On Oct 25 2011 Windows Xp Turns 10 (Retail Availablity date)

[vdeane]

Vista's problem was mainly lack of application/driver development at release (caused by delays... nobody believed that Vista would ever be released until they could hold a copy in their hands), vindictive tech bloggers (also caused by delays and cut features), and hardware manufacturers attempting to sell low-end machines with Vista even though it should have been obvious that those machines should have stuck with XP (or not been made at all, in many cases).  By the time all this was fixed, 7 was practically out.

Incidentally XP and 8 are far more fisher-price than Vista and 7 are.  Vista and 7 look modern and professional.  XP and 8 look like toys for toddlers.

Didn't notice those explorer changes because I've never used that functionality.  I don't like how Vista and 7 removed the ability to manage file types, though.

[J N Winkler]

Microsoft did make some bona fide mistakes with Vista--for starters, the implementation of UAC was highly user-unfriendly; in Windows 7 it is easier to customize.  I would also turn around the point about drivers.  How can anyone intelligibly claim that developing the drivers as a single point of failure (which is essentially what Microsoft did with Vista) is good software engineering?

[Scott5114]

I sort of look at the whole XP thing with a bit of shock and horror. The world of October 2011 is a much different place from that of October 2001 and we use our computers for pretty different things nowadays. Think about it: when XP came out, Wikipedia was only 10 months old, nobody had heard of YouTube, talking about roads meant using MTR, nobody really had digital cameras, nobody had 64-bit processors...

Of course a lot of this is probably just me being accustomed to Linux release cycles. Fedora Core 1 was released in November 2003, and Fedora 16 is scheduled for release next month.

[corco]

I sort of look at the whole XP thing with a bit of shock and horror. The world of October 2011 is a much different place from that of October 2001 and we use our computers for pretty different things nowadays. Think about it: when XP came out, Wikipedia was only 10 months old, nobody had heard of YouTube, talking about roads meant using MTR, nobody really had digital cameras, nobody had 64-bit processors...

Same- when XP came out, I would have laughed at you and called you an idiot if you told me it would still be this popular in 2011.

I blame enterprises for having ridiculously complicated OS upgrade rollout policies that make it take forever to upgrade the OS (we still live in a world where certain large corporations, one of which I may work for, are buying new Windows 7 machines and downgrading them to XP because at this point the cost to upgrade everything, especially their in-house software, to 7 would be astronomical- and a lot of places are against having multiple images, preventing them from being upgraded as computers are replaced), preserving the deprecated OS on the market. I'm reasonably sure there wouldn't still be so many home users of XP if those folks were all using 7 on their work machines.

[J N Winkler]

Same- when XP came out, I would have laughed at you and called you an idiot if you told me it would still be this popular in 2011.

I wouldn't have laughed.  I remember people sticking to Windows 98 SE because Windows ME was such a turkey.  (In fact I kept using Windows 98 SE right up to October 2006.)  I also used to share a house with someone who had to get a RMA on a brand-new laptop with Windows XP (then only recently released) because the operating system had crashed so badly the computer was unusable.  Given that experience by proxy, the real surprise for me would have been not that Windows XP has lasted as long as it has, but rather that it did not turn into another Windows ME.  Microsoft has been so hit-and-miss with operating systems over the past 16 years (Windows 95 was a bomb, Windows 98 was a success, Windows ME was a bomb, Windows 2000 and Windows XP were successes, Vista was a bomb . . .) that it does not surprise me at all that people continue to use "good" versions of Windows for as long as they possibly can.

I blame enterprises for having ridiculously complicated OS upgrade rollout policies that make it take forever to upgrade the OS (we still live in a world where certain large corporations, one of which I may work for, are buying new Windows 7 machines and downgrading them to XP because at this point the cost to upgrade everything, especially their in-house software, to 7 would be astronomical- and a lot of places are against having multiple images, preventing them from being upgraded as computers are replaced), preserving the deprecated OS on the market. I'm reasonably sure there wouldn't still be so many home users of XP if those folks were all using 7 on their work machines.

