8 ms·
It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away
by oybng 9mo ago
It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away
- hypeatei 9mo agoIt still is if you're an enterprise customer. The retail users aren't Microsoft's cash cows, so they get ads and BS in their editions. The underlying APIs are still stable and MS provides the LTSC & Server editions to businesses which lack all that retail cruft.
- lelele 9mo agoDo you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?
- hypeatei 9mo agoYes. Enterprise, Pro, and Home are the enshittified, retail editions. Enterprise just adds a few more features IIRC but still has ads. The other versions I mentioned above don't have any of that.
- r_lee 9mo agoEnterprise is not retail and is usually done via volume licensing, but probably without any additional configuration it might have that stuff intact. But you can use group policy etc. freely. I don't know how Win 11 is though
- lelele 9mo agoFWIW, ChatGPT advised against LTSC or Server editions for a dev workstation and recommended Enterprise, as you do. However, I can’t find Enterprise from a reputable EU vendor. Do you know of any? Is Enterprise available to end users?
- r_lee 9mo agoIt's not officially, but nothing prevents you from buying licenses. I don't use Windows anymore but iirc the easiest way is to get the E3 or E5 licenses. The volume licensing is "Contact us" pricing LTSC is also Enterprise, but it's meant for e.g. computers attached to an industrial machine/line that rarely gets updated and such. But it's used by many prosumers as a way to avoid bloat and e.g. keep Win10 for longer
- zppln 9mo agoI'm an enterprise user and I find Windows 11 a complete disaster. They've managed to make something as trivial as right-clicking a slow operation. I used to be a pretty happy Windows camper (I even got through Me without much complaint), but I'm so glad I moved to Linux and KDE for my private desktops before 11 hit.
- p_ing 9mo agoIf anything, right click is faster thanks to dumping the ability for 3rd parties to pollute it with COM controls that needs to be init'ed.
- materialpoint 9mo agoThe problem with Windows after Windows 7 isn't really ads, it's the blatant stupid use of web view to do the most mundane things and hog hundreds of MB or even GBs for silly features, that are still present in enterprise versions.
- antonkochubey 9mo agoStart menu search requires 7 web browser processes that consume ~350 MB of RAM to be constantly running.
- bnastic 9mo agoEverything after Win 2000 was a bad idea. Enterprise or not.
- GeekyBear 9mo agoWindows 2000 was the last version where Dave Cutler was fully in charge of Windows. Things started going downhill after that.
- whoknowsidont 9mo agoWindows 2000 was a bug riddled, poorly architected punching bag for malware. Things definitely went up-hill AFTER Windows 2000. What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release? It wasn't even a good release when it came out, and it definitely didn't stand the test of time.
- bigyabai 9mo ago> What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release? An unsubstantiated insistence that a single human being is the bus factor for a thousand-engineer org? I'm just as confused as you, everyone I've ever met who liked Windows 2000 went on to love XP SP3, usually with the W2K skin on it.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoXP was arguably better.
- robotnikman 9mo ago7 was pretty good. But I may be looking through the glasses of nostalgia and my love for the frutiger aero style
- 63282836292919 9mo agoIn my day job, Explorer still freezes every second day, GUI interactions take several seconds and the sidebar is full of tabloid headlines and ads.
- layer8 9mo agoAt least with regard to the last point, your enterprise admins must be doing a bad job.
- shepherdjerred 9mo agohttps://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
- Ygg2 9mo agoIt's functional - yes, intuitive - maybe, but optimized is highly debatable. The answer to maintaining a highly functional and stable OS is piles and piles of backwards compatibility misery on the devs. You want Windows 9? Sorry, some code checks the string for Windows 9 to determine if the OS is Windows 95 or 98.
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoHe was talking about user interface not app compatibility
- Ygg2 9mo agoHe's mentioning Desktop environment, I assume he means all the parts, not just UI.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoMillions of total computer noobs hit the ground running with Windows 95. It was a great achievement in software design.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- qcnguy 9mo agoThe pivot point was Windows 95. Competition. In the first half of the 90s Windows faced a lot more of it. Then they didn't, and standards slipped. Why invest in Windows when people will buy it anyway? Upgrades. In the first half of the 90s Windows was mostly software bought by PC users directly, rather than getting it with the hardware. So, if you could make Windows 95 run in 4mb of RAM rather than 8mb of RAM, you'd make way more sales on release day. As the industry matured, this model disappeared in favor of one where users got the OS with their hardware purchase and rarely bought upgrades, then never bought them, then never even upgraded when offered them for free. This inverted the incentive to optimize because now the customer was the OEMs, not the end user. Not optimizing as aggressively naturally came out of that because the only new sales of Windows would be on new machines with the newest specs, and OEMs wanted MS to give users reasons to buy new hardware anyway. UI testing. In the 1990s the desktop GUI paradigm was new and Apple's competitive advantage was UI quality, so Microsoft ran lots of usability studies to figure out what worked. It wasn't a cultural problem because most UI was designed by programmers who freely admitted they didn't really know what worked. The reason the start button had "Start" written on it was because of these tests. After Windows 95 the culture of usability studies disappeared, as they might imply that the professional designers didn't know what they were doing, and those designers came to compete on looks. Also it just got a lot harder to change the basic desktop UI designs anyway. The web. When people mostly wrote Windows apps, investing in Windows itself made sense. Once everyone migrated to web apps it made much less sense. Data is no longer stored in files locally so making Explorer more powerful doesn't help, it makes more sense to simplify it. There's no longer any concept of a Windows app so adding new APIs is low ROI outside of gaming, as the only consumer is the browser. As a consequence all the people with ambition abandoned the Windows team to work on web-related stuff like Azure, where you could have actual impact. The 90s Windows/MacOS teams were full of people thinking big thoughts about how to write better software hence stuff like DCOM, OpenDoc, QuickTime, DirectMusic and so on. The overwhelming preference of developers for making websites regardless of the preferences of the users meant developing new OS ideas was a waste of time; browsers would not expose these features, so devs wouldn't use them, so apps wouldn't require them, so users would buy new computers to get access to them. And that's why MS threw Windows away. It simply isn't a valuable asset anymore.
- Mountain_Skies 9mo agoIt's quite common for a company to build a good product and then once the initial wave of ICs and management moves on, the next waves of employees either don't understand what they're maintaining or simply don't care because they see a chance to extract short term gains from the built-up intellectual capital others generated.
- glitchc 9mo agoPiracy. The consumer versions are filled with ads because most people don't pay for them.
- charlie-83 9mo agoIs this really the case? I feel like most windows users just bought a laptop with Windows already on it. Even if all home users were running pirated versions they would still become entrenched in the world of Windows/Office which would then lead to enterprise sales.
- glitchc 9mo ago> Is this really the case? I feel like most windows users just bought a laptop with Windows already on it. This is largely true in North America, UK and AUS/NZ, less true in Europe, a mixed bag in the Middle East and mostly untrue everywhere else.
- warmwaffles 9mo agoIf you were able to wave a magic wand today and remove piracy, Microsoft would not remove ads.
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoIdk why they use Electron for everything, they literally built the UI stack itself and C# is insanely good at building UIs if they stop trying to reinvent UIs in C# that is.