Win95 Lifecycle Draws to a Close 702
Mr_Perl writes "As many Everquest players discovered recently directx 8.1 is not being made for Windows 95, sending stores everywhere into a frenzy to slap little stickers over the words "Windows 95" on game box system requirements sections. Microsoft has picked November 30th, 2001 as the date that Win95 moves into the unsupported phase of it's career, making it even more useless to those who still keep it around for playing the latest games. Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003."
Re:Hummm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft support (Score:4, Interesting)
Face it, the opportunity cost of maintaining any product in the 9x/ME line will continue to rise in the upcoming years. The fact that 95 through ME were essentially the same product with performance tweaks, bug "fixes," and feature additions made it easy(er) to spread DirectX willy nilly. But now we face Windows 2000 which looks like MS already wants to kill and XP, two projects that (supposedly) share minimal common code with their older brethren.
I'm sure most properly designed software that runs on 98 through ME will still run on 95 for years to come. You just won't see the latest gaming patches for it. And who runs Quake IX on Win95, anyway?
Re:Why is this news? (Score:2, Interesting)
Win2k next... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does this add any rights? (Score:4, Interesting)
Like it or not, just because a company ceases supporting software dosn't mean that they have in any way abandoned or renounced their copyrights, which still last 95 years.
Since MS, quite overtly, ceases support to force upgrades expect quite vigorous defense of their intellectual property rights.
KFG
Bill Gates should make a good product, not squeeze (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft is trying to establish the idea that they can kill their products even when people still are using them.
When this happens with Windows XP, you will no longer be able to change parts in an old computer, because doing so would require re-activation, which Microsoft won't make available after a date the company picks. This is a way of forcing users to pay more, not only for software, but for hardware, too. (Microsoft's big customers are hardware manufacturers.)
I really, really don't like Microsoft's abuse. I don't like things like the Registry, which is a database that frequently has errors that cannot be fixed with the tools Microsoft supplies. All settings for most programs are contained in the registry, and if there is bad error, it can be necessary to start over completely, and re-install all programs. For some people with a lot of programs, this can take 20 hours.
I don't like the artificial limitations which cause Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME to crash even though there is plenty of memory available.
I don't like the sloppiness and built-in weak security. This has caused billions of dollars of grief for people all over the world.
I don't like the fact that the operating system re-configures itself without any notice to the user. When there is a problem with a connection, as there often is after a computer is moved, there is no notice that something has changed.
Monopolies are not necessarily bad. Abusive monopolies are terrible.
I am very much looking forward to the time when Linux configuration and documentation are good enough that I can stop supporting Windows completely.
Why does a man who has 70 billion dollars feel that he has to squeeze money from people? Why doesn't Bill Gates relax and make a good product? Does it really make all that much difference to him to make another billion?
--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence? [hevanet.com]
Thank god! (Score:1, Interesting)
Windows 9x/Me were Alpha releases of Windows.
Windows 2000 was a beta.
Windows XP is, like, Windows 1.0. I mean, as a 1.0 release, it's still full of bugs - but unlike everything before (besides maybe 2k), at least it's not
I wait for the day when XP (1.0) is all that's supported, maybe by then personal computing won't still be in the stone age!
Unfortunate (Score:2, Interesting)
If MS continues to publish OS's with license restrictions like XP (which they will) I think it will force more alternatives like Linux to evolve and compete...Especially if the older MS alternatives become unusable...
Help me out here (Score:2, Interesting)
I only ask this question since M$ seems to ignore things like my 5-year-old laptop which could never handle anything above Win98, but works fine with Win95
Re:Bill Gates should make a good product, not sque (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way. In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
Without those "artificial limitations", it's likely Win95 never would've seen the light of day. See, much of Windows 95's vaunted instability was due to Microsoft buckling under the pressure of their ISVs. Microsoft had actually removed most of the 16-bit code, and many nasty bugs. However, many ISVs told Microsoft that they weren't going to develop for Win95 immediately, since they felt that their Win3.x apps still had some life, and many OEMs and partners told Microsoft that they would not upgrade to Windows 95 unless some app (depends on the company what app that would be) was available. Thus, to be able to make Windows 95, it needed to have much better backwards-compatibility. Which meant re-introducing lots of nasty 16-bit code and a number of bugs that win3.x developers had come to rely upon. Was it wrong for them to do that? Yes, probably. But when you're a business, making money is important. Had they not, no money would be made. QED.