I don't know that "blame" is the word I would use in connection with those upgrade rollout policies.  Businesses have to turn a profit and are perfectly entitled to ask what a regime of software upgrades will do for the bottom line.  The software industry in general (not just Microsoft but also the major application developers) does such a poor job of preserving commercially important functionality across version releases that businesses tend to upgrade only when blackmailed into doing so by the threat of obsolescence.

Case in point:  Acrobat MDI versus SDI.  SDI is now the default and sole option in Acrobat as of version 9.  Before that, MDI (i.e., the ability to have multiple documents open in a single window) was the default and sole option in Acrobat up to and including version 7.  Version 8 was the only release where the two options co-existed.

When Adobe announced on one of its corporate blogs that SDI would henceforth rule in Acrobat, the response was overwhelmingly critical.  Many of the negative comments came from workers in architectural and engineering firms who used dual-screen monitors and were accustomed to parking the Acrobat window in one screen and having a production application (such as a CAD program) running in the other screen.  Since this is no longer possible with SDI, many commenters said, "We will revert to Acrobat version 7."  This has knock-on effects on OS upgrade planning because Acrobat version 7 won't run on Windows 7.  (Windows 7 is the main reason I am currently running Acrobat X on my new laptop even though I think version 7 was better designed and more intuitive.)

My own feeling is that, in the absence of genuine technological change, the relationship between the software industry and software-using enterprises tends to settle into an adversarial one.  In the case of Acrobat, for example, there has been no addition of functionality between version 7 and version X that is meaningful or even visible to 99% of users.  (Indeed there was not that much change between version 5 and 7, and IMV the biggest--PDF layers--was actually an economically regressive white elephant.)  This means the software industry has to blackmail the enterprises into, effectively, buying the same product multiple times, just to keep the profits coming in.  Since the software industry does not get direct profit participation from the enterprises, they have little incentive to listen to them on user interface issues, and usually don't.  It is an attritive stalemate that doesn't get broken unless and until a paradigm-changer comes along.

[agentsteel53]

XP->Win7 (or, really, NT4->Win7 because on XP I had always kept the "classic" skin) wasn't nearly as much of an interface shock to me as Office 2003 to Office 2007.  when I first used Office 2007, it took me a half-hour to figure out that that butterfly-like thing at upper left was the file menu!  

my only major pet peeve with the Win7 interface is that there is too much functionality associated with mouse hovering, and dragging without dropping.  I like to rest the mouse cursor while thinking and assume that it is being inert.  This is extra annoying in Photoshop, when I am attempting to very carefully fine-tune a slider, and after 10 seconds of mouse-down, Win7 assumes I want to hide Photoshop and see the desktop.  Why no, that is approximately the last thing I want!

[Scott5114]

I think that companies are also much too dependent on specific programs in a lot of cases. In the Acrobat 7/Acrobat X fiasco described above, my inkling would not be to hold off on OS upgrades just to preserve an old version of Acrobat, but to see about dropping Acrobat and finding a PDF viewer that does what I need it to if at all possible.

I am planning on starting a company at some point and I think I will attempt to make a go of using as much open source software as possible, so that, among other reasons, if the devs ever do make some sort of bonehead move that makes the software unsuitable for continued use by the business, it could be forked if necessary.

[SSOWorld]

There are businesses out there that believe that open source software is a cardinal sin.  I cannot say which of course.

[J N Winkler]

I think that companies are also much too dependent on specific programs in a lot of cases. In the Acrobat 7/Acrobat X fiasco described above, my inkling would not be to hold off on OS upgrades just to preserve an old version of Acrobat, but to see about dropping Acrobat and finding a PDF viewer that does what I need it to if at all possible.

My own view is that the enterprises need to be aware of moral hazard in the software industry and have to avoid developing profit centers around particularities in a piece of software which disappear when a new version of that software is released.  But profit is profit and enterprises are just as capable of myopic choice as individuals.  (My God, look at all the organizations that try to use CAD drawings as archival records of finished construction!)

