People aren’t jumping on the Microsoft bandwagon as much as they used to anymore. Unlike the fanfare that was made for Windows 95, XP just kind of slipped in there and companies are sticking with it as it’s the most stable PC operating system M$ has come up with yet.
That doesn’t mean XP is a good operating system, it’s so bad that the Service Pack 2 is over a Gigabyte’s worth of data if you order it on the CD. That’s a lot of bad code they are fixing, that shouldn’t have been introduced in the first place, but XP was needed because Win98 just wasn’t up to the multi-tasking thing. Too bad the server architecture they used from NT for XP isn’t that great either as most of the worlds’ web servers (almost 70%) run Apache software as of April 2005.
From the New York Times this am:
Contrast that to:
Mr. Lucovsky recounts how a friend at Amazon discovered a performance issue, found a fix, tested it and had it in place, all in a day. “Not a single customer had to download a bag of bits, answer any silly questions, prove that they are not software thieves, reboot their computers, etc.,” he wrote. “The software was shipped to them, and they didn’t have to lift a finger.”
MR. LUCOVSKY’S remarks are of interest because he knows a thing or two about developing operating systems. He was a senior architect of Windows NT, was the chief keeper of the keys for the source code and was named by Microsoft in 2000 as one among its inaugural batch of distinguished engineers. Recently, after 16 years at Microsoft, however, he said he decided that he had been wrong in thinking that Microsoft knew best “how to ship software.”
It was other companies, the ones who understood the potential of the Internet and software-as-a-service, that were best able to deliver benefits to customers “efficiently and quickly,” he said. He resigned from Microsoft and has joined one of those other companies: Google.
Last week, AssetMetrix Research Labs, a research firm based in Ottawa, released the results of a survey of 251 North American companies, measuring the adoption of Windows XP. Only 7 percent of companies had actively embraced the latest improvements, Service Pack 2, released six months ago. The improvements it turns out, introduce software-compatibility problems. These can be overcome with tinkering but not without aggravation and additional cost for fixes that should not have been necessary in the first place.
Windows XP may prove to be a tenacious paterfamilias, unwilling to move aside for the next generation. Security holes notwithstanding, it is the most stable version of Windows to date. That very stability will make it difficult for the company to market Longhorn as a release more important than XP itself, a prediction that Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, made in 2003.
Thank goodness for Linus Torvalds, some of us won’t be as vulnerable to coughing up more $ to M$ just to play around on the web.
