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August 18, 2007
Looking at the Vista
Back at the forum, I'm having an interesting discussion with Mr. David. About Vista and whether he wears rose tinted glasses.
Vista is quite a different aesthetic than every previous Windows that came before it. Certainly it is a watershed in terms of whether the Microsoft OS empire will sail on or sink. Empires rise and empires fall. It is interesting to contextualise the demise of Digital Research (CP/M) and the rise of Microsoft on the back of MS-DOS oh, so long ago. Scoble has just run a series of podcasts starting with The rest of the story: How Bill Gates beat Gary Kildall in OS war, Part 1
I would guess a fair number of the computer using public went from Win98 to WXP directly. Traipsed from a good vintage to another good vintage and skipped the unpleasant, tart tasting milestones in between.
When people were running Windows 98, I had moved on to Windows NT 4 after a couple of years. Windows NT 4.0 was a solid and robust system but feature poor and over secure - it could not do USB, device drivers were not prolific in the early days. Microsoft felt that this would not sell to the general public.
In particular, the graphics subsystem was so secure it was unable to host accelerated DirectX games. It's interesting to note that Vista has recently had a scare because an ATI video driver bug allows a breach in security i.e. Vista graphic subsystem security does not appear to be as good as WinNT 4
So, if you were one of those who moved from Windows 98 to WXP, you had the benefit of skipping
WinNT 3.1 > WinNT 3.5 > WinNT 3.51 > WinNT 4.0 > Win2000.
Of course, you might be tempted to say there was no competition to Windows. We didn't have Ubuntu Feisty Fawn nor did we have the platform independent Web 2.0 so Microsoft could take their time to get Windows right.
As Mr. David says - Time will Tell.
Posted by Anandasim at August 18, 2007 10:38 PM
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