Not sure what the problem is with the detractors...agenda...message...
Actually my message does not really have anything to do with how good or bad any Windows OS is from any technical or usability point of view. Similarly it not about the merits or otherwise of Apples products. It's not about how wonderful an OS Linux is (There I used the generic "Linux").
I have spelled out my message on this forum many times and I guess it's time to do it again. As you asked. Here goes, in summary:
Please try to use cross platform solutions. Please try to not allow the computing infrastructure of the entire human race be dependant on a single source of supply, which for most is in a foreign country and over which we have no control and is a financial burden to everyone. Please may it be that I don't have my choice of OS dictated to me by the overwhelming demands of needing to be compatible with some ones proprietary file formats, disk formats, network protocols and the binary executables required to support all of that.
If you can arrange that the people of the world don't have to keep shovelling money to Redmond as well that would be great.
For the record I have updated two Win8.1 machines to Win10 with NO issues at all.
Can't give exact figures but both machines boot/shutdown faster and appear to be faster overall.
Based on my exposure to Win10 so far I am excited about the pending arrival of my new Win0 development machine yay
One does not have to be using the OS to contribute in the dialog about it.
I've got a test box running now. It will be interesting to see how the users get along with it. I've made it plain vanilla.
For Win 8.1, I added some comfort tools and my usual set of OSS programs. This time, I've continued with the OSS programs, but no special tweaks beyond turning off some of the more intrusive data collection. I didn't do it all though. Wanted a full set of OS features. Wonder if people will pick up on them and see value.
Getting error messages like GWXUX stopped working and then finding out it's part of the Win10 upgrade nag should be enough to discourage anyone from upgrading and encourage them to look at alternatives.
Upgraded my 7 year old Acer 7730 laptop yesterday from Win 7. Everything went fine... until I noticed I didn't have any sound. Ok, a reboot should take care of it. Kind of did... right after the BIOS boot-up messages disappeared the computer started "screaming", almost as loud as a fire alarm! The sound was so loud so I needed to find earplugs, I also believe that the CPU was very much occupied with producing this sound as it had not started within 2-3 minutes.
Due to the late hour I didn't want to wait for Win10 to completely start (to start troubleshooting audio drivers etc.) as the sound even might have been heard by our neighbors.
If I'm not able to fix the audio relatively quickly, I'll most probably go back to Win 7.
Unlike Heater, I recognize MS past and some of the positives they've inadvertently induced into the PC market.
However, I am going to put off W10 simply because W7 works great for me, I'm not gaming where DX12 is a big deal, and mostly for the fact that I am tired of everyone wanting to datamine and monetize me.
I'm moving from Google to GMX for email, and will probably end up getting my 2014 Gen2 Moto G onto a Cyanogen non-Scroggled Android .apk.
I might even contemplate trying to move my personal system to Free/Open-BSD, or Mint if I have to.
Not on Facebook, though we have put the dog on it for the wife to be semi-anonymous.
Many of the touted benefits of allowing onself to be datamined can still be obtained without the intrustion. The most useful one I can think of is GPS Turn-by-Turn. Easily solved with offline GPS app or stndalone unit for $50.
I recognize MS past and some of the positives they've inadvertently induced into the PC market.
Please elaborate? Can you name those positives?
Currently I can only think of one. MS very accurately reverse engineered Netscape's Javascript (bugs and all) an put it into IE. Thus forcing JS to be standardized (Ecma International ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262.) Thus giving the world the only cross platform language and system we have today! Hurray for MS.
This was all totally inadvertent of course, as they hurried to crush Netscape Navigator by giving away IE for free.
I am tired of everyone wanting to datamine and monetize me.
I'm totally with you there.
Some times it's not even about our privacy directly. It's that nagging though that people are out there using us for their own gain with no benefit to us.
Microsoft helped making the "standard" IBM PC commodity hardware, which helped driving down costs considerably due to the huge market and vendor competition, resulting in incredibly cheap computers of what used to be "work station" class and used to cost something like $20k-$30k or worse. The cheap hardware made Linux possible (and is also why 386BSD started at around the same time, of which came FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD etc).
So the one thing (and the only thing) I'm thanking Microsoft for is making Linux possible.
