Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them.
The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995.
I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation.
See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution.
Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.
Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK.
We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.
I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001.
I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model.
For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.
The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995.
By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.
Replying to myself, but I don't want to edit the former comment.
I think that iPod is the excellent case study for what the innovation actually is. From the technical standpoint, iPod is a garbage. I mean, less space than a nomand, lame. iPod wasn't very innovative in the terms of technology. MP3 players existed for years, and I was, as a nerd, relatively happy with them.
However, iPod played a significant role in bringing in the basic innovation to the masses. Downloading music with a click, instead of ripping it from CD with some weird tools, keeping your music library in a sync. It makes no difference for you or me, but it makes a big difference for your friend from different department, which is not tech savvy.
That's the actual purpose of innovation. It's about a Marry from the street.
People using the standard Microsoft environment, still use their computers as a bit better typewriter, faster snail mail, and an interface for finding stuff immediately, through Google. They do nearly the same stuff they were doing in 1995. Except, Internet is more popular thing.
People in the standard Apple environment, share their personal data between many devices, use nice touch interface, download music and movies with a click, without need to buy/rent a DVD, put their photos on the web easily etc., etc. Soon, thanks to iPad, they're going to enjoy the touch screen on daily basis, and forget about the standard folders-based filesystem, Desktop and other concepts that, actually, might be unnecessary for them.
So you're comparing Windows since 1995 with everything Apple have made? No wonder Microsoft appear to have badly stagnated.
Microsoft have changed a lot since 1995. They moved into the mobile space with Windows CE and Windows Mobile. They moved onto the web starting with software like Internet Explorer, Outlook, IIS, Windows Live Messenger and moved onto websites such as MSN, Hotmail, Multimap, and, more recently, Bing. They moved into hardware and released the Xbox, Zune, Zune HD, Xbox and Xbox 360. They moved into online gaming with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live, which have evolved into social networks and marketplaces for both these products. That's ignoring all the different major changes to Windows-related technologies, whether .NET, DirectX, Exchange, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, Windows Firewall, or Microsoft Security Essentials, which have all changed beyond recognition or outright didn't exist back in 1995. Hell, Microsoft have even made a standardised video codec called VC-1. There's probably others, but that's much more than "nice fonts, widgets, and ... nice shadows here and there".
Were these products innovative? Some definitely were (Xbox Live stands out), some weren't especially innovative but had advantages that caused them to compare favourably to their competitors to gain significant marketshare (Xbox, Internet Explorer, DirectX, .NET, Windows CE, Exchange, IIS), some weren't and have largely languished (GfwL, Windows Media Player, Bing). Besides, Microsoft's victories have traditionally not been through direct innovation as much as incremental product iteration which they generally do well.
Apple have grown at an unprecedented rate, and any company compared to them doesn't compare favourably, but that hardly means Microsoft have just sat there doing nothing. Trying to this into a "Apple environment vs. Microsoft environment" battle which is completely artificial when neither company exists in a vaccuum as they create platforms for other companies to build on.
Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.
You should dig into Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet."
The biggest barriers aren't technological, they're cultural and conceptual. When Gutenburg invented the printing press, did you instantly have serialized novels, political pamphlets, abstruse philosophical treatises that depended on exact wording, magazines, and public libraries? Nope. That took time. Gutenburg just wanted to produce Bibles better and faster. We're still figuring out what to do with computers and networks.
Apple was at a point in the late 1990s where they HAD to innovate, or die. Their series of fiascos with clueless CEOs and never-materializing products (Copeland) had pushed them to the brink of collapse. Microsoft has not yet had to face such a challenge, perhaps they will and emerge a reinvented, reinvigorated company like Apple, or they will continue to stagnate and eventually be another Wang in the history books.
This is why I think we shouldn't count MSFT out. They've had it so easy for 10 - 15 years that they have turned to competing among themselves for something to do. Once a real sense of fear and external competition sets in we may see a very different beast.