In the case of Acrobat, part of the problem is that it is actually a comprehensive PDF authoring solution, not just a PDF viewer.  (This is not to say that the free PDF viewers are better than Acrobat, by the way--FoxIt has trouble with raster data, Nuance PDF Reader throws up compatibility errors for PDFs Acrobat handles just fine, etc.)  There are also complementarities.  Acrobat is the generally accepted standard for PDF authoring, so employees experienced in using Acrobat are easier to find than employees who can get something out of Acrobat's competitors.  I don't actually know of a true "Acrobat killer" (replicating all of Acrobat's functionality) for any platform, let alone Windows, although certain commonly used tasks can be automated using command-line tools which are widely available cross-platform.  (For example, these days I use 'pdftk' instead of Acrobat directly to slice and dice the sign design sheets out of highway construction plan PDFs.)  More is possible with 'pdflib' but a license costs about as much as full-version Acrobat.

I am planning on starting a company at some point and I think I will attempt to make a go of using as much open source software as possible, so that, among other reasons, if the devs ever do make some sort of bonehead move that makes the software unsuitable for continued use by the business, it could be forked if necessary.

I think that makes sense primarily as insurance against the "bonehead move" being made in the first place, since developers of open-source software tend to be more responsive to the end users and less dogmatic in user-interface matters.  (This is true only to a point, however--look at all the unresolved bugs on five-year tickets in Mozilla's issue tracker.  Newsgroup content filtering in Thunderbird, anyone?)  I see forking as a method of last resort for getting around the problem of withdrawn functionality since that makes you the developer, so you lose the economic benefits of specialization (having someone else develop the software while you concentrate on the end uses).

I don't mean to say either that the situation is hopeless or that there are easy solutions to any of these problems.  Where computers are concerned I have basically settled into an attitude of cheerful cynicism.

[Mr_Northside]

Vista's problem was mainly lack of application/driver development at release (caused by delays... nobody believed that Vista would ever be released until they could hold a copy in their hands), vindictive tech bloggers (also caused by delays and cut features), and hardware manufacturers attempting to sell low-end machines with Vista even though it should have been obvious that those machines should have stuck with XP (or not been made at all, in many cases). 

Personally, I think along with driver issues, that this was one of the biggest reasons why Vista flopped.  If you wanted it to run smoothly when it came out, you needed to shell out $$$ for a top-end system.  Sure, you could get it to run on more affordable systems, but it would run like shit. 
Thankfully, they didn't do the same thing with Win 7.  Win 7 isn't any more of a system hog than Vista (if not better), but what was a costly top-end system when Vista was released would be a much more affordable PC when 7 was released.

[SteveG1988]

Vista's problem was mainly lack of application/driver development at release (caused by delays... nobody believed that Vista would ever be released until they could hold a copy in their hands), vindictive tech bloggers (also caused by delays and cut features), and hardware manufacturers attempting to sell low-end machines with Vista even though it should have been obvious that those machines should have stuck with XP (or not been made at all, in many cases). 

Personally, I think along with driver issues, that this was one of the biggest reasons why Vista flopped.  If you wanted it to run smoothly when it came out, you needed to shell out $$$ for a top-end system.  Sure, you could get it to run on more affordable systems, but it would run like shit. 
Thankfully, they didn't do the same thing with Win 7.  Win 7 isn't any more of a system hog than Vista (if not better), but what was a costly top-end system when Vista was released would be a much more affordable PC when 7 was released.

With SP2, and drivers for the GMA950 which are tweaked compared to the intel offical drivers (it allows more games to run on it and increases aero performance) 1.83 Core Duo 3gb DDR2 667 ram and a 60gb 5400RPM drive...it runs about as good as Xp does

[JREwing78]

An interesting retrospective from Ars Technica:

Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/10/ten-years-of-windows-xp-how-longevity-became-a-curse.ars

[J N Winkler]

It is indeed an interesting article.  I am not sure though that I agree with the premise that it is "bad" that a particular PC operating system has lasted for more than ten years in the marketplace.  How old is Unix now?  42 years?  And is Microsoft's preferred approach (new OS every three years, taking majority market share within a year or two of release) likely to be any better?  Certainly OSes need to change and adapt in order to accommodate the affordances of new technology, but what Microsoft wants to do sounds like a bid to get us to pay more without any commensurate increase in useful functionality.  There is also the fact that computing in general is structured around paradigms which are far more durable than any particular operating system and are potentially imperiled by OS changes.  (One example of such a paradigm is the concept of division of data into files which can be grouped into tree-like directory structures.)