But, I see that this thread is not the right one for this discussion. It's about early Win10 adopters. I'm not one, but my SO's PC has started to get the 'upgrade to Win10' nag messages.. and it's not the time to do that yet. So what was the trick again to turn off the nag messages for the time being?
What follows next in your post may have some grains of truth in it but it is such a gross miss-representation of all that happened since the the arrival of the first micro-processors I don't know where to begin. History re-written by the victors as it were. Of course I'd like to write a long essay expanding on why I say that but this is not the place.
...the one thing (and the only thing) I'm thanking Microsoft for is making Linux possible.
That is just outrageous.
With that logic I have to say that I owe my very existence to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. If they had not kicked up a fuss my father would never have left Czechoslovakia to join the British army. He would not have met my mother in England. I would not be here. Thank you Herr Hitler. Shame that so many had to die to make my life possible.
Or perhaps I should thank the guy who shot Archduke Ferdinand thus kicking off the first world war which ultimately led to the second.
Or...perhaps I owe my existence to Winston Churchill when he stood up and said enough is enough. Thus making me possible.
Again, there may be a grain of truth in your train of logic but it is ignoring the billion other causes and effects that go on in the world. Many of which are far more significant than the record of victors says.
Relax.
It's not a rewrite of history. Granted, it was mostly a coincidense which put Microsoft in that position, but it still is what made the billion-PC market possible. Which again made the massive hardware price cuts due to scale possible. But yes IBM and Compaq (the company which really started the clone market) should be added to MS. I cannot see how there could possibly have been this insane upscaling of commodity hardware possible without the PC and a common OS, can you? And without cheap PCs there would be no Linux. No 386 PC for Linus Torvalds to tinker with.
I cannot see how there could possibly have been this insane upscaling of commodity hardware possible without the PC and a common OS, can you?
Yes.
It was already under way years before in the 8 bit world and CP/M. It was everywhere.
I take a different view. There was such a buzz around the micro-processor when it arrived on the scene. A huge interest and a lot of enthusiasm, energy, innovation was to be seen everywhere. All us young teenagers could see where this was going to lead. Clearly with such a toy to play with and 4 billion people on the planet to play with it something would happen with or without IBM or MS.
Turns out MS had little to do with what you are talking about. Apart from buying qdos and selling it on to IBM. qdos is itself an example of what I'm talking about above.
IBM itself tried hard to stop what you are describing. Remember their attempt to close the architecture with MCA?
All in all I see the IBM/MS thing as a little spark among many others, that just happened to start the forest fire. A fire that would have ignited anyway. No doubt in very different ways.
Further..When the IBM PC first arrived in our company a young Cambridge CS undergraduate colleague of mine looked it over with disdain and said "IBM always holds up the progress of computing by ten years". Turns out he was right, it was ten years between the launch of the 32 bit 386 (1985) and any OS from IBM or MS that could make use of it, Win 95.
Lots of people were doing real computing in those 10 years, and the PC was quite frankly laughable.
We've since melded most of the good stuff together and it's a good scene overall.
IBM essentially took the path Apple did with their 8 bit computers. There were much better machines out there on both the low and high end.
MSDOS basically took the path of CP/M too. Both entities basically jumped in with what they could get done quickly, and both entities were followers for a very long time too.
...resulting in incredibly cheap computers of what used to be "work station" class and used to cost something like $20k-$30k or worse.
Yes, there were such expensive workstations around. The IBM PC was not originally targeted at them or that market. Rather it was intended to take the low end personal computer market that already existed in the form of all those millions of CP/M machines.
In that respect the original IBM PC, despite being a 16 bit machine, had lesser performance and a higher price than they did!
Also in that respect you have a point. The 8 bit world had already been pushed to it's limit and it was time to go 16 or 32 bit. There was a bit of a log jam. Sadly IBM buggered that up by adopting the brain dead 8086 architecture and MS-DOS that held us back for ten years.
Luckily the die hard Apple persisted with their 32 bit Mac and the little cockroach ARM multiplied everywhere without people noticing for a long time.
All in all I conclude that the explosive growth of personal and other computers, and their dramatic drop in size and price is down to physicists, semi-conductor process engineers, chip designers and generally "Moores Law" far more than it is down to MS.
