Success of Windows

LiamD

I got thinking about this lately and while a number of things come to mind I can't fully answer the question

Just why is Windows so successful?

Your thoughts???

stepbar

First mover advantage.

Cake Fiend

stepbar wrote:

First mover advantage.

Kind of sums it up in one, really. Jesus, don't Novell have egg on their faces after the whole IPX/SPX vs TCP/IP business!

They really brought home computing to the grasp of Joe Public. And as they grew, wielded serious marketing power.

Now it's a case of their own ubiquitousness fuelling their continued success. Even in fully *NIX-based departments, I've still heard people referring to 'excel files'!

mick.fr

Well this is a long story than begun in the 80.

For those who did not know Microsoft was the first distributor of AT&T Unix, this is where they really begun to make money. But this money has been invested to develop their own OS based on the new IBM PC standards.

Microsoft managed to develop products based on other ideas mainly, but they also managed to improve existing technologies, develop new concepts and products around existing ones.

Microsoft Windows for example contains quiet a few UNIX BSD code for example.
Like Winsock for example, fully copied from UNIX BSD :-)

Let's go back to the point. Microsoft was the only one to develop an operating system that provided a 2D environment (Even under MS-DOS), Microsoft office with Excel and Word ancestor like Workplan for PC.
The success of the PC in the enterprise and at home made Windows popular (Well what other choice did we had ?). Windows was the only one.

Then later Microsoft did something great : The partners.
They created partner's relashionships to provide Windows compatible hardware, mainly axed on Video and Sound devices to extend even more this new PC market than will also provide entertainment to end users.
So many games came out for MS-DOS quiet quickly althought game consoles were already well established in the market. There was no point anymore to have a console and a PC, because the PC was doing it all.

Some great PC games were already available at the end of the 80 like "Monkey Island" from Lucas Games.

With Windows 95, Microsoft made the development of softwares extremelly easy with a single Kernel where everything was running, like device drivers, applications. This made Windows 95 not a great OS because it was pretty unstable, but it was really easy to develop on it, so many companies actually developped softwares for windows 95 hoping to make some easy cash. And this is basically what append, well exactly what append in fact lol.

Windows has been made easy to use as well. Mainly with some MAC OS background/ideas, but this was another world anyway : PC.

Later in 90 Microsoft decided to target the PC in the enterprise and hired David Cutler the project lead of VMS at Digital to come over with some of his mates (About 20) to develop what will become later Windows NT.

Microsoft has been critisized a lot while developing "pro" OS that begun with NT 3.1 and later 3.51, but they managed to kill NOVELL Netware that almost had to close down a few years ago.
NOVELL was really popular and more secured than Windows NT initially, but once again Microsoft managed to take external ideas, improve them and came out with something even better.

Windows 2003 is today as secured than any other strong UNIX machine.
Even Linux is far to be as secure as a Windows 2003 Server is.

So in a few words, to resume Windows success : Used new PC market that grew up to a phenomenal scale, took ideas from others and improved them, provided text editors tools, entertainment with a lot of games (And today collaborative solutions, videos...), a huge number of partners to develop satelite solutions to Windows such as Anti Virus, use the open source projects to develop their own commercial products (Free source code helped them to develop faster and at a low cost), I am thinking to OpenGL for example, UNIX BSD, OpenLDAP, etc....

This is a resumed version of my vision and knowledge about the MS story.

seamus

That's pretty much it above. Right place at the right time.

The OS itself was nothing new or revolutionary, but the combination of the (relatively) cheap IBM PC and (relatively) user-friendly DOS/Windows combo gave them their initial foothold.

Unix's main problem was that it wasn't very user-friendly, and wasn't cheap to get your hands on commercially. There were free versions, like today, but if there's no money to be made, then there's nobody distributing it. The Internet didn't exist on the public scale we have now.

Apple suffered from some disastrous marketing, and the Sony bug - only producing hardware and software that worked with your products.

Capt'n Midnight

mick.fr wrote:

Well this is a long story than begun in the 80.

another view starts off with Bill dumpster diving for code and the ethics go downhill from there
Also getting some lucky breaks and buying in/off stuff and illegal restrictive practises.

The IBM PC was a success because of the IBM name. Because of anti-competition laws IBM had to buy in the OS. Microsoft sold them an OS, that they later bought from Seattle university. CP/M the main competitor was sold at far too high a price so there wasn't much competition at the start, and anyway Dos was preinstalled on most/all IBM's.

A little later on the blackmailed all PC makers into a licensing deal where to continue to get Dos they had to pay for a license for Dos for each machine regardless of wether it had Dos or not. More or less still that way today - if you take into account the bundles that Dell and others offer, the cost of getting a Home user PC without windows isn't any cheaper than with it.

DrDos , CP/M and all the rest couldn't compete when the user had to pay for a microsoft license as well.

Masses of Vapourware especially on things like Word 2 - to stop people buying products already on the market.

Later on when windows 3 was usable they could benefit from things like undocumented API calls which sped up their applications but Lotus and Wordperfect could not benefit from ( and wordperfect for windows was too buggy too )

Dos 7 (the internal one), a true multitasking DOS was shelved when windows 95 was released so people would have to finally ditch Dos - a marketing decision but only really possible when you had a monopoly , had there been a serious Dos competitor in the market then they might have had to release it. This move ensured the future apps would have to run in Windows so kill off any of the last standalone Dos apps, apart from games.

Along the way microsoft stole / copied / bought technology and seemed to have shafted a lot of partners. The classic example here is spyglass. Netscape sold browsers, so microsoft bought a browser from spyglass with a downpayment and a promise of a percentage of sales. Then then gave it away free, Netscape could not compete and spyglass had given away the family jewels for beans.

Windows was user friendly and most microsoft products put ease of use and speed above reliablity and security (and IMHO still do when compared to other OS's )

2003 is as secure as Linux :rolleyes: for 3/4 of last year a fully patched version of IE was vunerable. Add in microsoft office and your computer is secure only if you don't use third party documents or visit the web - and you have to visit the web to get patches. It's like the C2 security claimed for NT4 - it only applied if you tweaked the registry, removed the network card and floppy drive and changed most of the default security settings. Yes it's possible to make 2003 fairly secure but

Also there is the whole pirated software issue, up to windows 3.11 serials weren't needed , and for 95 you had a 1:7 chance of guessing it. until windows XP you could reuse the serial on any number of pc's - again it's hard to sell a competing OS when you could casually copy windows

since windows is almost all new PC's it's what people want especially those who haven't used anything else before

The Jam wrote:

And the public wants what the public gets

with windows there is a massive network effect, any magazine , library , beginners computer course will be for windows


the really annoying part is the licensing and costs, Dos was only about 3-5% of the cost of the original IBM PC, now for entry level PC's it's nearly 10 times that.

Peteee

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

2003 is as secure as Linux :rolleyes: for 3/4 of last year a fully patched version of IE was vunerable. Add in microsoft office

What has IE and office got to do with a Server OS?

aidan_walsh

Many of the exploits capable of taking down the entire OS came from those two products. IE cannot be uninstalled from Server 2003, so provides a permenant security risk, and Sharepoint is built atop Office technology.

Cabaal

Don't know about anyone else but its just sad when you look at Vista and see how many ideas and UI changes they've stolen from Mac OSX and various linux distros

One of there biggest featiures in Vista is Windows+TAB, its basically a graphical alt tab....sad

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/23/microsoft_incompatibilities_then_and_now/ Dos history

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/18/microsoft_breached_antitrust/ -

It's claimed Microsoft's engineers used at least 500 undocumented APIs to ensure Microsoft's applications worked better with Windows than those of competitors