Windows XP and iPod: A tale of two birthdays This week is remarkable for two 10-year computing anniversaries: that of the Apple iPod and of Microsoft's Windows XP. Both should be celebrated for their success and impact on consumers and tech sector. But while Apple's iPod will be celebrated in the history of its creator and – no doubt – the annals of computing history as …
was the lack of proper separation between admin and user.
At home, I had to prevent the missus from removing such unimportant items as command.com in earlier Windows incarnations, so quite early on I installed Windows NT 4.0. Later I moved to 2000 rather than going through 95, 98 and (shudder) Millennium. I did not like the level of privilege I had to give users on XP, when that became the next step (as MS throttled support for 2000).
Windows 7 is a good deal better than XP in many ways.
XP is the same as 2000 in this respect.
Perhaps what you are thinking of is that XP could run loads of apps that 2000 couldn't. Specifically, it could run a lot of shitware written for Win98, which demanded to be "run as admin" so that they could screw up your system. The Windows ecosystem (and as a result, the internet at large) is still plagued with this problem.
Lack of proper separation between admin and user?
What? That's the whole point of MS moving off the old 3.X, 95, 98... Windows systems onto NT based systems. Rest assured that there is proper separation between admin and user, it's just that lots of people/suppliers of hardware didn't set it up properly.
one of the prime offenders of not properly setting up their software to work with the new OS was the the MS Programming Languages division. We went through all the proper processes to setup our shiny brand new secure network, and promptly had to break the model as soon as we went to install the newest .Net software. Grrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And always run XP with an admin and one or more user accounts. Of course some games/ancient software with config files in the program's directory wanted admin rights which was almost always cured by giving all and sundry access in its directory and children in Program Files and the registry. Rather unfortunate, but better than giving the user admin rights.
I've now banned my mother from installing any more iOS updates on you as every time she does, you crash, funnily enough exactly the same as my wife's iPhone 4 and my old 3GS used to do the same. The only way to recover is to rebuild the iObject from a machine with a clean iTunes install on it (no backups) and then to resync with the original backup. How the hell did you last 10 years on looks alone?
Or is it just me that has had the completely opposite experience (iPodding since 2002, XP since 2008), with mostly rock solid iPod/iPad/iPhone upgrades - single exception being iOS5 for the iPhone 3GS which failed the upgrade once and needed a single restore (and with a pleasant surprise that no data or configuration settings were lost!).
XP has just about got stable (at SP3 + many many many patches) on my company laptop but it does need another rebuild (windows explorer can randomly hang or crash) as I'm sure its going to shoot itself in the head soon [wait a sec, just completing the backup].
No, I think you'll find it was a combination of Adobe's Postscript page description language and the software that capitalised on it (Aldus PageMaker, Adobe Illustrator for instance) that gave the Mac legs. It established the Mac as the de facto standard platform for the print/design/publishing sector which grew into more or less every creative sector over time. And this was before Windows existed, so it couldn't have had anything to do with the ability to install Windows on it.
Yes, you were running Ventura Publisher (I was too) on DOS when the Mac WAS the best thing you could buy. I remember distinctly the difficulty getting Publisher to output correctly to the, by then, pretty standard Linotronic and Agfa Imagesetters. The problem was usually the fonts...
...such fonts just didn't exist unless you were using early Bitstream (dubbed 'Shitstream' at the time) fonts which had incredibly bad kerning tables, or Monotype (who for some strange reason used Postscript Type 3 for some of their families) fonts. The early Adobe font collections were flawless and still are to this day (I'm still using a Type 1 version of Helvetica Neue dating back to 1988!).
Generally though, the truth is that type control in Ventura Publisher was severely limited compared to what you could achieve in PageMaker. I know, I'm a "touchy feely can't think for shit graphic artist" who used both platforms from the very beginning and the Mac was simply better back then which is why it got it's legs so early on and has been so closely copied since.
If by Stagnating you mean "INCREASED BY 48% in 2005" then you're absolutely correct - although I would suggest you call Oxford first and tell them the definition of the word stagnating now means greatly increased.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Some_Analysts_Excited_by_Mac_Sales_Figures/
Some analysts are looking beyond the unrealistic iPod sales expectations for 2005, and are focusing instead on the strong Mac sales figures. Analysts from Needham & Company see the Mac as a strong force in Appleis performance during fiscal 2005.
