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Happy 30th Birthday, Windows!
v3rgEz writes: And what a ride it's been. Today marks the 30th anniversary since the debut of Windows 1.01, the first commercial release of Windows. At the time, it was derided as being slow, buggy, and clunky, but since then ... Well, it looks a lot better. .The Verge has a pictorial history of Windows through the years. What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?
He did say useful though.
Desktop/laptops are where you get things done. IMO phones and tablets are toys. You can play simple games, check your email, bring your porn with you to the bathroom etc. But the email and phone calls that are work related are about stuff that, guess what, 90% of people need to go to their (mostly Windows) PC to do.
There are exceptions of course but most people do stuff other than communicating all day. Phones are horrible for anything requiring screen space, processing power etc. Phones might have the processing power but the apps that they run are still living in the 90's vs their PC equivalents.
Yeah, haha, funny and all but I haven't experienced a blue screen that wasn't hardware related since XP. I'm not saying they don't happen but it's not Windows 98 anymore. Every time somebody makes a comment like this it makes me think they used a computer once about 1996 and then never touched them again.
If NeXTSTEP was so great, then why didn't it become as popular as Windows? {...} Yet that never happened! NeXTSTEP and its descendants toil away in near obscurity while pretty much everyone uses Windows!
Are you aware that Mac OS X is a derivative of NeXTSTEP ?
And that iOS is in turn a distant cousin of Mac OS X ?
These are immensly popular OSes (lots of Mac Books and Mac Air, around), and they are descendant of NeXTSTEP.
Apple rehired Steve Jobs, partially to get hold on the technology as a replacement of the aging Mac OS Classic platform.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The success of something does not depend solely on how good it is. How well it is marketed plays a huge role as well. I will freely admit that Bill Gates is a world class genius when it comes to marketing software. When it comes to writing well designed, easy to use software his ability is far more modest.
Spot on! And there's something else, too.
If IBM hadn't selected Microsoft to provide an operating system for it's IBM PC, I think it's safe to say that the computing landscape would look quite different right now. IBM approached Microsoft to do an operating system for the IBM PC in 1980. Microsoft then referred IBM to Intergalactic Digital Research (remember them?), where Mrs. Kildall (who ran business affairs for IDR) turned them away because she didn't want to sign IBM's confidentiality agreements. If IDR hadn't dropped the ball, we'd all be worshiping at their altar instead of Microsoft's. Remember, Microsoft was a computer language company at that time; they had no Operating System. After IDR dropped the ball, Microsoft bought what would become DOS from another company, modified it to fit IBM's specs, then licensed it to IBM and, as it turned out, other companies as well. Microsoft's initial success in the O/S market was pure luck. It's continuing success is marketing. Plus, it was an easy call for users (individual and corporate) to stick with Microsoft Operating Systems since most everyone went to IBM-compatible computers in the 80s, so it was easy to retain users for compatibility reasons.
Today's Microsoft is the Frankenstein's Monster that IBM created. Bill Gates was smart enough to seize on an opportunity and ran with it. None of this has anything to do with the quality of Microsoft's software. People endure Microsoft's software quality, design deficiencies and screw-ups because most feel like they don't have any other choice and, in many cases, they really don't.
The reason WIndows takes a lot of tech support resources is because the whole world uses it for everything. If everyday people tried using Linux all the time, there would be just as many problems.