Erm, choose the OS family you're speaking of. Yes, win9x had very weak security, and for a good reason -- it's a home system, and at the time win95 was written the internet wasn't so popular. Now, if you want to make the "billions of dollars" argument, you'll have to refer to NT, which is not win9x, and has some pretty impressive security features. Yes, there were problems, too (note that IIS is not considered part of the OS), but a lot of that (I'm not saying a majority, but a lot) came from admins who had no clue what they were doing when it came to NT security. My point? Pick one or the other -- either you're talking about win9x and the weak security argument holds up, or you're talking about NT and the "billions of dollars" argument could make a fair case, but not both.
I'm assuming you're referring to the fact that Windows networking defaults to DHCP. Don't you think the same thing would happen on any other OS that uses DHCP to get an IP address?
Either you're very naive and have no clue how publicly-traded businesses work, or you're deliberately trolling. I'll assume the former, as it's up to the moderators to decide the latter. Okay, quick lesson in the economics of a publicly-traded coporation: That money Microsoft makes does not go directly into BillG's pocket. Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders to continue to be profitable. It does that by releasing product. In the cycle of product development, there comes a point where you have to call it "good enough" and release it so that you can sell it and a) recoup your R&D costs, and b) hopefully make a profit to keep your shareholders happy. This is what Microsoft does. Yes, Microsoft, just like any other group of developers in the world, would love to sit on a product until it's 100% perfect. Doing that, however, is economic suicide. I'm not even talking just the loss of a monopoly position. Microsoft can survive without that. I'm talking about disappearing off the face of the free market. You can't run a business designed around selling product without releasing product. It's just not possible.
Not really. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, even within the Win9x world Windows 95 is a nightmare. The original release doesn't even support USB and can be a pain just to establish a net connection. It has drivers for, well, almost nothing beyond very bland generic basic hardware--and home users aren't very prone to updating drivers manually. Which reminds me, in the original release, no functional Windows Update to get the system updates for most people. Plus, there are three distinct flavors of Win95, and just try asking a home user "Well, is it Win95 A, Win95B, or Win95C? Well, right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'About this computer', then read off the very very long number..." And any recent USB devices can be very flaky even on the Win95 versions with USB support.
And even non-USB hardware may not work on Win95. Some hardware vendors have abandoned support for Windows 95, long before MS is abandoning it. Just try to get supported Win95 drivers for a brand new ATI video card if you isbelieve--their website explicitly disclaims all support for Win95; so, maybe Win98 drivers will work, maybe not.
The problem is made worse when considering WinME, and how the subtle changes made to ME to keep average joes from seeing any DOS underpinnings broke some drivers and code. Consequently, that leaves a hardware vendor or software maker with supporting Windows 95's lack of all features and libraries in later versions, Win98's much better "completeness" of libraries and features and compatibility, WinME's not-total-compatibility with Win98 thanks to its stupid "features", Windows NT which is even more archaic in terms of compatibility and libraries and worse to support than Windows 95, Win2k and its quirks, and finally WinXP which is the new standard in the MS world. Or, they can require Win98 or Win2k minimum, as many are already doing. A lot of hardware and software makers probably don't even test on Win95 anymore even if they do claim Windows 95 will work with their product, since most of the time it *probably* will, in one way or another.
So, I think it's great that MS is dumping Win95 support at last, and not releasing new packages like DX 8.1 for it. Now, I'm all for backwards compatability--in a recent post, I even lamented that nVidia doesn't seem interested in either including rudimentary Glide support in their drivers or releasing what code they can for the Glide API, for the sake of continuing to be able to use a few great Glide games that are out there. But that's a far cry from dumping support for a 6 year old OS when Win98SE runs everything Win95 can and a lot better. After all, would you expect a Linux distro compiled in 1995 to run most apps compiled today perfectly? No--libraries have changed, and a whole lot of code everywhere has been updated since then. Win9x has always strived for compatability, so the situation is much better with Win95, but surely it's time to drop any official support.
That said, I went to the MS support download site about a month ago to download all the Windows updates to keep handy, since I have copies of all flavors and like to set up archaic OSes in VMware, and I couldn't find most of the Win95 updates. There was a download for administrators of all of them, but the link is broken now.
So, offhand, can anyone think of a place to easily obtain all of the Win95 updates at once?