The key to Appleis 57 percent revenue growth was directly linked to the 48 percent increase in Mac sales, substantially higher than the overall PC growth rate of 12 to 15 percent. Needham attributes most of the increase to Windows users switching to the Mac, since it feels sales to existing Mac owners were relatively flat.
So because I worry about little things like "Facts" in the Mac vs PC debate, I must be a fanboy.
Full Disclosure - I have a mac, with windows (wouldnt consider buying one without it) but only use the windows side to game. But I recognise that they're like different tools - some tools do some jobs better than others. Can you unscrew a screw with a knife? Sure. Open a can with a Screwdriver? Done that. Are there better tools suited for the job than those choices? Yup.
I find for everyday PC usage that the Mac OS runs nicer, and I prefer its quirks (like being able to scroll in an inactive window, menu bars that are always at the top, etc); thats not to say windows doesn't have its place too - its better for gaming and err... well if I find something else I'll let you know.
I use linux and I hate m$..........
Actually I do'nt because I'm a dual booter and for a reason
My 5 yr old dual core PC running windows Xp starts up and runs faster than the 7 month old PC at work running windows 7.
The only problem with the Xp at home is that the file copying is a little slow when copying 2 gig files
But then I do try to stay in Linux until forced to reboot to windows ...
"My 5 yr old dual core PC running windows Xp starts up and runs faster than the 7 month old PC at work running windows 7."
if you are on a corporate netowrk, chances are that you have a roaming profile... the differences in boot time between a roaming profile and a local one would be quite significant.
my 180 quid laptop from tesco runs win7 and runs it fast, it really is a good OS :) (then again, so is xp)
Indeed, my first thought when reading the article was that it wasn't a strictly fair comparison as one was a brand new disruptive device, while the other was a version update of an existing product.
It's like comparing the launch of the iPod Photo (remember that model anyone?) with the launch of the Sony Playstation.
It's worse than that. I dread to think what would happen if I tried to install Win7 on my primary home machine with its 2Gb RAM.
I had enough experience trying to run Vista, at work, on a machine of the same generation. "Painful" doesn't begin to describe it.
No, *that* machine's OS is never going to be upgraded. Not to another Windows version, anyway. Maybe to Linux, when I get a new games machine, but until then it's XP forever.
In a sense, the previous 32-bit Windows (I'll discount the dark ages of Win2-3-95-98-ME) were in some sense, incomplete. Win2K worked well, but was a bit Vista-like in being too full of bloat. Win NT3.5 was strictly business, having Win3.1's UI skin. NT4 was pretty good,but was no good for games (and therefore CAD). Win XP SP2 is the first 32/64 bit OS from Microsoft that actually works properly. It's easy to install, works at home and in the enterprise, and can run in anything from small laptops to gigantic CAD machines, or wicked games boxes. While Win7 is prettier, and can perhaps make better use of modern hardware, it doesn't actually add much functionality that businesses need. Consumers like the pretty UI of Win7, but that's not a new OS, is it?
I've had machines that ran slower then molasses on a windows xp install run just faster on 2K without touching the hardware spec. (700 Mhz P3-based celeron core, 1 GB ram, and IIRC a whopping 80 GB drive)
Given the choice between xp and win2K for a low end machine, I'll take 2K. NT4.0 sucked because it was the windows 95 skin, but the 3.5 underpinnings (and no USB support, crappy power management support, etc.) XP is windows 2000 with better hardware support, more features, and a lot more chrome demanding the video processor's attention. (that having been said, Server 2k3 R2 is pretty damned reliable, and although the jury's still out on 2K8 R2, indications are good.)
I remember using SDRC's I-DEAS (now Siemens NX?) on NT4. There was OpenGL for graphics. It did crash a lot pleading 'memory exceptions' but I suspect that was to do with only having 128 MB RAM. I liked NT4 a lot- it was snappier and didn't crash like Win98 did all the time. It was that 8GB HD limit and lack of USB support that let it down for me, though.
