The Relevance of Windows

Josh Fink writes "ZDNet has up an article exploring whether of not Windows is still relevant. In the age of 'Web 2.0' both older folks who remember the days before Windows and younger folks who have never known anything else are beginning to see Microsoft's offering as old news. From the article: 'Before closing the books on the Age of Windows, however, let's not get too caught up in the fashion of the moment. The water-cooler crowd may take a dim view of "Win-doze" for all the right reasons. Still, Microsoft's archrivals continue to view it as a product with a potentially make-or-break impact on their businesses. In fact, two of them--Adobe Systems and Symantec--are lobbying European regulators to get tough on Microsoft. The European Union already has an unresolved antitrust dispute with Microsoft, and Adobe and Symantec would be silly not to play that card for all it's worth. So this is what they're doing.'"

Is the Operating System Dead?

[eldavojohn]

I read an interesting article [applematters.com] about the operating system being dead and it contained the choice between a machine with your favorite operating system or a machine with your most hated current OS but with access to the internet.

And, you know what? I must admit that I would take the machine that had the connection to the internet regardless of what current OS it had on it.

So, not only is Windows no longer relevant, but the functionality of the operating system itself may have been trumped by our ability to communicate with other people. This doesn't invalidate operating system arguments but it does cause one to wonder about what is really important when you're getting a machine to work & play on.

of course windows is still relevant (for now)

[rpax9000]

that doesn't mean that i want to have to use it for anything. it's ms' right to include whatever they want in their os, in my opinion. it's also my right to prefer os x or linux (or my old vic 20) to using windows.

i think the software companies involved in the whining are just trying to save an obsolete business model, kind of like the music companies complaining about itunes selling music too cheap or the movie studios trying to keep anyone from hacking the encryption on their dvds.

as far as the security thing goes, i don't really have any sympathy for the av companies, but at the same time i'm not sure ms' track record gives me any reason to believe they can handle the security of my computer. of course, my only windows machine is my company issue dell laptop, and it's probably going to die of an exploding battery or me chucking it out the window when i get frustrated trying to use it before it gets a virus anyway.

The obsolete businesses complain the most.

[Anonymous Coward]

Symantec!?! These guys have a business that depend entirely on Microsoft continuing to deliver a horribly insecure OS. They're not arguing that Microsoft is unfairly competing with Symantec's "market" - they're really complaining that Microsoft is finally fixing bugs that never should have existed to begin with. They should have known that their "patches until Microsoft fixes it" (which is what AV software really is) product wouldn't be a big-money business after Microsoft (eventually) fixed things. And Adobe - it seems like formating a text document hasn't been innovative since TeX - and if Microsoft makes that easier, I say more power to them.

Don't get me wrong - I don't love Microsoft - but I'd hate to see Adobe make pretty-printing proprietary in Linux or Windows - and I'd hate to see Symantec claim that patches are proprietary for Linux or Windows.

Words and words.

[suv4x4]

Words about Windows relevance or irrelevance are easily thrown out in the plublic without thinking of what they really mean.

I imagine a world where Windows is banned and replaced with Ubuntu (for the sake of argument). Imagine your family installing and updating software from CLI or giving up your favorite software or games.

Imagine relearning all they know about their desktop in a Linux environment.

Windows also has a lot of software not offered on other platforms, such as Photoshop, Flash (the IDE), Dreamweaver, 3DSMax and so on.

The Linux alternatives for a designer are mostly jokes (like Gimp, where you can't even draw a rounded rectangle without installing specially crafted Script-Fu commands).

The Mac platform is a lot worse than Windows where I'm locked not only into proprietary OS (which is outdated every year and you have to re-buy it), but also proprietary hardware which you can't upgrade any better than a laptop (add some RAM, a DVD.. and that's it.. wanna faster processor on your iMac? throw away the whole machine and buy a new one).

Re:Office

[daviddennis]

I've used it off and on pretty much since its introduction.

I can't find anything particularly wrong with it. In fact, it's nicer to use because at least it's not all gloomy grey like the Windows version. (Interesting to see them finally fixing this in the new Office, but it was a long time coming).

D

McNealy on PRI's Marketplace last night...