About fucking time. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like trying to develop for 5 different unixes, but you can't use the preprocessor since it has to all be the same binary.
Re:This is just their income plan ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Independent developers design software for MS products because of the platforms' ubiquity. One 'feature' that Microsoft customers are implicitly paying for is the availability of software. By taking away that platform's continued availability to new users, MS dries up the development market for older platforms, forcing users to upgrade even if they have no compelling need for the upgrade through the upgrade's intrinsic changes. Users upgrade to keep up with the newer software and for the continued hardware support, not for the OS itself.
It is a particularly vicious circle. It would not be so dangerous if Microsoft did not have such a chokehold on the software market. I am hopeful that this chokehold will encourage the development of viable alternatives, like Linux. On the other hand, MS's monopoly advantage might be too great for simply the best technology to win out.
The issue raided of "abandonware" in earlier posts is a reasonable one. Copyrights and patents are given so that creators may benefit from their creation, for the benefit of society. When intellectual property rights are enforced to discourage the dessemination of knowledge, as in the case of "abandonware", the intellectual property laws have had an opposite than originally intended effect.
When MS pulls the plug on an OS, they are effectively pulling the plug on all the people who developed software for and worked on that OS. Because these people added value to MS's product, they have a legitimate proprietary interest.
If Microsoft was explicitly renting out their software, their actions would be somewhat more defensible. As they are claiming that they are selling a perpetual license, however, but acting as if they are only renting it, there is a legitimate case to be made for MS's misreappropriation of previously sold goods.
Re:Does this add any rights? (Score:2, Interesting)
In the lab I work at we still have a few AT machines, that run an early version of DOS and have programs in Basica to control some instruments. When we thought the system and program disks had been lost for a while we couldn't figure out how to re-obtain the things we needed, but at least all we had to look for was some disks, and not also a registration confirmation.
I am thinking maybe the reg scheme that I expect to become commonplace will require upgrades every 5 years, whence you can no longer reinstall the OS, which lets face it, you have to do quite a bit with Windows.
Re:Planned obsolescence (Score:2, Interesting)
Rule #1 for defending Microsoft:
Be so narrowminded and shortsighted to fail to see any future developments. And call everybody ridiculous who does.
It's correct that Win95 continues to work, but for WinXP you will need Microsoft's good will (aka WPA). Of course they will grant you gracefully to use XP, so that people like you can tell how nice Microsoft is and nothing changes. However the version after WinXP, will have WPA that works and will be enforced so people like you will tell us that nothing changes, MS just enforces what they did not before. BTW, they force XP on new PCs and inflate [zdnet.com]
XP-selling numbers to proclaim XP as "the standard" and abandon older versions earlier.
Is Microsoft evil? No, they just don't care about laws and can get away with it. (BTW: Didn't Bill Gates lie under oath? Wouldn't mere mortals go to jail or at least be fined?)
Is Windows a safe investment? Only in short-term.
say what you will, it is characteristic of MS (Score:3, Interesting)
The irony is, of course, that while Microsoft has been learning on the job and shipping outdated software, customers have been financing their learning experience and suffered from frequent, incompatible upgrades to boot.
Re:damn... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the old days, when hardware was the sole bottleneck, some hacker in his garage could write something that shocked the world. Look at Doom-a shareware program by a few hackers. Look at Wolfenstein-a slick but fiensishly complex work produced by experienced corporations. The complexity of software is now orders of magnitude greater than it was ten or fifteen years ago.
Suprisingly, this exponential increase in software complexity has begun to outstrip Moore's Law: only the newest 3d games require the latest hardware. Almost everything else runs well on a 2 or 3 year old system. Furthermore, graphics cards are the key to top performance, and chip speed, while relevant, isn't as critical as it used to be. This trend will continue as ambitious projects run into barriers set by graphics cards and network connections.
What does this mean? While certain hardware components will remain critical, the new bottleneck for most applications will be software. The latest applications with all the bells and whistles will be fiendishly difficult to develop and debug. Security will become more important with the advent of always-on broadband connections. Since software development is holding things back, software companies must give users compelling reasons to upgrade; they can no longer rely on rising cpu speeds to drive sales.