Win2000 had a splendid trick- upon logging on and inserting a ZIP disc, Win2K would overwrite the ZIP disc with the contents of whatever previous ZIP disc had been read by the machine... Grr
: D
"Just months after Windows XP, a humbled Bill Gates had announced the Trustworthy Computing initiative to shift from focusing on features to spotlighting security and privacy."
You sure you are not mixing something up? Isn't Trustworthy Computing all about giving handouts to RIAA and MPAA by ensuring a "protected signal path" and that you cannot circumvent it at the system level by installing an unapproved driver? Which all resulted in your Vista being more concerned with checking each video frame going to your monitor for possible IP rights violations than with things like properly copying files from one place to another...
You put an amazingly rosy spin on that, but even if one accepts that it's OK when some senior management initiative has a fortuitous effect of preventing release of a totally FUBAR new product, it that does not change what "Trustworthy Computing" is. Which is taking control over a computer from the user's hands and into the IP rights holder's ones.
If that gave them time to put more hot air in aero or whatever, it's just a coincidence, a side effect, probably totally unanticipated...
which is the DRM / TPM use of keys to secure access to data .. whether it is for security or for content-control.
The delay could indeed have been put down to the "Trustworthy Computing" which was Craig Mundie's exposition of 4 pillars of improving their business "going forward" - "1.Security, 2.Privacy, 3.Reliability, 4.Business [ahem] Integrity". It was a massive task to steer that particular Titanic and they've come a long way but everyone else has caught up and in many places overtaken MS .. so MS are becoming less relevant to people these days.
The people who USED it and didn't listen to all the media rubbish DID and STILL DO like it. The biggest problems with Vista on release were the file copying speeds, the lack of driver support and the minimum hardware requirements. XP had the same driver problems when it was released and also suffered with the same (what was considered) excessive hardware requirements compared to what the average user had in there system at the time. As for the Vista file copying, this was fixed with a service pack and XP had a number of problems fixed with service packs as well. So before you churn out all the usual crap about Vista being bad, actually try using it. I have put standard users on Vista and they have said they can't understand why it's so disliked. It's at least as reliable as XP, has better security then XP and is easier to install then XP (no floppy drive needed for your SATA or RAID drivers to detect the hard drive)
I had my doubts about Vista until I saw its recovery process in action and it stayed my hand. The sort of tiny boot file corruption that would kill XP stone dead was detected and repaired with no intervention required.
Admittedly you had to slap it around a bit when you got it first to make it behave itself but who doesn't like doing that to computers?
I USED Vista for four years, and I cordially loathed every day of it.
The biggest problem wasn't so much that the minimum hardware requirements were excessive, but that they were ludicrously *under*-specced. I was running it on a laptop with 2Gb of RAM and about 100Gb of spare HD space (when it was installed), and it took - literally, I actually timed it often enough - around ten minutes to boot. It also took several minutes to shut down, or even sleep.
And don't even get me started on the "security" confirmations, each one of which had to be clicked *twice*. Why twice? To this day I have no idea.
Windows 7 is far better. But then: http://xkcd.com/528/
I'd still be on Vista, if it weren't for my Technet membership (£150ish annually for pretty much all the MS software you can download - it doesn't even stop working if you don't renew your subscription). I think there was a tendancy to blame Vista for anything that went wrong with a setup that Vista was involved in - I though I had the file copy problem, KB of throughput on a 100BaseT network. The trouble is, it turned out that it was a auto/manual detection of media issue, when I'd set it to auto/auto the bandwidth shot up to what I'd expect.
XP is still a very much used and loved OS both in business and home use, but why?
It was the ideal stepping stone release, sure it could be quirky at times, but it was like a slightly uneven and curved stone pathway to get us where we needed to go over the next decade
XP took the "average user" beyond the 1GB RAM point, supported the transition from IDE to SATA (and SAS) hard disks, broke the Terabyte barrier without any drama and also helped us make proper use of USB (and in some cases, FireWire)
XP Tablet PC Edition was also Microsoft's first stab at Tablet computing, although this wasn't the perfect tablet OS, it did work fairly well and still gave the user the familiar look and feel of Windows XP that they were familiar with.
Sadly XP32 was limited to maximum of 3.1GB of RAM, but it got by with that restriction.
The corporate world loved it as they could fix it when it went wrong and also it was relatively easy to manage and install MSI packages on.
