>>From past history, M$ only stumbles at the beginning of a product cycle, and once they reach their stride they are a steamroller. Their big screwup with NT was called OS/2. They learned from that, and by the time they released NT 3.0 it was already a very decent product, NT 4.0, Win2k and WinXP are progressively better. <<
<<Last minute edit. I wrote all this before catching up with the thread. Sorry for the parts that are a rehash.>>
Alomex -
To go slightly OT here . . .
Actually, XP is the fourth real version of NT.
Before NT, Microsoft and IBM were partners, working together to develop a robust version of OS/2, as you said. (Ed Iaccobucci of Citrix fame was a key player in that effort.)
But Microsoft decided to pull out and build their own "advanced operating system" with memory protection and multitasking, etc. from the ground up. My understanding is that NT is not related to OS/2 at all. It's based on VMS, from what I've been told.
For those who don't know, VMS is an old operating system that ran on DEC machines. David Cutler is from DEC, I believe.
The history of NT is easy to get confused about, because Microsoft started off with NT 3.1. That was the very first release. And no, it wasn't a "very decent" product. It didn't run well or stably at all.
They chose that number because that was the current version of Windows at the time. The plan was, they said, that they were going to release upgrades to the consumer Windows and the NT line in lockstep until such time as they could unify the code base.
Of course they screwed that up within a year by releasing Windows for Workgroups, and then NT 3.5. NT 3.5 was basically a massive re-write of a lot of the buggy code from 3.1, and the first version of NT that a business would consider putting into production. 3.51 fixed a whole bunch of other bugs.
NT 4.0 was the next major release, where the big deal was the incorporation of the Windows 95 interface. Since it was actually the first major upgrade to the OS, it should have been 2.0, but why quibble? In addition to the interface change there were a lot of improvements under the hood.
Many businesses still run 4.0, which has been patched and patched. Six large service packs and a series of other patches and hotfixes have plugged security holes and fixed bugs.
Windows 2000, then, was really version 3.0 of NT. It's actually quite stable, though I have seen a lot of blue screens of death while running it. Not as many as with 4.0.
That brings us to XP, which is NT the fourth. There is no server version of XP yet, but the Home and Pro versions do seem to be very stable. I'd say they're probably on a par with OS X 10.1 in that regard.
So OK. The OS's do become more stable over time. Stability isn't the problem with XP. Security is.
One big problem with XP is that Microsoft decided that in order to make it easier for help desk jockeys and other techs to support users remotely, they would make it possible for someone to easily take control of another person's computer over a network. It's like having PC Anywhere installed whether you want it or not.
Plus, they wanted the system to automatically download and install upgrades without user intervention. They wanted the user to be able to log in to everthing in the world using a Microsoft "Passport". And they wanted the browser and e-mail programs to be capable of doing all kinds of fancy stuff on the local machine.
To enable all those features, and to make sure that their various programs (browsers, e-mail, media player, etc.) were so deeply imbedded in the OS that users wouldn't or couldn't use the competitor's products, they integrated all kinds of things that from a security standpoint should be kept separate. In the process, they created an OS that to a friend of mine who's a security maven looks like "a wheel of Swiss cheese that's been hit by a shotgun".
Add the high price and the complex and off-putting licensing scheme, and you have the makings of a stumble.
I know I'm probably oversimplifying and being too technical at the same time here. Certainly I've gone on for too long.
Please don't get me started about Microsoft again. ;-)
- Allen |