I recognize MS past and some of the positives they've inadvertently induced into the PC market.
Please elaborate? Can you name those positives?
If one stops to think way, way back (to the 80's) when PC's really began to be a 'thing', there were tons of systems, with tons of peripherals, and tons of different connections, file formats, etc.
While I liked the Atari 800 that I slaved for a summer working minimum wage to afford, I ended up on the Amiga.
MS, as it became the 800# gorilla in the room, did end up causing a lot of standards to coalesce<sp>.
Not always for the best, que Amiga or BeOS metadata, however for better or worse as the dominating company/"leader", it did force a certain amount of consolidation and compatability.
I'd agree with most of what Tor posted.
Yes, anyone 'could' have been the Microsoft, however there is no guarantee we wouldn't have had several big players who kept the entire market splintered and more costly than what actually happened. Could have been better for sure, could have been worse for sure.
I remember trying to sell people on 'PC-Compatable' back in the day when that was an option. What if that had persisted throughout the 90's?
Heater, I think you're purposely refusing to acknowledge that MS really ever did anything which positively impacted computing.
Not that I care that much to be honest, but they did usher in computing to the world's businesses, large and especially small, along with hundreds of millions of average joe's.
Just more so than Apple, Atari, Commodore...
Heater, I think you're purposely refusing to acknowledge that MS really ever did anything which positively impacted computing.
Well, yes. I have my bias. Born out of decades of experience and starting in a world of GEC's OS4000, ICL's VME, DEC VMS, Sun Solaris. Later suffering the trials and tribulations of companies that used closed source embedded operating systems like PSOS, VxWorks and QNX.
However in an attempt to remain open minded I did ask the question here (or was it on the parallel "anti-thread"), "Please elaborate? Can you name those positives?"
I even suggested one myself. The MS adoption, cloning, and resulting standardization of Javascript, the most widely used programming language in history.
The only answer I have so far is "Microsoft made Linux possible". Yeah right.
But let's put this on a concrete footing: Is there even one byte (figuratively speaking) of MS software, or one standard they have promoted, after all these decades and billions of dollars expended, that I actually need or can use in any useful way?
No, I don't mean "need" as in "you need windows to run that windows application you want" I mean intrinsically useful by itself.
...however there is no guarantee we wouldn't have had several big players who kept the entire market splintered and more costly than what actually happened.
Yes, companies like to lock you in, they are all for splintering, that's a natural part of capitalism. I find it hard to imagine though that things would have been more costly than having to shovel tons of money to Redmond as the world has done over the years. And now very costly as the world tries to figure out how to get away from such lock in.
On the other hand, I can point out many negatives of the MS era. Well, I did some of that already.
Yes, just that. MS got it all streamlined into one direction (even though it was created around a non-optimal architecture (to say it nicely) like the x86). Maybe somebody else would have done that. But we don't know, and we cannot know. Like the Columbi egg: "I could have done that!" Maybe it would have happened anyway, and MS was just in the right place at the right time. But if somebody could catch a baby falling from a balcony by simply just being there by chance, I would still thank the guy. If a whole procession of people were passing below and the baby couldn't avoid being caught by *someone*, I would still thank the guy.
Now, what about my inquiry about how to turn off the 'upgrade to Win10' nag message in Win7? I'm sure I saw it described before but I can't find it. Presumably it must be about removing something that was installed by Windows update. Anyone?
Now, what about my inquiry about how to turn off the 'upgrade to Win10' nag message in Win7?
Easy. Install Debian.
As you are into analogies, I might say: This all sounds like someone who has small pox and wants to hide a few spots rather than fixing the underlying disease.
I love the falling baby analogy by the way. Let's have some fun with that:
MS would never catch a falling baby unless there was some chance of selling it back to it's parents. Otherwise let it splat on the pavement.
Or like the cuckoo that lays it's eggs in other birds nests, your computer. The baby then does it's best to kill off any other babies in the nest, pushing them out to their death.
WordPerfect - killed by Word.
Netscape Navigator - killed by IE.