Equally important, as XP matured we were given the choice of XP32 and XP64 which was a logical and progressive step for those who wanted to dabble in the pure 64-Bit environment
Sure Microsoft couldn't kill the XP beast and the reason being wasn't that it was an out of control animal, but it was quite tame and controllable. Stick with the the Service Packs, do the weekly updates and keep it virus/exploit free and XP was everything we needed it to be.
I think it will have its place in MS history as one of the best ever Windows platforms that MS bestowed upon us
Maybe if Microsoft allowed windows 7 to be installed as an upgrade io XP boxes they might be able to sell more copies.
Noone wants to upgrade XP to vista before they can upgrade to 7.
Also , stop using ribbons as the only option for the default OS apps and office, that might help sales as well.
Maybe if Microsoft generally stopped behaving like someone with their fingers in their ears going "la-la-la I-cant-hear-you-we-know-best" they could sell more stuff.
Of all the MS problems, sales isn't one of them. They are the predominant OS & will continue to be so for many, many years,
Also the Ribbon isn't that bad, is customizable with simple XML & has been proven to increase productivity with real world users. Being stuck in the stone ages & refusung change is what holds IT back.
My personal experience with the ribbon is it's a waste of space, doesn't do what you want, requires considerably more effort to find something, is *not* customisable, and generally a barrier to productivity.
Seriously.
The 'heritage' interfaces had a minimal toolbar which was customisable enabling one to easily add commonly used features or even custom macros. They also have a context-sensitive menu on the right-click. The best thing is the multi-level menu which hides away, includes icons for those who don't read, and by its very nature encourages a clear hierarchy of functionality. Oh, and works with modern wide-screen formats which are very low resolution in the vertical.
The ribbon, in contrast, is a homogeneous mass of iconic pictures of fixed size and contrast which seriously slows people down when hunting for the right icon to click. The icons aren't particularly well organised and there's no clear separation of function. Not to mention including all the complete rubbish one never uses (e.g. table styles, etc., etc.).
The great thing about Office 2011 is you can turn the damn ribbon off and get back to some productivity. Praise be for Jobs insisting that all applications have a menu.
This will be a huge barrier to many in "up"grading to Windows 8++ and is a great reason to stick with XP; you know, the OS that "just works" (and doesn't have a whopping great WinSXS directory to clutter up your VM discs).
The Ribbon not only does all the things you describe with the "heritage" UI, it is also, and has always been simple to customize. They even make a point & click tool if you're not into XML: see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386089.aspx
The Ribbon lets you do anything you want. But has been met with some disdain because it looks different. If you want your productivity applications to tell you how to be productive without the option of making it your own, then I suggest looking at a Mac.
So lets get this right; to customise the Ribbon(TM) in an Office application, you need to hack XML, or download and install a tool that's aimed at developers.
Hate to say this, but if you can't see everything wrong with that, you should stick to back-end programming and never go be let anywhere near a poor suffering user.
Having just finished a college class on the ribbon let me assure you that it IS that bad and still slows me down even though I've spent the last half semester learning how to use it. Customizable with XML? Yeah, that's great. Tell my mother about that and see if it does her any good. And what studies are you looking at that 'prove' it increases productivity? A study done by Microsoft's marketting department, or did they just pay for it?
Great, you'd love OSX. With ever iteration they change the UI and make it uglier and uglier.
10.3 came with the white and grey stripes (and colourful plastic macs)
10.4 came with the beautiful brushed metal texture (and white plastic macs)
10.5 came with dull gray gradients and ugly clouds as shadow replacements under windows. (and brushed metal macs??!?!?)
And NO option to go back to previous style UI textures in any release.
10.7 is even worse. After 10 years Apple decided to even hide important user-folders to make things unnecessary complicated.
At least in Windows 7 there's still the "classic" look if your really want grey non-textured boxes and window decorations.
In fact wait till you see/work with Windows 8. You'll tear your hair out, nauseously vomit every time you (try to) click the Start button and that silly panel display swipes in front and back and throw your PC up the wall when you see how much software is broken because M$ is trying to make a big smartphone out of every PC.
