Windows box.

System stability from the mid 90s in both Linux and Windows is what prompted me to go entirely BSD until a couple of years ago.

KDE was also unusable garbage in 96. It took a few years before it matured into anything remotely like you see today. WindowMaker, in my opinion, was the best thing going at that time.

Stallman says software free, speeches protected

[patio11]

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.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Hal_Porter]

I meant that you can't avoid the infestation. One drive-by install of a trojan and it's over. If they root you, you'll never know.

This is true on all OSes, not just Windows. "I'm safe because I know my business" is just BS. No one is safe. But you can make it prompt you before installing ActiveX controls. And a non privileged browser process has so few rights it's very hard for malware to spread out of it. Almost all of the filesystem and registry are off limits for example. Even if it did Opera is not common enough for malware to bother targetting it. Actually you can see if a machine has malware because some non signed process is usually hogging the CPU or thrashing the disk. Or if I debug something I can see an unsigned DLL has been injected into every process.

At least I can see the difference in performance between my machine which is probably malware free and my parents' or brother's girlfriend machines which I'm sure or not. Most of the malwate I've seen is not at all subtle - it just wants to get off the machine into as many machines as possible as quickly as possible.

And come to think of it, if I can't see the malware, is it really that bad that I have it? It's reminds me of that puzzle about "if a tree falls but there is no one to hear it, does it still make a noise?" ;-) Or in biology the idea that introns, the bits of DNA that don't code for proteins are the remains of retroviruses that failed to wake up.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Jason Levine]

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.

Plus, you can turn off most of the "eye candy" in XP. Right-click on the taskbar->Choose Properties->Click on the Start Menu tab->Choose Classic Start Menu. Combine that with the Windows Classic theme in Display Properties and you have an OS that looks like more like Win2K did. It's the first thing I do with any Windows XP installation.

Of course, I don't exactly keep my XP system in "Classic Mode." I've installed LClock and Free Launch Bar. The former changes the look of the system clock and lets me change the Start Menu button to another image (a Windows logo that I mocked up). The latter changes my QuickLaunch bar to allow for submenus and other visual improvements.

Re:95 wasn't so bad....

[Cro Magnon]

OS/2 kicked W95's butt on multitasking, and even on compatibility with 16 bit Dos/Windows software. It failed because IBM couldn't market it well, but tech-wise, it totally whooped W95.