Microsoft is the monopoly on the desktop, and therefore the most threatened by these changes. Some people still use windows 95, and still prefer it over new versions, in 2001. That's six years! The product line has already begun to enter stasis and fragment. 95, 98, NT, ME, XP, 2K vs. Linux, MacOS, BSD, BeOS, Solaris...there are as many competing strains of windows as there are competing OSes! If Microsoft allows itself to stagnate its power will erode, and third parties will find reliable ways around the barriers to competition MS has set up. The MS leadership has many faults, but stupidity is not among them. Something is going to give.
Planned obsolescence is Microsoft's new model. If the old system does everything it needs to, nobody will upgrade. Therefore, believes MS, the old system must not be allowed to do the necessities. Since the necessities will soon be effectively free from hardware constraints software must be the new control mechanism. Hence, product activation, .NET and passport, and the end of support for old OSes. Product activation codes will create an artificial link between new hardware and new software, while .NET, passport, and digital rights management place control of the most critical applications and data almost irrevocably in Microsoft's hands. Online, with everything dependent on MS servers, they can easily block out third parties (just as AOL's AIM fought with MSN messenger) and discontinue support for old software. They can sell subscriptions and monitor users. If MS has its way the existing hardware driven revenue engine will be replaced by one of purely artificial control. By leveraging its monopoly and turning proprietary crippleware into a standard Microsoft hopes to be a far more formidable presence in five years than it is now.
Think about it-by various methods you can currently communicate with windows users, even if you use another OS. However, in Microsoft's vision this is impossible. With the ability to constantly change its closed standards MS will block out any attempts at compatibility with its proprietary formats; you will only be able to exchange word documents if you have an up to date and registered version of office on a supported OS. Even linux users will *need* access to an updated windows box to interact with the rest of the world. MS considers linux it's number one threat right now, and this sinister plan is the only way it could possibly eliminate that threat.
Microsoft's existing monopoly will allow it to quietly build this trap. Businesses will fear the costs of changing to something new and different, a herd mentality will prevail, and MS will not be foolish enough to drive companies away prematurely with licensing extortion. Once a business is locked into .NET it will be almost impossible to convince it to reimplement its entire set of mission critical information services with something completely new; a gradual transfer will not be possible. Users will naturally want a platform compatible with the one they use at work as computing becomes more tightly integrated into the fabric of everyday life. In fact, use of an incompatible platform may severely inhibit the ability to perform many jobs, as well as precluding telecommuting. This is how Microsoft plans to rule the world in the future, and this scenario is not at all farfetched. The only thing standing between them and absolute power in the world of personal and business computing is the acceptance of their new control mechanisms by the mainstream of users. So far the mainstream has been frighteningly compliant. There was a time when predictions such as these would have been dismissed as paranoia or trolling, but today there exists irrefutable evidence that Microsoft has already put these plans into motion. After all, these plans are the logical course for a capitalist to follow.
Isn’t it benign of MS to release the source code (Score:2, Interesting)
...if the product enters non-supported phase? I believe this will happen.
Remember Windows CE 3.0 code was released albeit under shared source license.
Jawahar
http://www.diaries.com/css/
Sue microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Our consumer laws says that a company must keep support for a product up to 5 years after it's dicontinued.
Since win95 were discontinued only in 1998, they must keep support for it (at least here) until 2003.
Don't get mad at M$ (Score:2, Interesting)
My friend works at BorisFX, a company which makes graphics tools, and they: :)
:)
1. Don't properly support their current versions. Most of the tech support answers are upgrade your computer, buy the latest version of our software and theres nothing we can do because it's XYZ's fault.
2.Stop supporting their old versions THE DAY their new versions are released (pretty much)
Not that i know the meaning of what M$ actually does for support... other than service paks!
Re:the blight is really bloat (Score:4, Interesting)
Yay, innovation.
From an ISP standpoint (Score:4, Interesting)
Now before this gets modded into oblivion, just think about how fast the web is changing everything. People (other than gamers) aren't just using their computers for word processing, it's all about email,browsing,home finance, online banking, shopping. As the websites get larger and more complex, they suck up more space and memory on the computers.
Luckily windows 3.1 dialup support died for us Dec 31 2000, so we didn't have to worry about Trumpet winsock et al. anymore.
Windows 95 can be a major problem when working with a newbie who still thinks that the mouse is a "foot pedal" like that on a sewing machine (yes it's true, I actually had a call like that). I mean the Internet Setup Wizard is a piece of cake, but the majority of the people who are hip enough to navigate the web have allready moved on to 98/ME/XP/2K whatever.