Lotus etc - killed by Excel
I run Debian already. The win7 box isn't mine, and runs commercial accounting software which has no replacement, and most probably wouldn't survive an "upgrade" to win10, and lastly the os locale version uses utf-8 to the full, to put it that way. There's no way I can suggest a change to Debian. Even I, who have never found MS Windows useful for anything, can be pragmatic now and then. Not making a habit of it though..
mindrobots: Thanks, that Computerworld article should help.
Getting back on topic, even if just for 1 post, I wanted to say that my upgrade to Windows 10 Pro has been completely uneventful - the way it should be, right? To the best of my knowledge all my software, free or paid for, continues to work as it had under Windows 7 Pro. Earlier in the day I received my invite to perform the upgrade. I had it do the downloads and then scheduled the upgrade to be performed at 2300, giving me ample time to make several Disaster Recovery Images to my back up drive. Feeling secure a had a return bridge to Windows 7 Pro I allowed the upgrade to proceed, which took 35 minutes. A few set up screens later I was presented with my desktop still using the same theme I had before. Even all my desktop icons were in the same place as before. The only thing different is the way the system tray looks, some of the icons somewhat simplified. The Windows 10 Upgrade nag icon moved over to the far left and has become the tablet view icon which gives a smaller rendition of the Windows 8.1 view.
At this point I do have to admit to one problem encountered, and that is Cortana refuses to talk to me, except when I tell her who I am and pronounces my name. From there she goes mute. Perhaps after I throw some gold and diamonds and several unlimited credit cards her way, maybe she will change her mind and begin talking.
Even with that minor glitch I can honestly say that I like Windows 10.
Update:
Ordered and received (same day delivery) a Webcam with microphone and it turned out to be the gold and diamonds that Cortana wanted. Now she talks and sings and tells dumb jokes.
Did 8.1 pro to ten pro. Shoulda known when the new windows logo came up it would not be perfectly smooth. (First thought--Stay away form the light, don't go toward the light......)
But it was not to bad either. First go round, no wireless or bluetooth, win10 could not find the marvel navistar device, killing bluetooth and wireless. Revered did not loose anything of note, and then retried update to win 10. Now works as it should. Miss a couple things (or just haven't found them) but no disasters to report. Now to figure out how to get IST running again so that I can read PDFs from Philips Medical. Otherwise, trial by work is in progress.
WordPerfect - killed by Word.
Netscape Navigator - killed by IE.
Lotus etc - killed by Excel
Need I go on...
LOL, MS didn't 'kill, kill, kill' these applications, at least 2 of them failed to compete in the marketplace because they were the dominant players and didn't feel threatened.
Lotus and Word failed to get on the GUI bus, and thus got themselves kicked out of the market because they thought it was a fad or something.
And its not just me saying it, go about 1/3 down this page: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/netwext/ellig paper/ellig.htm
Netscape? The article above also mentions it, and it does seem to strike me as familiar.
What I remember about early IE and Netscape was that both continually added features to such an extent that they ended up being bloated monstrosities. No doubt IE had an in as it was added to Windows install, however I do remember using both on same desktops, with IE being sometimes noticibly faster.
Lets not talk about browsing on a Mac using Appletalk.....
One could cut the chaff of this entire discussion and simply ask the question, if any of the other computer systems at the time were "better" than the MS/PC, why didn't they become dominant?
Just like VHS/Betamax, it may not have been the best technically, however for some reason it was enough to win the market.
Now, what about my inquiry about how to turn off the 'upgrade to Win10' nag message in Win7? I'm sure I saw it described before but I can't find it. Presumably it must be about removing something that was installed by Windows update. Anyone?
I seem to recall that the KB3035583 update had something to do with the nag. Perhaps if you uninstall that.
Actually Lotus was a house divided that really thought their s$$T was gold plated and didn't stink. They had a product called Improv. It was a seriously powerful spreadsheet program that could manipulate views almost at will it seemed. I may yet bring that back in a VM one of these days. Seeing and hearing about their demos for Improv, that was where the divided house became apparent. The lotus side of the house was so paranoid regarding the capabilities of Improv that whenever a demo was done, a Lotus rep had to be there to make sure that the person demoing Improv did not in some way compare or point out a Lotus fail against the solutions to the limitation addressed by using Improv instead. In hindsight, this is just short of the comedy routine that must have ensued when the then CEO (Gerstner I think) of IBM found out he had semi trailers full of returned IBM PS/2s that either were never accepted by the resellers or returned unsold after being shown on the books as sold through Wallmarts, Targets and such. ooops!
