Not for 99% of the apps out there. Anything hidden or undocumented was there to avoid competition with MS' own products, but for typical application development, in my experience, MS has always been (too) easy. Nice IDE's, cheap development tools, tons of resources, free libraries, bells and whistles. Quite a difference with OS/2.
I guess we've seen entirely different things then, because it was the exact opposite from where I sat. Back in the early days of Windows the MS documentation of their APIs was absolute crap, and sometimes what did exist was actually incorrect. Their example source code was often full of errors. And MS VC++ just flat out sucked compared to Boorland's products. (Hell, VC++6 still sucks. I haven't tried .NET though.)
It wasn't until well into the Win9x era that MS <i>finally</i> started fixing a lot of this. By today's standards they're not too bad, but in the beginning they were a nightmare.
Good grief, if MS screwed up anything in 95, its not that they didn't allowed ALL Dos apps to be run, its that any would still run at all ! Or rather, that windows 95 wasn't much more than a dos app, rather than an OS
**ROFL** While I won't entirely argue that (though I never did see a problem with an OS being a fancy DOS shell, so long as the DOS got updates to) I will say that supporting <i>most</i> (but not all) of the DOS interrupts was a very <i>bad</i> way to do things. You either break clean and start anew or you have 100% backward compatability. You don't make it 95% backward compatable with the lost 5% being heavily used stuff. That's just stupid.
IMHO, the biggest reason was that IE finally became a viable alternative around version 4 or 5. That was all that was needed, as it was free, and was installed on like 98% of the computers out there.
Yet in my experience most people didn't like (or often even trust) IE and were glad to use Netscape. (Especially since also around then Netscape became free.) My observations were that what turned most people off of Netscape was actually the switch to the Communicator user interface (not a single person that I knew liked it), followed by the switch to the Mozilla codebase for Netscape, which was extremely purist (and buggy) at first, thus making a lot of web pages not load and pissing a lot of customers off. There was a good solid period where people were actively going back to Netscape 4 and refusing to use the latest releases because they just didn't work. And because of this unhappy situation that Netscape themself created for their customers, a lot of people just started giving MS IE a try. And what do you know? They found that for the most part IE 4 (and up) really were almost as good as their old Netscape, and definately better than the buggy new Netscape.
the pressure was on NS to make something worthwhile the hassle of purchasing it (initially) and downloading it later (on 28.8 !).
It wasn't about being pre-installed. The pre-installed IE browser in Win95 just flat out sucked. You could barely even use it. Just about everyone who used IE was downloading the latest IE, so having to download wasn't the issue.
And it wasn't about being free either. Netscape became free before IE was even worth downloading. (Heck, before Win98 was even released.) So they were still on an equal playing field there.
It was about Netscape making mistake after mistake (<i>especially</i> once 5 hit) and forcing their customers into the situation where they either had to roll back to an old version and never see another update for who knew how long, or switch to another browser. And what other browsers were there worth switching to at that point?
Had Netscape not moved to a different code base (or at least waited until the Mozilla code was much better) I don't think that the browser war would ever have been won by IE.
but it remains to be seen if they can keep their margins when competing more or less directly with Dell&Co. I'm not convinced yet, but time will tell.
Which only matters so long as they're competing with Dell&Co. If they keep Mac OS for Mac PCs only and refuse to license production of Mac PCs to anyone else, then they'll never have any difference over what they're doing today, what they've always done.
And the flip side of that coin is that if Apple lets Mac OS be installed on regular PCs and/or licenses the Mac brand to Dell&Co, then Apple will be taking in licensing money that can make up for the margin loss or may even convince Apple to stop producing their own PCs all together and just collect licensing fees instead.
Prettier ? Dunno, to each its own I guess. Use style XP, and your windows looks like a Mac if that is what you crave.
Personally I'm more a Win2K look-and-feel guy myself. I don't need Windows-for-five-year-olds with its bright primary and secondary colors and rounded corners and even further hidden advanced options. Nor do I need to drown in the watery grave created by Apple.
But a lot of people are impressed by the latter, and even if there are ways to reproduce this, most people aren't smart enough even think about it. Look at how many major ISPs use features like free firewall, virus protection, messenger software, etc., etc. as major sellings point these days, as if Zone Alarm, Grisoft AVG, MSIM/YIM/AIM/etc. weren't just as free and available to <i>everyone</i>. Heck, you can even get free email and webspace.
The fact is that there are plenty of people impressed by Mac OS look and feel, and were it to ever compete directly with Windows that would be a selling point to plenty of people out there.
More stable ? Nope. It crashes a good deal more often than XP in my experience, and that is despite the fact it only runs on controlled hardware, whereas XP is expected to run on any thinkable pc. Either way, we can hate MS all we want, saying XP isn't stable as an OS is nonsense today.
I never said that XP isn't stable. Hell, 2K was stable. XP isn't any different in my experience. They'll both run 24 hours a day for months straight without a hitch in my experience.
But, again, people are stupid. Just because we've both seen more Mac OS crashes than Win2K/XP crashes doesn't mean that Joe Blow even remotely believes it. Joe Blow still remembers their last PC, running WinME. Once bitten, twice shy. You'll have to clear the minds of every Joe Blow who ever ran Win9x/ME before they'll readily trust version of Windows to be stable. And that's not even counting the number of major OEMs who ship PoS systems that have their own hardware problems. People generally blame those problems on Windows too, just because Windows is the first thing they see, especially if it BSODs, even if all that they needed was a better power supply.
More secure ? quite possibly, at least it is built on a solid foundation (BSD/March), but I doubt all the clumsy framework on top of that would prove any more secure than XP or Linux once it reaches large enough marketshare to gain the interest of viruswriters, hackers and the spyware boys.
Again, I completely agree, and once Mac OS has an actual chunk of the market share that makes targetting it worth the VXers while, it'll probably suffer far worse that Windows. (At least that's what I'm expecting.) But until that market share breaking point Mac OS is more secure not because of code, but because of a lack of any attacker's interest. So Mac OS has a few years before its illusion of safety falls, and that's plenty of time to pretend to be secure and gain market share from it, <i>especially</i> when security is such a buzz word today.
It's funny how so many people are so concerned about security, and yet most haven't even set up their Windows update to run regularly and most don't even own a hardware firewall (or use any that are built into their hardware) or use freely available fireware software.
As a side note though, I'm not entirely convinced that Linux code is actually any more secure than Mac OS or even Windows right now. It's still way too untested. There are a lot of arguments to be made for Linux like faster fixes and more secure by default, but I've already seen way too often where Linux users just unsecure their settings because good security is a pain in the arse, and where they've run the same kernel without an update for years. And who knows how many lurking backdoors or buffer overflows haven't been caught yet because it's so untested?
Windows 64 is also a lot more secure than XP32 today.. I think there is only one known "proof of concept" virus for it, that doesn't mean it will stay like that though
This is one area where I'll readily admit I know next to nothing about, as I don't have any use for 64-bit software yet. (Being still on 32-bit procs and all.) How is the 64-bit version any safer than WinXP SP2 with a no-execute proc?
<pre><font color=orange><i>Jesters do oft prove prophets.</i> -Regan in
King Lear (Act V, Scene iii) by William Shakespear</font color=orange></pre><p>@ 189K -> 200,000 miles or bust!
<pre>(Not that I condone piracy.)</pre><p><pre><font color=orange><i>Jesters do oft prove prophets.</i> -Regan in
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