In general I tend to see Windows XP's longevity as a positive factor.  It was a known quantity, so businesses could plan their activities around it, and develop value in data without worrying about particularities of OS support.  Its permanency in the marketplace (and absence, until the advent of Windows 7, of viable successors) mitigated the fact that the risks associated with OS development are shared unequally between the OS developer and the users.  I would have to see a lot more evidence of returns foregone from sticking to Windows XP before I believe that it is the latter-day equivalent of the old British bobtailed coal wagon.

I really worry about what will happen with Windows 8 and successor OSes, which I see as being hugely affected by an ongoing "iPadification" of technology.  Will we have to buy special computer tables so we can interact with the OS by laying fingers on a horizontal screen, and if so, what will the implications be for activities like converting old paper records (such as construction plans) into electronic form?

[corco]

I really worry about what will happen with Windows 8 and successor OSes, which I see as being hugely affected by an ongoing "iPadification" of technology.  Will we have to buy special computer tables so we can interact with the OS by laying fingers on a horizontal screen, and if so, what will the implications be for activities like converting old paper records (such as construction plans) into electronic form?

I don't think that's something to worry about for a while. There are far, far too many power users for whom a touch screen is impractical- GIS users, architects, surveyors, graphic designers- pretty much anybody that does anything relative to drawing won't be able to use a touch screen unless the technology really changes. Touch screens may become the norm, but I'd be stunned if mice weren't still compatible with computers for a really long time to come.

[Stratuscaster]

Finger-based touch screens might be impractical - stylus-based screens might work better for certain apps. But I'll agree - the majority of PC users will still be using the traditional keyboard/mouse.

Where I work, we are still deploying desktops and laptops for corporations with XP - it's still used on 50% of the systems we do today.

[realjd]

It is indeed an interesting article.  I am not sure though that I agree with the premise that it is "bad" that a particular PC operating system has lasted for more than ten years in the marketplace.  How old is Unix now?  42 years?  And is Microsoft's preferred approach (new OS every three years, taking majority market share within a year or two of release) likely to be any better? 

I don't agree with your UNIX example. UNIX may have been around since the 60's, but its various releases are updated as often or more often than Microsoft updates Windows. Go look up a release schedule for Solaris for example, or any of the BSD operating systems, or even Mac OSX. A more correct comparison would be to compare the age of UNIX to the age of Windows NT (the ancestor to XP, Vista, and 7) which was released in 1993.

I think the big driver for corporations to upgrade to Windows 7, 8, or higher  - other than Microsoft ending support for XP - will be the need for a 64-bit OS. Windows 7 was the first Windows release where the 64 bit version was ready for regular use in my opinion.

I agree with your concern about the iPadification of technology. I love my iPad, but there are a large number of tasks that simply require a mouse and keyboard. I couldn't imagine having to do any software development by touch for instance, or put together a complex spreadsheet, or anything else like that.

[Scott5114]

I think that companies are also much too dependent on specific programs in a lot of cases. In the Acrobat 7/Acrobat X fiasco described above, my inkling would not be to hold off on OS upgrades just to preserve an old version of Acrobat, but to see about dropping Acrobat and finding a PDF viewer that does what I need it to if at all possible.

My own view is that the enterprises need to be aware of moral hazard in the software industry and have to avoid developing profit centers around particularities in a piece of software which disappear when a new version of that software is released.  But profit is profit and enterprises are just as capable of myopic choice as individuals.  (My God, look at all the organizations that try to use CAD drawings as archival records of finished construction!)