MS certainly went out of their way to kill Netscape. Realizing, late, that the web was going to be a big thing they rushed to get a browser out. Not having one they did a royalty deal with SpyGlass to use the Mosaic browser as Internet Explorer. They gave away IE for free thus never having to pay any royalties. It's hard to compete with free so Netscape was doomed. You may recall there was an anti-trust investigation into this shenanigans.
As for the others, certainly WordPerfect was a more usable word processor and Improv a better spread sheet.
But you hit the nail on the head "Just like VHS/Betamax, it may not have been the best technically, however for some reason it was enough to win the market." and the article you linked to addresses exactly the issue. Network effects can be a lot more powerful than outright technical superiority.
If everyone is sending me documents in format X, be it Word, Excel, Win32 executable, whatever, I had better have something that can work with format X.
Luckily, in recent years, people, governments, corporations and other institutions have realized what a bad idea these closed, proprietary formats and protocols are and the resulting single supplier lock-in they promote.
Interesting to read the interpretations of history in this thread. There's a bit of the truth across all of it.
I lived through that history being heavily into computers during it. Riding the C64/C128/Amiga train at home and the Apple //e, IIgs, Mac train at school. Then having school get a IBM PC with MS-DOS, and me finally getting one at home. Had friends in the Atari camp too.
Each camp has their own version of what happened and why. In the USA, at least, the computers that really got into people's homes first were the C64, Atari 400/800, and CoCo. It was a REALLY long time before people had PCs running MS-DOS at home. I recall a lot of factors being involved in making things happen, not the least of which was games.
The IBM PC, despite the brain dead design of the 8086 and it's circuitry, had one major thing going for it. It was dead easy to clone. Basically it was an implementation of Intel's reference schematics for x86 systems. And it was dead easy to create add ons using the ISA bus. No custom chips, no barriers. That opened the door to the cloners. Compaq, DELL, HP and a hundred others. Just get your chips from Intel or AMD and throw it together. Easy.
Aside: I was amazed to find that early 386 mother boards still used the 8059 interrupt controller, a chip designed for the 8 bit 8085, ten years before! That's how easy they made it.
There was a little issue with getting a BIOS but that was soon reimplemented.
Then there was the little issue of an operating system for your clone. No worries, Bill has one.
However, from that link, when Excel came out it was supposedly pretty bad-ask and innovative.
And it appears, the market, in which MS was not the dominant app/suite manf. liked it.
And it didn't come out cheap, at $495 I think it was the average going price, if not more.
Funny thing, I believe it came out for MacOS first.
We could go on like this for days though, and I doubt you'd ever reckon that MS might have ever had a good app/decision.
You should be happy though, MS is certainly feeling the heat.
But thats gonna be bittersweet, because pretty soon I think the linux-fans are going to be red-faced when they find out how nice it is to develop for Linux using Visual Studio.
Who'd have ever thought that would happen?
Comments
I have spelled out my message on this forum many times and I guess it's time to do it again. As you asked. Here goes, in summary:
Please try to use cross platform solutions. Please try to not allow the computing infrastructure of the entire human race be dependant on a single source of supply, which for most is in a foreign country and over which we have no control and is a financial burden to everyone. Please may it be that I don't have my choice of OS dictated to me by the overwhelming demands of needing to be compatible with some ones proprietary file formats, disk formats, network protocols and the binary executables required to support all of that.
If you can arrange that the people of the world don't have to keep shovelling money to Redmond as well that would be great.
I thank you in advance.
Can't give exact figures but both machines boot/shutdown faster and appear to be faster overall.
Based on my exposure to Win10 so far I am excited about the pending arrival of my new Win0 development machine
I've got a test box running now. It will be interesting to see how the users get along with it. I've made it plain vanilla.
For Win 8.1, I added some comfort tools and my usual set of OSS programs. This time, I've continued with the OSS programs, but no special tweaks beyond turning off some of the more intrusive data collection. I didn't do it all though. Wanted a full set of OS features. Wonder if people will pick up on them and see value.
