The installation environment for Windows has always been overly complicated, error-prone and fragile, and a danger to system stability. There have been numerous

The installation environment for Windows has always been overly complicated, error-prone and fragile, and a danger to system stability. There have been numerous cases of app uninstallers getting DLL reference counting wrong and destroying a Windows instance because they removed a critical component or deleted an "unused" registry entry. One workstation I'm running now has some software that cannot be uninstalled; the installers just say "sorry, something bad happened" and that's it -- it's a practical impossibility to manually remove the packages, and in one case it involves clobbering tens of thousands of registry entries. I wrote apps and drivers for MacOS 6/7 and early Windows; there was really no comparison in sophistication between the two systems. MacOS's approach was simple, elegant and worked well, while Windows' was baroque, poorly documented, and generally a very bad experience in terms of debugging and having confidence it would work in the field (I'm not talking about writing the apps or drivers themselves, just installing them). There's absolutely no good reason for the current state of affairs on Windows other than an initial bad design that Microsoft chose to carry forward as architecture. (Read the INF file format documentation, it's a horrorshow).