That's an aliasing bug in the data, though. The 2001 date was cherry picked to show the release of OS X, but not the switch from the Win9x codebase to XP. You could play a similar game with the summer of 1995, where windows was "innovating" rapidly with the sudden switch to a 32 bit operating system while Apple was mired in tiny feature additions to system 8/9.
The truth is that neither the XP/Vista/7 codebase nor OS X have changed much over the last decade. Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
> Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
I agree that we're just going to see incremental improvement with the current UI paradigms. Maybe this is just a sci-fi reverie, but I'd hope that at a certain point, we see a new generation of desktop UIs. (Centered around what, I don't know. Maybe 3D layout + 3D gesture recognition. Pan, tilt, zoom.)
> I don't think Windows has made any such leaps since 1995. Mild improvements, but also a lot of backsliding (Vista).
You'd be 100% wrong then. There have been two huge leaps, from the 9x codebase to the vastly more stable and secure NT codebase, and a further one from XP to Vista. Vista isn't "backsliding" by any stretch of the imagination -- its focus on security is the reason Windows today is so much more secure than OS X.
Of course, there have been plenty of other improvements along the road, from global search to a compositing UI.
That's a pretty bold statement. The security model might be theoretically better but since most applications force you to run as administrator anyway I don't think it's currently buying you that much.
> The security model might be theoretically better but since most applications force you to run as administrator anyway I don't think it's currently buying you that much.
1. The security model isn't just theoretically better -- OS X still doesn't randomize heap and stack addresses properly, for example. As Dion Blazakis points out in http://www.semantiscope.com/research/BHDC2010/BHDC-2010-Slid... slide 30, NX + ASLR makes "[h]ackers everywhere shed a tear."
2. Most Windows applications do not force you to run as administrator. Vista provided the push necessary for most applications to not require admin privs (source: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/08/user-account-con... -- the "Impact on Software Ecosystem" section).
3. Frankly, an ordinary consumer should be a lot more concerned about his data than about the computer itself -- whether a program runs with admin privileges or not is mostly irrelevant in this case.
Nonsense. Perhaps the codebase is more stable. But why would a friend of mine still run windovs 98? He has no compulsion to change. You have to think end user.
> But why would a friend of mine still run windovs 98?
How would I know? How is one anecdote relevant in the face of facts and hard data?
> You have to think end user.
I am thinking of the end user. The end user today buys a computer with Windows 7, and enjoys a stable, secure, and hassle-free operating system. This was really not true of previous Windows versions, especially XP, and especially Windows 98.
What I meant was that my friends pc still does everything he needs and has no compulsion to upgrade to windows 7.
Stability aside (which I think is a good thing) all that I can see that is different in windows is a bit of eye candy. Big wow.
OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows. And there lies it's strength. Linux sadly just imitates where it should be innovating on the desktop.
I can understand though the desire not to confuse the users by radically making a design change. And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.
> OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows.
I haven't used the iPhone OS, but I think OS X is significantly less intuitive than Windows. Enter renames a file?!
> And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.
The security model of Windows NT has never been a joke -- it's always been more flexible than the standard Unix model (e.g. full ACLs instead of nine bits for permissions). The security of Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 2, was indeed a joke because MS wasn't too serious about security vulnerabilities then. Vista is a different story though.
Agree ACLs great idea; in practice - buggy as hell; but I left windows, so they might have changed things.
What I was getting at was, that despite the added features to each incarnation; the average Joe might not notice that much has changed. They just want to do what they want to do easily.
My Dad happily got the job done in word perfect and i comfortably used a browser (until the os crashed) on Windows 3.1.
I agree with you on Finder's irritations. Gnome's nautilous puts finder and explorer to shame in my opinion. But it has little irritations of it's own. I did notice recently that in Windows7 explorer would carry on copying files rather than terminating on error; about time!
It's been said; that Windows omitted the security model in earlier pc's as they didn't forsee home pcs connecting the web. Hardware and cost also must have also been a limitation for earlier os's.