Due to the late hour I didn't want to wait for Win10 to completely start (to start troubleshooting audio drivers etc.) as the sound even might have been heard by our neighbors.
If I'm not able to fix the audio relatively quickly, I'll most probably go back to Win 7.
Unlike Heater, I recognize MS past and some of the positives they've inadvertently induced into the PC market.
However, I am going to put off W10 simply because W7 works great for me, I'm not gaming where DX12 is a big deal, and mostly for the fact that I am tired of everyone wanting to datamine and monetize me.
I'm moving from Google to GMX for email, and will probably end up getting my 2014 Gen2 Moto G onto a Cyanogen non-Scroggled Android .apk.
I might even contemplate trying to move my personal system to Free/Open-BSD, or Mint if I have to.
Not on Facebook, though we have put the dog on it for the wife to be semi-anonymous.
Many of the touted benefits of allowing onself to be datamined can still be obtained without the intrustion. The most useful one I can think of is GPS Turn-by-Turn. Easily solved with offline GPS app or stndalone unit for $50.
Currently I can only think of one. MS very accurately reverse engineered Netscape's Javascript (bugs and all) an put it into IE. Thus forcing JS to be standardized (Ecma International ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262.) Thus giving the world the only cross platform language and system we have today! Hurray for MS.
This was all totally inadvertent of course, as they hurried to crush Netscape Navigator by giving away IE for free. I'm totally with you there.
Some times it's not even about our privacy directly. It's that nagging though that people are out there using us for their own gain with no benefit to us.
So the one thing (and the only thing) I'm thanking Microsoft for is making Linux possible.
But, I see that this thread is not the right one for this discussion. It's about early Win10 adopters. I'm not one, but my SO's PC has started to get the 'upgrade to Win10' nag messages.. and it's not the time to do that yet. So what was the trick again to turn off the nag messages for the time being?
-Tor
With that logic I have to say that I owe my very existence to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. If they had not kicked up a fuss my father would never have left Czechoslovakia to join the British army. He would not have met my mother in England. I would not be here. Thank you Herr Hitler. Shame that so many had to die to make my life possible.
Or perhaps I should thank the guy who shot Archduke Ferdinand thus kicking off the first world war which ultimately led to the second.
Or...perhaps I owe my existence to Winston Churchill when he stood up and said enough is enough. Thus making me possible.
Again, there may be a grain of truth in your train of logic but it is ignoring the billion other causes and effects that go on in the world. Many of which are far more significant than the record of victors says.
Relax.
It's not a rewrite of history. Granted, it was mostly a coincidense which put Microsoft in that position, but it still is what made the billion-PC market possible. Which again made the massive hardware price cuts due to scale possible. But yes IBM and Compaq (the company which really started the clone market) should be added to MS. I cannot see how there could possibly have been this insane upscaling of commodity hardware possible without the PC and a common OS, can you? And without cheap PCs there would be no Linux. No 386 PC for Linus Torvalds to tinker with.
-Tor
It was already under way years before in the 8 bit world and CP/M. It was everywhere.
I take a different view. There was such a buzz around the micro-processor when it arrived on the scene. A huge interest and a lot of enthusiasm, energy, innovation was to be seen everywhere. All us young teenagers could see where this was going to lead. Clearly with such a toy to play with and 4 billion people on the planet to play with it something would happen with or without IBM or MS.
Turns out MS had little to do with what you are talking about. Apart from buying qdos and selling it on to IBM. qdos is itself an example of what I'm talking about above.
IBM itself tried hard to stop what you are describing. Remember their attempt to close the architecture with MCA?
All in all I see the IBM/MS thing as a little spark among many others, that just happened to start the forest fire. A fire that would have ignited anyway. No doubt in very different ways.
Further..When the IBM PC first arrived in our company a young Cambridge CS undergraduate colleague of mine looked it over with disdain and said "IBM always holds up the progress of computing by ten years". Turns out he was right, it was ten years between the launch of the 32 bit 386 (1985) and any OS from IBM or MS that could make use of it, Win 95.
IBM and MS have a lot to answer for.
Lots of people were doing real computing in those 10 years, and the PC was quite frankly laughable.
We've since melded most of the good stuff together and it's a good scene overall.
IBM essentially took the path Apple did with their 8 bit computers. There were much better machines out there on both the low and high end.