The future looks bright, doesn't it? Especially for eggheads. All that matters now is bling. Stupid rectangular blobs on screen with pointless icons, numbers and sliding faces of people that you don't know and don't care about, totally irrelevant to the work that needs to be done.
Did Apple steal the iPod when they partnered with Creative labs?
I'm not pointing the finger at them it’s just something I heard and haven't seen much of it talked about.
What I heard was, while partnered with Creative (makers of the Zen) who wanted to build an MP3 player with a GUI they eventually broke off and did the iPod separately.
If so it would make them a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to complaining about android these days.
The idea of 'a player for MP3s' wasn't original to Apple or to Creative Labs. The unique aspects of the iPod were the scroll wheel, which most obviously descends from Microsoft's mid-90s addition of a scroll wheel to the mouse, and the Firewire interface for super-fast synching. Firewire is a very Mac interface that has never been big in the Windows market that Creative Labs were most interested in.
Having lost the market, Creative Labs sued Apple in 2006 over a bunch of interface patents, notably including using a hierarchical menu for navigating music and requesting an import and sale ban. The companies ended up settling, with Apple paying a licence fee for the relevant patents. So I guess that's where the story derives from.
So a bit of a hypocrite is probably right, but I wouldn't have agreed with you if you'd used hypocrite without qualification. Apple ended up having to pay licence fees for patents it infringed and it now asserts that Samsung et al are infringing patents without paying licence fees.
While specifically not approaching whether there's a distinction between the similarity of an iPod to Creative's preceding products and Samsung's arrangement of Android to the iPhone, there is a difference in the overall markets. With the iPod Apple entered a vanishingly tiny immature market and popularised it. Both the iPhone and the Android handsets that followed it have entered mature and profitable markets. The net effect is that — supposing for argument's sake there was any wrong against Apple whatsoever — Apple's actions increased Creative's sales, Samsung's decreased Apple's.
comparing a single version of a product (windows xp) with all generations of a while range of products (iPods) doesn't seem to make much sense.
XP is still about because it is actually pretty good at what it does. After suffering years of woe with win98 and the monstrosity that was winME, XP was a godsend. And it still does it's job well. We still have more XP machines in our office than Win7 ones because there seems little point in upgrading other than for some eye-candy.
Plenty of win2000 installations still in use too (although not in my office I might add) but that does seem pretty silly, how can they cope being stuck on IE6?
Oh and all this is coming from a so called "...bitter linux user with ... irrational Microsoft hatred..." who hasn't used any version of windows himself at work or at home for years.
They beat the rest with the concept of "good enough" - they were stuck with XP because it was exactly good enough for the definition of corporate computing in the last decade.
Apple are quite good at making each OS upgrade just about worth making vs. the disruption of old software failing. A lot easier to do with a much smaller market and with clearly defined definitions of which hardware can be upgraded.
really not a problem.
Now that is not to say that Lion is a big improvement to Snow Leopard .. hint: in some ways it is, in some ways its not .. I have a Macbook Air which came with Lion on but I've not yet been inclined to upgrade the other macs .. waiting for some other software to be upgraded first.
Which is the whole purpose and method of Microsoft's model.
Why on earth should an operating system, something that should be looked to for stability and long life, be a consumer product with a use-by date?
And this bitter Linux lover, by the way, congratulates Ubuntu for getting in on the same act. Hey! Yesterday's version is old news, get today's, it's /prettier/ --- or at least, our designers think so.
At least Microsoft makes money out of charging money for the bug fixes and cosmetics.
Win NT 4 was around for about 14 years.
Win XP has already been around 10 years and will continue for a while yet.
Technology does move on and you do have to get to a point where you release another OS to take advantage of new programming techniques, new hardware and new security research. There is only so long that you can bolt on additions to an aging architecture. More than a decade is pretty good in my opinion.
The article and your post seem to have unwavering confidence that Windows 8 will succeed, but it's not impossible for it to flop.
I've got fed up of vertical touchsceens and Apple's study into their viability concluded people don't like them. So we're left with a touch interface on a computer to be used with a mouse. Do people really want that?
I love the idea of Windows 8 on tablets, I really do, but will people buy them instead of iPads? It's a tough act to follow. What do they say about these things? To break into an established market, offer people a huge improvement or the same thing at half the price. Is Windows 8 really going to be able to do that?
