In article <199709092305 .
QAA23874 @
cactus .
tc .
pw .
com>,
<Pio_Gaeta @
europe .
notes .
pw .
com> wrote:
>But such critics should take notice: Microsoft did what a number of
>others *could* have done and didn't. These others even had ample
>opportunity.
Microsoft did a lot of things that no one else could do too. Go ahead:
start a company and try to sell an improved version of the Windows GUI
with replacements for some of the standard DLLs. It should be compatible
with all software written for the old one but be a lot less annoying
to use. Send me email when 10% of the Windows user population has
switched to your product.
>Take what has been called the oldest argument on the internet: Mac
>vs. Windows. It's been argued endlessly that the Macintosh platform
>is superior to Windows. So, if that's true, why didn't Steve Jobs and
>Apple become what Bill Gates and Microsoft are today?
Not by me it hasn't. Macs suck. Windows boxes suck. Unix vendors suck.
Most operating systems suck; we seem to think of this as a fact of life
these days, and we only notice when one OS sucks less than the others.
Humanity has had electronic computer technology for almost sixty years.
0.1% of humanity (5 million people) have had access to computers for
10 years. All those combined person-years still haven't managed to
solve a lot of really basic problems that users encounter every day when
surfing the 'net. Most of the problems that haven't been solved are
artifacts of the political and economic structure of the software industry.
>The Macintosh was released in 1984, long before Windows. It beat
>Microsoft to the Windows-oriented approach by six years. If Apple had
>decided to make the Mac OS open, and license it to other hardware
>manufacturers at that time, Microsoft's later decried domination would
>probably have been prevented. But they didn't, so there went the Mac,
>and there went Apple, despite all the claims - many of them justified
>- of its superiority.
Microsoft is just as guilty of locking customers into proprietary
technology as anyone else; they just used cheaper hardware than Apple,
Xerox, and the Unix vendors.
Why doesn't Windows run on top of Xenix, Microsoft's Unix product,
which had multitasking and (some) security built into it from day one?
After all, Unix flavors are relatively cheap to make; you can get three
or four by FTP for free these days. MS could have been killing off Unix
vendors a whole decade before the launch of Windows NT, and they would
have had the end product debugged by now.
>Besides making Windows able to run on all the most popular hardware
>platforms, Microsoft also did something else: They made it very
>user-friendly, in its installation, in its setup, and in its
>operation. Add that to its "open-ness", and its popularity was
>virtually guaranteed.
It runs on *the* most popular hardware platform; anything else is just
Microsoft's embarrassment. Go ahead and try to use Windows NT on a MIPS
or Alpha box with any non-Microsoft software for which you don't have
the source code.
>Compare this feature to Unix. Unix is anything but user-friendly.
>Without an understanding of Unix, which takes quite some time to
>obtain, it's impossible to set up and run. Its commands are so
>non-comprehensible I've heard them referred to as "extraterrestrial".
This could have been fixed so easily; I'm really disappointed that
it wasn't. It is being fixed now, slowly, but I think most of the
customers who still want Unix don't want to pay for an easy-to-use
interface any more.
Installing Solaris is no harder than installing Win95--in fact,
it's easier, because the hardware usually isn't as broken as some PCs
are--although Solaris is less colorful and it doesn't tell you how
wonderful it is while it's copying files.
>So it's no surprise that when Windows NT came along, with its
>familiar, user-friendly interface, it was an immediate threat to Unix,
>despite the fact that Unix was more robust, had superior clustering
>technology, and ran on larger machines.
Throwing away all that so you can run Windows is a *good* thing?
I appreciate the fact that to people who have no computer at all, a
Windows computer is an improvement; however, if you've been spoiled by
Unix applications that work on machines that stay running for years at a
time, it's hard to get used to an OS that crashes ten times a month, where
every fifth application you install causes another one to stop working,
and where even the tiniest security issue instantly becomes a major
vulnerability because everyone is attacking your OS and the vendor can't
keep up with the bug fixes. Ever notice how many viruses and trojans run
under Windows?
>Despite all the complaints, despite all the Justice Department
>investigations, despite all the cries of "monopoly!", Microsoft has
>taken over the market because it makes life easy for the most
>important person in the market: the user.
Sure hasn't made my life easy. We tried seriously using Win95 and NT
last year--half of our machines had Windows on at least one partition on
the hard drive. It was awful--I was spending hours trying to help users
use applications that had serious problems. Standard user training
included "how to reinstall from the CD when one application clobbers
another or the registry gets destroyed." There are only three of these
machines left, and we're phasing them out as soon as it is convenient.
There will probably be only one left by this time next year, and it will
probably only run Windows part-time.
>I've several years of experience with LANS, WANS and OSs and I
>remember the older age ;-) of dot and @ commands
>(Wordstar and Lotus say you anything?).
I think the 'vi' text editor took me a month to learn; however, since
its command language is more efficient than those of other popular
editors, and I never need to learn any other editor, it was well worth
the time. It's available for every single hardware/OS platform that I
use these days, and it comes pre-installed on most of them.
>Who remember how difficult IT was before GUIs and standardization?
I remember a time when IT was easier than it is now. IT was hard, then
it became easier due to increasing industry standardization, then it
became hard again, but in different ways. If anything, the level of
standardization has decreased in recent years, because some people expect
everyone is using Windows, and they cause problems for those who don't.
Some of them are quite rude about it too.
I don't think GUIs have had any sort of impact on IT--after all, it's the
same darn user sitting in front of the machine. The set of problems that
the end user can't solve themselves has changed, so the help desk sees a
different set of issues to tackle. Users with no competence still flood
the help desk with trivial questions, and users who shoot themselves in
the foot now do much more damage before they give up and come to us.
The GUI makes automation and remote access difficult, and it's a pain
to have to constantly adjust your thinking to fit the interface model.
>Who know how hard setting up and administering a small LAN was before
>WNT and W95??
Win95 is easier to set up? I didn't know that. Funny that I wouldn't
notice that after setting up dozens of Win95, NT, Solaris, and Linux
machines.
Win{95,NT} are significantly harder to keep running and administer without
having a technical person in the same city. That's one of the reasons
why we're phasing it out; the short-term costs are a little lower but
the long-term costs would fund our procurements for years!
>I don't think they're perfect, I think they're not so robust as other older
>OSs, but the've the merit of a big semplicity.
What good is a computer if you can't rely on it? Seems like a waste of
money to me. Do you mean that you don't care if your computer wastes
your time and throws away your work? I initially learned Unix by reading
books while my Windows box rebooted. In many ways it's like reading a
book while there are commercial breaks on TV!
>I don't care other aspects (anti-trust, market dominion......) this are
>political
>things, so other will do for me.
Just imagine if the only provider of food was McDonald's. That helps
put things into perspective. ;-)
--
Microsoft Magic Line, The: n; the curve on a price-performance chart defined by
the set of current shipping MS products. New MS products shift the MML upward.
Competitive products that fall below the MML become unmarketable and disappear.
Hence, Microsoft is always the worst marketable solution for any real problem.
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