4 ms·

Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus. IE 5 was a better browser th

by Joeri 11y ago

Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus. IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won. Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. Don't get me wrong. Microsoft software was crap, it's just that the competition was even worse. The quality of modern software is much improved.

Bud 11y ago
I can agree with you about Word and Excel. I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both. You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI? XP was crap and we should all be glad it's dead.
- russgray 11y ago
  XP came out the same year as 10.0, which was rubbish. OS X wasn't really worthwhile until 10.3.
  - 1stop 11y ago
    Didn't XP only get decent after a bunch of service packs? ... is that not the same thing as 10.3?
- frik 11y ago
  > WinXP Never heard about the Windows NT operating system series? WinNT series: WinNT 3.5 (1988-1994, based on VMS a bit on OS/2 designs) -> WinNT 4 -> Win2000 -> WinXP (August 24th 2001) -> WinVista -> Win7 -> Win8x -> Win10 (2015) [exluding all service packs] MacOS X: NeXTSTEP (1987-1989, based on Unix) -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody (1997) -> Mac OS X Server 1.0 -> Mac OS X Public Beta -> Mac OS X 10.0 (March 24th 2001, this is the first MacOS X you know) -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 -> 10.11 (= El Capitan, 2015)
- zensavona 11y ago
  You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X "windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS"
- barrkel 11y ago
  Netscape crashed way more often than IE. That's what got me to switch. OS X was a worse platform because it didn't support much software - games in particular. XP was extremely solid, coming after ME in the consumer space (I had switched to W2K after 98, I took until SP2 before I switched). So no, I don't agree with you. Even today, I think Windows is a better gaming platform and Linux a much better dev platform - OS X is insufficiently similar to Linux to work well when Linux is used in production.
ekianjo 11y ago
I come from the AmigaOS world in the first place, and AmigaOS was leagues ahead of Windows prior to Windows XP, years before - it was multitask, it had datatypes, Arexx scripting language and so on. It was not perfect (lacked memory protection) but nevertheless it was better than Windows 3.1 at the time. As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.
- xorcist 11y ago
  Amiga as a platform was proprietary end-to-end. One supplier of hardware, operating system, and even some applications. It's like IBM could have been if Microsoft was in-house to them. Had AmigaOS been cross-platform, things might have developed differently.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    I totally agree with you. Just pointing out that AmigaOS was way more advanced than MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 at the time they both existed on PC.
EdiX 11y ago
>Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. it wasn't but... >Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately. >IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95. >Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM. What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius. They developed an integrated suite and that turned out to have value. IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics. Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator. Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them. BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable. For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.

by Joeri 11y ago

Bud 11y ago

I can agree with you about Word and Excel. I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both. You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI? XP was crap and we should all be glad it's dead.

russgray 11y ago
XP came out the same year as 10.0, which was rubbish. OS X wasn't really worthwhile until 10.3.
- 1stop 11y ago
  Didn't XP only get decent after a bunch of service packs? ... is that not the same thing as 10.3?
frik 11y ago
> WinXP Never heard about the Windows NT operating system series? WinNT series: WinNT 3.5 (1988-1994, based on VMS a bit on OS/2 designs) -> WinNT 4 -> Win2000 -> WinXP (August 24th 2001) -> WinVista -> Win7 -> Win8x -> Win10 (2015) [exluding all service packs] MacOS X: NeXTSTEP (1987-1989, based on Unix) -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody (1997) -> Mac OS X Server 1.0 -> Mac OS X Public Beta -> Mac OS X 10.0 (March 24th 2001, this is the first MacOS X you know) -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 -> 10.11 (= El Capitan, 2015)
zensavona 11y ago
You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X "windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS"
barrkel 11y ago
Netscape crashed way more often than IE. That's what got me to switch. OS X was a worse platform because it didn't support much software - games in particular. XP was extremely solid, coming after ME in the consumer space (I had switched to W2K after 98, I took until SP2 before I switched). So no, I don't agree with you. Even today, I think Windows is a better gaming platform and Linux a much better dev platform - OS X is insufficiently similar to Linux to work well when Linux is used in production.

ekianjo 11y ago

I come from the AmigaOS world in the first place, and AmigaOS was leagues ahead of Windows prior to Windows XP, years before - it was multitask, it had datatypes, Arexx scripting language and so on. It was not perfect (lacked memory protection) but nevertheless it was better than Windows 3.1 at the time. As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.

xorcist 11y ago
Amiga as a platform was proprietary end-to-end. One supplier of hardware, operating system, and even some applications. It's like IBM could have been if Microsoft was in-house to them. Had AmigaOS been cross-platform, things might have developed differently.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  I totally agree with you. Just pointing out that AmigaOS was way more advanced than MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 at the time they both existed on PC.

EdiX 11y ago

>Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. it wasn't but... >Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately. >IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95. >Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM. What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.

mike_hearn 11y ago
Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius. They developed an integrated suite and that turned out to have value. IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics. Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator. Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them. BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable. For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.