[jpellino]

He reiterated the basic difference in philosophy between Sun and MS take on what your computer is. He did a demo of his JavaCard and walked up to a random workstation what became his within a few seconds. he went on to explain that MS believes the physical computer you hold is all your informatio, Sun believes the network is the computer. His analogy was that you don't carry all your money around in a briefcase, you put it in a bank and then access it when you need some of it. But we're perfectly happy carrying all our information around in a box, typically with little or no safety net. It looks like it may not be Sun who points us towards the information appliance with their name on it, but maybe Web 2.0 services that make it so that I can have my info (where-ever) and get it where I need to. I have to say with NeoOffice and Google Writely and Spreadsheets available, not to mention possible links to new Mac apps and .mac services, I can't imagine why I'll be paying full price for Office 2007 Now With Ribbons. And I'd love to see my Java Ring gain all that functionality.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[molarmass192]

You're focusing on one very specific segment of the OS market, namely games. Even then, the problem isn't hardware, Linux has very good support for 3D accelaterated cards and sound. The problem is DirectX is an MS only toolkit. Cedega kind of addresses that but it's not in the best way possible. Ideally, an Open DirectX project would seek to implement the DirectX interface for non-Windows platforms. On that note, that's easier said than done. DirectX mixes in doses of Windows specific directly memory access routines which really only lend themselves to emulation a la Cedega. There are some DirectX-like toolkits out there, but they tend to be fragmented (OpenAL, SDL, etc) and not in the realm of a "define macro and recompile" solution. I find the whole DirectX / OpenGL "fight" a really interesting story.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[xtracto]

I agree completely agree with you.

Just today I was happily running my Ubuntu based laptop when I saw a notification icon about "available updates". I clicked on it an proceeded to download the updates. Everything seemed right, excepting that there was one package (something called "image kernel") that failed to download and install; besides of that, everything went smooth (or appeared to be).

Anyway, after restarting the computing the only thing I got was a kernel panic... and I could not even restart in failsafe mode or anything else... basically my laptop is unusable now.

On the other side, I could never use the hibernate or suspend features of my laptop because after I selected hibernate, the computer would turn off fine, but when restoring the session it would just get freezed. The same thing happened to the suspend mode. I tried in some ubuntu forums but the only answer I got was "your computer ACPI is broken"... which is stupid as "the ohter" operating system can hybernate and suspend without problems.

What is the relevance of this you might ask?, well, from my experince (since 1994 when I installed FreeBSD for the first time), Linux has always been a "catch up" operating system. First it was the modems (and the "buy a real modem" zealot slogan) then the sound cards, then the video cards and now the wireless chips. Linux kernel developers cant get along with the technology development speed. It always feels as if Linux is one step back of the current hardware. And the main problem are the drivers. But, in my opinion is not a problem of the hardware manufacturers but a problem of the Linux zealotry of "give us the driver source code or give us the ball". Linux will always be catching up trying to hack togheter hardware drivers until they agree to play nicely with the hardware providrers.

This again?

[Ravenscall]

I remember all of this going around during DotCom boom 1.0 right before Win ME and 2000 came out.

Then the dotcom crash happened and people quit asking the question, as Microsoft was one of the few stable pillars of the IT industry for a year or so.

I predict pretty much the same thing this time around.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[frogstar_robot]

Linux will always be catching up trying to hack togheter hardware drivers until they agree to play nicely with the hardware providrers.

The problem is that "play nicely with the hardware providers" is a synonym for "never make major improvements to the kernel again because you'll break a 5 year old driver."

It's all about Photoshop, Sonar and Eve-Online

[PopeRatzo]

I'd be happy to change to a non-Microsoft operating system right now. I'd even spend some money to do it, but I've got a handful of programs that I just can't run on anything but Windows, and that's a stopper for me.

If I can't load Adobe Premiere, or Sonar or Eve-Online in Linux or OSX, it's no good to me. I'd even be happy to switch from Sonar back to Logic Audio Platinum and I can run Premiere on a Mac, but still there's Eve-Online.

If I even have to WORRY about whether I can run my favorite apps, I'm not going to change to a different OS, even if there are lots of reasons for me to do so.

I know from experience that I can work longer, with less fatigue, on a Mac than on Windows or Linux. I prefer the look and feel of OSX. I love the idea of open source operating systems, and I like the way Linux can be made bulletproof without sacrificing all sorts of performance and resources. But still... I can't run my favorite apps.

So who's got to change, me or the manufacturers? Am I supposed to switch to Linux with the hope that if enough of us do so the software manufacturers will start to port their apps over to Linux? I don't have time for that.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[cyberformer]

This is why MS is producing so many versions of Vista. The low-end home version will cost some OEMs almost nothing, but it'll be so crippled that it's basically trialware. MS is betting that people will prefer the convenient online upgrade "feature" (just enter your credit card number and unlock an better version) to switching to Linux, hunting for a Vista crack or installing an old copy of XP.

Vista Ultimate is mostly aimed at the kind of people who line up outside the computer store at midnight the day a new OS is released. If it's available to OEMs at all, it'll be for the multi-CPU, liquid-nitrogen-cooled machines that cost many thousands of dollars anyway.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[drinkypoo]

Guess you have 1GB or less of RAM, otherwise Win XP has problems hibernating reliably.

I'm using XPsp2 on a Compaq nw9440 with 2GB memory and the only time I've had a hibernation problem it was related to my port replicating dock.