Windows 8 definitely successful? I don't want to see MS stung, they're taking brave ballsy decisions, but definitely?
Don't bet your house on it. Windows 7 could be the new XP after all.
It's a bit of history repeating itself... In the 70s and 80s the Lightpen was the way forward, particularly for mainframe CAD, airline checkin data entry, etc. This didn't last long because people couldn't hold their hands at the required angle against a vertical screen, what with the carpal tunnel and all...
Oh no it isn't! MS thought that corporates would drop XP if they announced that they would finish XP support. What they had not considered is that the costs of upgrading desktops from XP is not the cost of the corporate licensing - that's peanuts. The problem is the disruption and cost of migrating all the applications - including all the bespoke bits and pieces which would have to be retested and maybe, rewritten for a new desktop. Then there's the disruption to users, retraining, etc. Many corporates are still taking the "if it works, don't fix it" attitude.
... oh, boy, if I hear that ones more ... Apple iPod glory ... especially you, as a British online forum, should give credit to the real inventor of this ... Kane Kramer ... who came up with the hole design and marketing concept, about 20 years earlier (Apple admits this in 2008) ... check Kramer's concept design sketches (Patent/Wikipedia) ... even the cable comes out at the same place ... just as Steve Jobs said it: "Good Artists copy, great Artists steal" ... now, I'm just not quit sure what today's fuss, with HTC and Samsung, is all about (remember: "Great Artists steal") ... might be greed ... by the way, Apple never paid Kane Kramer anything for his ideas ... no surprise there ... cheers ...
To support a statement already made, MS Windows XP at release was not great. I used MS Windows 2000 until SP3. While some had issue with MS Windows 2000, I thought it was the most reasonable OS MS had made since the first rush release of MS Windows. I updated a couple years to MS Windows 7. I skipped Vista not so much because it was bad, but because I saw no reason to spend money. The upgrade to 7 was much more cost effective than the upgrade to Vista. I am impressed on the quality of 7, and it runs at lighting speed on my macbook.
As far as the iPod is concerned, the ITMS was not a concern for me, I simply wanted to upgrade from my Creative Nomad. Though it was a good player, like most consumer it was badly built. A little plastic switch had broken and rendered the whole unit nearly unusable. The original iPod was huge in comparison so I was not interested, but when the iPod mini came out I bought one. It was a good size. Another advantage was that on the Nomad it took about an hour to load music on a card that was maybe 100 megabytes. On the mini it took less time to lead the full gigabytes of music using firewire.
A reason I continue to buy iPods, and apple stuff in general, is the quality. The original iPod mini still works although the battery no longer holds a charge. For consumer products they are rock solid.
I'm still using XP. I like it. If you turn off all the useless graphic cruft it performs quite well and is reliable. I've used Vista and win7, can't stand either of them, principally due to the nagware or outright refusal to do what I want. Also the visuals look like they're designed for retarded nine year olds, or possibly Americans.
I didn't have to start using a windows desktop until 2004 luckily, so have some perspective on this, not being totally immersed in Redmond Kool-Aid as some people obviously are.
Hint: use a good uninstaller like Revo.
Some points arising from other comments:
--security. Forget it, it's windows. MS engineers themselves don't know what some of it does any more. Use linux or a unix instead if you care that much, and turn on rbac. Windows based firewall? A joke, surely?
--the windows registry. What a crap idea. SPOE: Single Point of Evil. When they ditch this, they might have something.
--applications. Most people use maybe 30% of the functionality in office, and not much else on a business PC. Why pay more tax? If your app base doesn't lock you in to MS, you should be looking at alternatives, especially for workstations. There are plenty. They work. You'll save money. If you are locked in, bad luck.
--Evolution. A lot of this reminds me of the built-in obsolescence in the car industry. I run the latest Solaris on an Ultra 10 which it nearly 15 years old. It works well enough for file service and a little browsing and doc processing, and is reliable, stable and secure. And yet people are happy to submit to the M$ upgrade treadmill year after year, decade after decade. Ballmer is laughing all the way to the bank. And for what? New eye candy and more nagware.
Wake up you lot.