I used to do sys admin, and I was forever trying to lock down windows, i.e limited accounts, but it would break the apps or make them error or buggy. That's not really Microsoft's problem; unless they didn't provide adequate documentation. It's poor implementation. Likewise I've seen printers not working under limited accounts; I even saw a hilarious fix: make the whole system dir totally read/writable! To cut a long story short it riled me so much; I left windows.
People went from no security to a locked down system; that they found plain irritating. Whereas in OSX there is one simple system preferences panel, that asks for your password if you do anything that requires root privileges. Windows config is nasty until you learn it. Then they change it in each incarnation with the eventual itteration resembling a turd. Don't start me on Linux desktop implementations.
Also the security model on Windows feels the wrong way around. It should be locked down and slowly opened to trusted apps. But as you say perhaps that's finally been overhauled.
My mate uses win98 as he can get his job done easily. He can reset his os in seconds as it is so small. I wouldn't use it, but it's fine for him. About the only reason he might shift is for firefox, but he recently said he's found some compatibility layer that let's him run some modern apps. Hilarious. I don't know how he copes without a command line, but he does.
Don't get me wrong, there have been some leaps and bounds, but from my perspective, I'd rather a simple system; that works; that I can tweak if i want, that is portable, interoperable, that is fast and intuitive to use rather than a machine with oodles of power just to watch a high def movie or provide a transparent window, with drop shadows.
Aware that I have just started to moan. An OS in so intrinsic to using a computer, I wish they'd get the basics sorted. A bit of competition is good, but the Microsoft stranglehold on the OS hasn't been healthy.
I fear the whole thirst for profit and protecting intellectual property is just dangerous here.
Innovation and ease of use should be rolled into an uberOS.
Open protocols and filesystems should be at there.
Technologically, a lot has been done under the hood since 1995 just to allow modern hardware to work. USB devices, wireless NICs, and multicore CPUs didn't even exist when Windows95 was released. Much of the "innovation" is unseen.
While I also wish they had innovated the UI more over the past decade, we are probably in the (admittedly growing) minority. You shouldn't switch the gas and break pedals in a car just to be "innovative", and I think for Microsoft the risk of alienating old users outweighs the risk of losing new users.
Apple of course has been more free to make sweeping changes to their OS over the past decade because, frankly, they haven't had much to lose. It will be interesting to see how dramatically they change OSX now that they have found something that sells.
"It will be interesting to see how dramatically they change OSX now that they have found something that sells."
You don't have to wait; they've already done it with the iPhone/iPad OS. Apple is clearly still willing to make hard and dramatic decisions when it comes to its operating systems.
Don't get be wrong, I completely agree with you that Apple has made some bold decisions, and I respect them for that. However, I'm not sure it is fair to contrast Apple's innovation in new products to Microsoft's (lack of) innovation in established products.
To use your example of the iPhone: As innovative as the iPhone was when it was released, Apple really hasn't messed with it in almost three years. Doing so would risk alienating the 50+ million people using iPhone OS devices every day.
When the time comes in the next few years, will Apple make the hard decision to redesign their iPhone OS, possibly driving away some of their current users in the process? I would say they are more likely to than Microsoft. However, until they have passed that test, we shouldn't be so quick to judge.
Microsoft makes productivity software, games, embedded OSes, hardware, business software, commercial suites.....etc etc etc. They can't focus with so many irons in the fire.
Apple makes well designed prosumer products....and thats it. They are focused on shiny, evolved high end consumer goods.
Apple will refine and refine and refine, while MS will dump things unless it's a huge money maker or they have an axe to grind.
Not an Apple fanboy BTW, I personally don't like anything Apple, and would be 100% Linux if not for legacy software that I need Windows for.
I am personally quite happy with the Windows 95 look and feel and set up all my machines, Linux or Windows, with plain vanilla UIs and remove anything extraneous.
As far as the tablet thing goes, most Windows tablets were well over 2000 dollars, so I really blame the hardware manufacturers for that one.
The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995.
I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation.
See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution.
Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.
Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK.
We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.