MSDOS basically took the path of CP/M too. Both entities basically jumped in with what they could get done quickly, and both entities were followers for a very long time too.
Sorry to go on, but needs must.... Yes, there were such expensive workstations around. The IBM PC was not originally targeted at them or that market. Rather it was intended to take the low end personal computer market that already existed in the form of all those millions of CP/M machines.
In that respect the original IBM PC, despite being a 16 bit machine, had lesser performance and a higher price than they did!
Also in that respect you have a point. The 8 bit world had already been pushed to it's limit and it was time to go 16 or 32 bit. There was a bit of a log jam. Sadly IBM buggered that up by adopting the brain dead 8086 architecture and MS-DOS that held us back for ten years.
Luckily the die hard Apple persisted with their 32 bit Mac and the little cockroach ARM multiplied everywhere without people noticing for a long time.
All in all I conclude that the explosive growth of personal and other computers, and their dramatic drop in size and price is down to physicists, semi-conductor process engineers, chip designers and generally "Moores Law" far more than it is down to MS.
If one stops to think way, way back (to the 80's) when PC's really began to be a 'thing', there were tons of systems, with tons of peripherals, and tons of different connections, file formats, etc.
While I liked the Atari 800 that I slaved for a summer working minimum wage to afford, I ended up on the Amiga.
MS, as it became the 800# gorilla in the room, did end up causing a lot of standards to coalesce<sp>.
Not always for the best, que Amiga or BeOS metadata, however for better or worse as the dominating company/"leader", it did force a certain amount of consolidation and compatability.
I'd agree with most of what Tor posted.
Yes, anyone 'could' have been the Microsoft, however there is no guarantee we wouldn't have had several big players who kept the entire market splintered and more costly than what actually happened. Could have been better for sure, could have been worse for sure.
I remember trying to sell people on 'PC-Compatable' back in the day when that was an option. What if that had persisted throughout the 90's?
Heater, I think you're purposely refusing to acknowledge that MS really ever did anything which positively impacted computing.
Not that I care that much to be honest, but they did usher in computing to the world's businesses, large and especially small, along with hundreds of millions of average joe's.
Just more so than Apple, Atari, Commodore...
However in an attempt to remain open minded I did ask the question here (or was it on the parallel "anti-thread"), "Please elaborate? Can you name those positives?"
I even suggested one myself. The MS adoption, cloning, and resulting standardization of Javascript, the most widely used programming language in history.
The only answer I have so far is "Microsoft made Linux possible". Yeah right.
But let's put this on a concrete footing: Is there even one byte (figuratively speaking) of MS software, or one standard they have promoted, after all these decades and billions of dollars expended, that I actually need or can use in any useful way?
No, I don't mean "need" as in "you need windows to run that windows application you want" I mean intrinsically useful by itself. Yes, companies like to lock you in, they are all for splintering, that's a natural part of capitalism. I find it hard to imagine though that things would have been more costly than having to shovel tons of money to Redmond as the world has done over the years. And now very costly as the world tries to figure out how to get away from such lock in.
On the other hand, I can point out many negatives of the MS era. Well, I did some of that already.
Now, what about my inquiry about how to turn off the 'upgrade to Win10' nag message in Win7? I'm sure I saw it described before but I can't find it. Presumably it must be about removing something that was installed by Windows update. Anyone?
-Tor
Sorry to take this off topic.....or maybe bock on topic?
Does this one help?
As you are into analogies, I might say: This all sounds like someone who has small pox and wants to hide a few spots rather than fixing the underlying disease.
I love the falling baby analogy by the way. Let's have some fun with that:
MS would never catch a falling baby unless there was some chance of selling it back to it's parents. Otherwise let it splat on the pavement.
Or like the cuckoo that lays it's eggs in other birds nests, your computer. The baby then does it's best to kill off any other babies in the nest, pushing them out to their death.
WordPerfect - killed by Word.
Netscape Navigator - killed by IE.
Lotus etc - killed by Excel
Need I go on...
mindrobots: Thanks, that Computerworld article should help.
At this point I do have to admit to one problem encountered, and that is Cortana refuses to talk to me, except when I tell her who I am and pronounces my name. From there she goes mute. Perhaps after I throw some gold and diamonds and several unlimited credit cards her way, maybe she will change her mind and begin talking.