This can actually help out ISP's by not having to worry about support for computers that were "given" to people without the CD. (ever try changing DUN settings or reinstalling Client for MS without the CD on an "upgraded" system where the CABS weren't installed?)
I've experienced this first hand with "Why is the internet so slow?" check the settings, and the person has 8MB o RAM running w95 and someone gave them a CD with I.E. 5.x and somehow they got the thing to kinda run. By the time they have to go out and get SIMMS enough to run the browser du jour (Opera notwithstanding) they might as well go out and get a whole new system for $700 USD.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the way MS handles things is correct, but at some point the lower end of the bell curve of internet users has to catch up to really experience everything the web/net has to offer.
Look at dialup, without updated modem drivers/init strings, the cheap HSP modems
won't maintain a connection. If the computer starts losing memory, the winmodems die. It doesn't occur to these users who think that computers just magically "work" that it could be their own system, and not the network and support that the ISP offers.
But I still love all the phone calls I get because the default error message states "call your network administrator" everytime something happens... NOT!
So I guess in closing this is going to be a way to keep people happy in the long run.
I mean hey I still have netscape 2.0 running on a 1MB RAM Macintosh, but other than email, what good is it?
Re:the blight is really bloat (Score:2, Interesting)
Everything XP does out of the box would take at least 50-100MB more space.
Besides all that, it doesn't crash as much.
For a Window manager, I can't see where 1,490 megs of space go to make the difference in programs.
I can't see where that much goes either. However you can account for about 33% right off the bat. Windows restore points are going to default to something, and Hibernation, enabled by default, takes up the RAM in space, at all times.
Besides that, try something: take a brand new 80GB HD. Install XP on it. 78.5 GB left. Wipe it and install the compact version of 95. You now have 1990MB free. That whole FAT32/NTFS inclusion thing really helps.
Yes, it's bloated, but it's not that bad. It's not just a "purty" version of 95.
Geee, welcome to software planned obsolescence (Score:5, Interesting)
The hardware underneath has not changed much. A month ago they celebrated the last of the 16 bit code again. That chunk of code could have run on an 8088, just like MS DOS 3.2 can run on my AthlonXP. The hardware folks have gone to great lenghts to maintain compatibility. In the same way I can move Linux hard disks around the room from a 486 to an Athlon and have it boot.
Where's the software improvement? Can anyone out there name one thing that I can do in XP that I could not do under Win3.1 or DOS? Movies, check, audio, check, ethernet, check, IP suite, check, instant messenger, check, dancing icons and goofey sounds, check. All of it was possible, despite the artificial 16Meg RAM limitations, under their dinky single user non multitasking software. Today, their dinky single user non multitasking softare acts much the same, but it's a little faster thanks to hardware improvements. Win 3.1 flies on the same hardware that 9x chokes with more code than it takes to fly the space shuttle. If bloat is improvement, OK, there has been some real change.
M$ would have you believe that you are a "consumer" of software and that bytes somehow go stale in time. I've never eaten a byte in my life. It's hard for me to believe that their non compatibility issues are anything but planned.
Re:Bill Gates should make a good product, not sque (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft is trying to establish the idea that they can kill their products even when people still are using them.
When this happens with Windows XP, you will no longer be able to change parts in an old computer, because doing so would require re-activation, which Microsoft won't make available after a date the company picks. This is a way of forcing users to pay more, not only for software, but for hardware, too. (Microsoft's big customers are hardware manufacturers.)
I do not think that Microsoft will do this. Many of the XP sales are over the counter, which means there is no true licence. They are _sales_, like soap or a hammer. Refusal to activate would make it worthwhile for a number of lawyers to start class action lawsuits which would even go so far as to challenge the viability of shrinkwrap EULAs. The customer bought the right to use the software. As long as Microsoft is a company, they must honor the sale.
Buy?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an strikingly disingenuous quote from a man who has gone to great lengths to emphasize that when you purchase Windows you are buying, not software, but the license to use it.
They've made quite clear that Micros~1 is shifting its focus from selling applications to selling *service*. In other words, you are not buying anything, you are renting -- and have the right to use it as long as you continue to pay up.
It's like saying, "Once you buy a satellite dish, you have the right to use it forever". Sure, you do. But unless you pay for the service, all the dish does is hang off the side of your house.