The author has missed one important reason for the long life of Windows XP:
The economic turmoil that's hitting the world since 2008 has made people and corporations to extend the life of their hardware/software investments. Also to think twice if upgrades are really needed.
My two cents.
People who are buying W7 machines seem quite happy with it. There doesn't seem to be a mass rush to "down-"grade them to XP.
Those who are running older machines with XP seem quite happy to remain that way. No mass upgrade to W7.
Where does that leave an /early/ issue of W8? Something like an unwanted pregancy?
Interesting that Allchin says they spent a lot of effort on the ergonomics of WinXP. It shows, and it's the reason it's still the preferrred desktop OS today. Meanwhile the Longhorn team must've been left out of those discusssiions, I guess, because Vista was totally devoid of ergonomics, and Win7 ain't that much better. By the looks of things, Win8 won't change anything in that respect, either.
As for the iPod, styling and fashion-accessory status was its main selling-point. Why should I pay a premium price for an Mp3 player which doesn't work on any computer OTHER than one with iTunes installed? That isn't an advantage, it's a serious handicap. My first Mp3 player cost half the iPod price, and did work on any XP or Linux computer. It also doubled as USB memory.
Like most people I use my phone for mobile music these days, and I was careful to choose one which doesn't require invasive software on the computer. Plug it in, copy files.
But whatever.
Windows XP (as much as I hate it) still runs much of the world's corporate desktops. And will for another decade or so, if I have any clue about the subject.
The iPod, on the otherhand, corrupted the ears of an entire generation. Sad that today's kids have absolutely no clue what music is supposed to sound like.
XP does useful work (thus unfortunately giving Microsoft's marketards a sense of being useful). The iPod has ruined music, probably for at least a century.
Methinks your argument is inside-out, Mr. Clarke.
What gave WinXP legs was the fact that it was both necessary and sufficient.
It was necessary because (if we allow that Win2K wasn't "for" home users) the previous consumer offering was Win98. XP was therefore the first offering from MS that was actually a real OS, with access controls on files and kernel/user separation. Whilst the ordinary Joe might not understand *why* that made XP significantly more stable than its predecessor, it was only a matter of time before he *noticed* this fact.
It was sufficient because actually most people don't need all the crap that MS pumped into Vista and would prefer to use the 2GHz CPU and 2GB RAM for *their* stuff rather than some jumped up shell. This is still true. Microsoft have failed to add any features in Vista or 7 that actually make non-techies think "That justifies an upgrade.". XP has therefore only been pensioned off as people decide to upgrade their hardware and discover that they can't buy XP anymore.
If there's a moral, it is that an OS should provide a secure environment for apps and then keep out of the way. Penguinistas might care to note that it isn't just MS who get this wrong. Linus and his friends have met the first requirement for you, but the designers of just about every Linux desktop environment in recent history have screwed up the latter.
Who would have thought XP would last so long? It had a rocky first few years, but here I am 10 years later still using it, and having used it far longer than any other version before or after. I'll miss it when it finally goes, but that isn't looking like any time soon.
It's testament to the principle that if you give people something that does what they want, they'll not only buy it, but will need a lot of convincing to give it up and move on. Corporate desktops love XP because the expense of upgrading/training to another version is just to awful to contemplate. It does what they need, so why upgrade? Certainly not just to give Microsoft another shed load of cash.
The desktop has stagnated, everything is just GUI tweaks, showing the same old information in slightly different ways.
An OS like the Chrome OS is a leap forward in terms of new ideas, but it is crippled and a step backwards for people demanding computing power and local storage.
All the innovations and changes appear to be happening in the mobile arena now. But largely due to the different interface and use on the move.
In terms of mind share and market share XP lorded it over previous MS operating systems and unified MS's corporate and personal computing OSs offerings.
Linux and OS X were much lower profile back then and nobody was really going to pine for Windows 95 or 98.
Really, the one reason to abandon XP, and it is a major one, is security. That OS wasn't as "hardened" as Windows 7 (yes, the quotes around hardened are there for a reason).
Windows 7 is slower and not significantly nicer to use in my day to day work than XP. Security aside, why should I care for it? That's the crux of MS's problem, btw, the added value of Windows 7 over XP is not that high, except for security, a subject best addressed by sidestepping Windows entirely.
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