Even with that minor glitch I can honestly say that I like Windows 10.
Update:
Ordered and received (same day delivery) a Webcam with microphone and it turned out to be the gold and diamonds that Cortana wanted. Now she talks and sings and tells dumb jokes.
But it was not to bad either. First go round, no wireless or bluetooth, win10 could not find the marvel navistar device, killing bluetooth and wireless. Revered did not loose anything of note, and then retried update to win 10. Now works as it should. Miss a couple things (or just haven't found them) but no disasters to report. Now to figure out how to get IST running again so that I can read PDFs from Philips Medical. Otherwise, trial by work is in progress.
LOL, MS didn't 'kill, kill, kill' these applications, at least 2 of them failed to compete in the marketplace because they were the dominant players and didn't feel threatened.
Lotus and Word failed to get on the GUI bus, and thus got themselves kicked out of the market because they thought it was a fad or something.
And its not just me saying it, go about 1/3 down this page: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/netwext/ellig paper/ellig.htm
Netscape? The article above also mentions it, and it does seem to strike me as familiar.
What I remember about early IE and Netscape was that both continually added features to such an extent that they ended up being bloated monstrosities. No doubt IE had an in as it was added to Windows install, however I do remember using both on same desktops, with IE being sometimes noticibly faster.
Lets not talk about browsing on a Mac using Appletalk.....
One could cut the chaff of this entire discussion and simply ask the question, if any of the other computer systems at the time were "better" than the MS/PC, why didn't they become dominant?
Just like VHS/Betamax, it may not have been the best technically, however for some reason it was enough to win the market.
I seem to recall that the KB3035583 update had something to do with the nag. Perhaps if you uninstall that.
MS certainly went out of their way to kill Netscape. Realizing, late, that the web was going to be a big thing they rushed to get a browser out. Not having one they did a royalty deal with SpyGlass to use the Mosaic browser as Internet Explorer. They gave away IE for free thus never having to pay any royalties. It's hard to compete with free so Netscape was doomed. You may recall there was an anti-trust investigation into this shenanigans.
As for the others, certainly WordPerfect was a more usable word processor and Improv a better spread sheet.
But you hit the nail on the head "Just like VHS/Betamax, it may not have been the best technically, however for some reason it was enough to win the market." and the article you linked to addresses exactly the issue. Network effects can be a lot more powerful than outright technical superiority.
If everyone is sending me documents in format X, be it Word, Excel, Win32 executable, whatever, I had better have something that can work with format X.
Luckily, in recent years, people, governments, corporations and other institutions have realized what a bad idea these closed, proprietary formats and protocols are and the resulting single supplier lock-in they promote.
I lived through that history being heavily into computers during it. Riding the C64/C128/Amiga train at home and the Apple //e, IIgs, Mac train at school. Then having school get a IBM PC with MS-DOS, and me finally getting one at home. Had friends in the Atari camp too.
Each camp has their own version of what happened and why. In the USA, at least, the computers that really got into people's homes first were the C64, Atari 400/800, and CoCo. It was a REALLY long time before people had PCs running MS-DOS at home. I recall a lot of factors being involved in making things happen, not the least of which was games.
Aside: I was amazed to find that early 386 mother boards still used the 8059 interrupt controller, a chip designed for the 8 bit 8085, ten years before! That's how easy they made it.
There was a little issue with getting a BIOS but that was soon reimplemented.
Then there was the little issue of an operating system for your clone. No worries, Bill has one.
Don't disagree with much of that.
However, from that link, when Excel came out it was supposedly pretty bad-ask and innovative.
And it appears, the market, in which MS was not the dominant app/suite manf. liked it.
And it didn't come out cheap, at $495 I think it was the average going price, if not more.
Funny thing, I believe it came out for MacOS first.
We could go on like this for days though, and I doubt you'd ever reckon that MS might have ever had a good app/decision.
You should be happy though, MS is certainly feeling the heat.
But thats gonna be bittersweet, because pretty soon I think the linux-fans are going to be red-faced when they find out how nice it is to develop for Linux using Visual Studio.
Who'd have ever thought that would happen?