In the case of Acrobat, part of the problem is that it is actually a comprehensive PDF authoring solution, not just a PDF viewer.  (This is not to say that the free PDF viewers are better than Acrobat, by the way--FoxIt has trouble with raster data, Nuance PDF Reader throws up compatibility errors for PDFs Acrobat handles just fine, etc.)  There are also complementarities.  Acrobat is the generally accepted standard for PDF authoring, so employees experienced in using Acrobat are easier to find than employees who can get something out of Acrobat's competitors.  I don't actually know of a true "Acrobat killer" (replicating all of Acrobat's functionality) for any platform, let alone Windows, although certain commonly used tasks can be automated using command-line tools which are widely available cross-platform.  (For example, these days I use 'pdftk' instead of Acrobat directly to slice and dice the sign design sheets out of highway construction plan PDFs.)  More is possible with 'pdflib' but a license costs about as much as full-version Acrobat.

With regards to PDF viewing I find that the KDE project's Okular does most PDF viewing tasks effectively, even supporting some surprising facets of PDF like forms. Okular is designed as a general document viewer and can also handle many sorts of other documents like PostScript, DVI, ODF, and most image formats. I'm not so sure about how easy it is to get running on Windows but I think it is technically possible.

As for PDF editing, I don't really do so much of that so I'm not really up on the options for that. I generally just use LibreOffice or Inkscape to generate a PDF and leave it at that.

[Stephane Dumas]

I sort of look at the whole XP thing with a bit of shock and horror. The world of October 2011 is a much different place from that of October 2001 and we use our computers for pretty different things nowadays. Think about it: when XP came out, Wikipedia was only 10 months old, nobody had heard of YouTube, talking about roads meant using MTR, nobody really had digital cameras, nobody had 64-bit processors...

+1, DVD was still a novelty, there was hosting websites like Geocities, Yahoo was the big engine search and they got their mailing lists, Google just arrived on the scene. Excite beginned to be a shadow of its former self.

[SteveG1988]

I sort of look at the whole XP thing with a bit of shock and horror. The world of October 2011 is a much different place from that of October 2001 and we use our computers for pretty different things nowadays. Think about it: when XP came out, Wikipedia was only 10 months old, nobody had heard of YouTube, talking about roads meant using MTR, nobody really had digital cameras, nobody had 64-bit processors...

+1, DVD was still a novelty, there was hosting websites like Geocities, Yahoo was the big engine search and they got their mailing lists, Google just arrived on the scene. Excite beginned to be a shadow of its former self.

Comcast Cable internet was a branded version of Excite @home

Gateway had its own stores (we bought a PC there may 2001)

The sega dreamcast was towards the end of its short life as well.

USB was taking over everything, before then it was mostly serial and paraell port based products, as well as PS/2.

VHS was still selling like crazy, DVD was in mid takeover.

Nobody had DVD burners, too crazily expensive, a lot of pcs lacked DVD dries due to cost as well, CD burners were starting to become extremely easy to buy.

IE6 was just released and it was the standard browser.

Intel just laid the crap bomb known as the pentium 4, cursing us all with crappy performance until the Pentium M, Core DUo and Core 2 family came out.

USB sticks were really expensive and rare, if even available at that time.

Digital 8 and Mini DV were the king for digital video, but failing that Hi8 was decent.

Real player was still cursing computers....later quicktime would take over the role of really annoying media player.

[Takumi]

Social networking meant chatrooms.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Arcview 3.1 was the top of the line for GIS.

[SteveG1988]

Parkway cost 35 cents at a toll booth.

Gas was about 1.40-1.70 a gal (i forget the exact ammount)

Everybody had credit

the Palm PDA system was the king

EZ Pass was new

[relaxok]

XP SP3 up until three weeks ago.  It served me well for many many years.  Only reason I really got Win 7 was I wanted to do some graphics programming with DirectX 10/11 and you need Vista minimum (and Vista blows).  I had been using 7 at work since it came out so I was used to it but it's kind of amazing I had no real reason to upgrade on my home machine(s) after 9+ years.