Ubuntu is the first linux that hibernates correctly for me, but out of two machines I've tried it on (IBM Thinkpad A21p and Dell Dimension D600) only one of them (the dell) is hibernating correctly. Same exact OS...

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[OmnipotentEntity]

If more of your value is in your drivers than in your hardware, you make crappy hardware. Good hardware yeilds drivers that don't disclose any secrets about your product because all you need is an interface. Cheap hardware offloads what should be happening on the hardware to your CPU. That's the difference between Winmodems and real modems.

If you manufacture good hardware there isn't a reason in the world that you should be timid about releasing open source drivers. This has baffled me forever. Even major players like NVidia or ATI shouldn't have anything to worry about because the only thing you are making public is the interface. And that has jackall to do with what's actually happening under the hood.

Now, if you are a manufacturer of crappy hardware, then you really do have a reason to keep your drivers binary, but guess what, if you make your investment in software you have to deal with consquences of that investment. And the main one is you have to worry a whole lot more about the environment that you're drivers will be in. That's a consquence of the buisness model.

Re:Operating system far from dead

[Bluesman]

It's an oversimplified view from a non-programmer.

There is always more than one way to do something on a computer. Even Linux has a number of different methods for drawing on the screen. You can use X, bypass it a bit and use OpenGL, use the framebuffer, etc. Each of these methods has benefits and drawbacks.

Just like any other non-trivial system, trade offs are made in the design to accomodate a certain type of user. At its heart, any unix-like operating system is designed for multiple users to share one system. Windows was designed as a single user system and still suffers/benefits from that design.

I have a project that runs under Linux and Windows with no changes to the source code. It's a BASIC IDE for kids. The Windows version runs like a dream, because Windows will devote nearly 99% of the CPU to it when it's a foreground process. Linux will not, and even if it did, it would have to share the CPU with X Window which does all the drawing.

The upshot of this is that animation under Windows, using my program, is crisp and responsive. Under Linux it's not (it used to be *horribly* slow). I've done a few things to mitigate this, so it's "good enough" under Linux, but solving the problem in a portable way is not really possible without system dependent code or major changes to the architecture. Adding FreeBSD into the mix makes things even more difficult, as the tradeoffs in that system seem to favor a multi-user server even more.

But in the end it's all about tradeoffs. If I wanted to make an extremely high performance BASIC IDE, I could, but it would either limit the amount of systems I could run it on or require a huge effort porting it to each system. There comes a point where it's not economical, or where I run out of time. Since my target audience is children learning to program, I'm going for maximum portability and ease of development, since performance probably isn't too much of a concern, and I'm doing this myself in my spare time.

Re:Operating system far from dead

[Aladrin]

Oversimplified, but not necessarily as 'nonprogrammer'. Each OS has its own strengths. Mac is obviously a great desktop. Windows is a good desktop with a TON of software that just doesn't exist anywhere else, including games. Linux makes an excellent server.

I tried to make Linux (Slackware, then Kubuntu) be my desktop. I love Yakuake, Katapult and K3B. I wish they existed on Windows. But I'm a gamer at heart, and the offering for Linux is sad at best. Even with Wine and Cedega, I couldn't play any games reliably. But I've used Linux as a server environment for even longer, and love it. I would never considering trying to use Windows as a server again.

I don't yet own a Mac OSX system, but they have it for the CSRs at work, and my mac-user friends all say it's the way to go.

So yes, it's the apps that make the computer useful. But most of them only run well under a certain OS. Many, many bugs are OS-dependant. That's why they'd run better on 1 than another. Sadly, Firefox runs much better on Windows for me than Linux, for example.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[gartogg]

Wait a second...

The ulitimate goal of a technology is to get to a stage that it is so good, it is invisible. Then it's irrelevant, in these terms. It still matters, of course, but there is no differentiation.

There are plenty of irrelevant things with huge market shares. The point here is that operating systems have been commoditized, and are no longer important - The analogy you could use is that you don't care which brand of gasoline you use, but you care about your car. Of course, as computers evolve, new technologies become old, and then commotized. I cared about the computer architechture, then they all got to be good enough that I cared about by hardware (video card, ram, etc.) Then I stopped caring as long as everything worked.

I used to care about my OS, then they all became sufficient to get to my web browser and do the other tasks I needed done. Then I cared about my browser, but they all became good enough to use the web apps that I wanted, so I'll mostly stop caring about those as well.

Re:Is the Operating System Dead?

[ElleyKitten]

You know that schools just add the costs of the software to the tuition, right? So in those "deals", every student has to pay for a license for Windows and Office even if they already have them or use Mac/Linux/whatever and never actually buy and use the CDs sold in the bookstore. So I would define schools that don't do that as not sucking.