Yes, Windows 95 has started shipping, regardless of the bugs. After all, they can just do this whole thing again and make another ton of money simply by releasing a new version later. Remember Windows 3.11? We'll see Windows 96 next year, but I digress.
The point here though, is to examine the advertising disinformation machine at work. The above ad graces the cover of Tiger Software's catalog Windows 95 Reference Guide Vol. V Issue 9b. I don't think that Microsoft wrote this ad (they would have been more careful about their claims), but it's common for them to buy cover space for their products, and I hope they would be ashamed of the lies in this ad. (Probably not, check out their latest study which claims that Win95 is easier than a Macintosh!)
Let's examine the claims this ad makes:
Now, I'm sure I will be accused of being a Macintosh bigot, and there's a certain amount of truth to that, but one thing which I firmly believe is that Apple is concerned about more than simply getting your money and Microsoft is not. At Apple, the engineers are intent on creating hardware and software which is easier to use and more powerful than anything done before. At Microsoft they are simply concerned with making sure that every cent you spend goes through them. They own the OS, the applications, and soon they will own the network and the very banks you use.
This is the insidious part of their plan. Every time they acquire another software company (they didn't write Excel, PowerPoint and FoxPro, for example) they cinch up the noose of control one notch tighter. The next thing you know, you won't be able to buy software from anyone other than Microsoft. That's their plan.
It's not this bleak though. People are already aware that Microsoft is too big, and the world is taking steps toward reducing their dependancy on Microsoft. After all, we've seen this happen before with IBM. They dominated the computer industry several decades ago, and look where it got them. They are still a huge company, but they are no longer recognized as the industry leader. They handed that role to Microsoft, on a silver platter.
The real trick will be predicting how the computer industry grows into the next few decades. We're still in a period of phenomenal growth, because we are making constant incredible leaps in hardware technology, and constantly straining them with our software needs. Until we max out the hardware and allow the software time to grow into it, we won't have any stability in the computer industry. We have to hit some serious physical limits before we will be able to determine which direction we should take things.
We've already hit some limits in the supercomputing realm that are causing it to undergo some serious shakeouts. For example, the desktop machines are encroaching on the performance of the Cray machines, forcing them to go massively parallel (and to sell out to SGI). Single processor scalar machines are a dead-end, to the best of anyone's ability to determine. Only by linking a large number of processors together can we get to the next levels.
That's where the computing world is heading, and I'm sure you recognize that, given how you are viewing this page. In the networking world though, Microsoft is an also-ran. Unix and Macintosh are the current leaders in this world (check out the Internet Domain Survey), and I expect that this will continue for a while, as these are still the general purpose computers of choice. DOS boxes are bought in volume for single purpose users. Word processing and spreadsheets. Anyone doing more, already has more.
Last updated Sun, Mar 10, 1996