An Architect's View

8 responses so far ↓

• 1 Callum McGillivray // May 6, 2005 at 10:52 PM

  Ahhh...
  
  Don't you just love Windoze ?
  
  My desktop support team roll their eyes every time a new update comes out.
  
  I smile and shake my head.
  
  Callum

• 2 Roger Lancefield // May 7, 2005 at 4:56 AM

  We're continually hearing about how spam, back-pain, throwing 'sickies', poor public transport, grid-locked cities, etc. impact upon the productivity of businesses. Has anyone ever done a study into the amount of down-time a business running MS Windows since, say, 1990 has experienced? I'm sure it would make fascinating reading.
  

• 3 Chris Charlton // May 8, 2005 at 10:26 PM

  Does Microsoft account Windows Update visitors as "site visitors" that are on for "more than a minute"... maybe considered "surfing."

• 4 Roland Collins // May 8, 2005 at 10:43 PM

  Roger,
  Suffice it to say without Windows, most of those businesses wouldn't even exist or be capable of the volume that they handle ;)
  
  Sean,
  Next time, you should download the Service Pack Network Install. It's one large file that applies all of the updates at once :)

• 5 Damien // May 9, 2005 at 7:23 AM

  What gets me is that if you select to install a stand-alone component it should have *all* *relevant* *updates* already built into the installer. With every single Linux distribution out there that I know of, when you select Package XYZ from their packages installer it picks the latest one from the distribution sites to install, not some three year old one which has to them be updated five times before it is up to date. Pure idiocy.

• 6 Roger Lancefield // May 9, 2005 at 9:51 AM

  Roland, frankly, that's absurd. As if there weren't others who would have stepped into the breach. Your point seems to assume that the only platform that could have reached ubiquity was the one that did. That the only company who could have done something worthwhile was one with a pi**-poor attitude towards its customers and the industry of which it was apart.
  
  Apple have treated their customers with far less contempt than MS, as have the original digital bad guys, IBM. The idea that without MS our economies would have been unable to advance into digital technology is ludicrous. I bet B Gates loves that idea, that MS will go down in history as enabling the global enconmy to drag itself out of the dark ages.
  
  I agree that business didn't and doesn't want rival standards in key productivity areas - especially at the level of the OS, but there's no reason at all why it could only have been MS. Many of the small businesses I did tech support for back in the 1990s (particularly prior to email and the Web reaching ubiquity) would, frankly, have been just as productive and would have suffered only a fraction of the hassle and expense if they'd stuck to proprietary machines with a few productivity apps in ROM while relying on sneaker-net to move their files around. Many such companies only bought into Windows because they needed to get access to the MS Office file formats in order to exchange data with their customers.
  
  And what have MS done with their decade and a half of total dominance that other companies such as Apple haven't been able to achieve? Precious little as far as I can see (given their position to do pretty much anything they've wanted). They've spent most of the time since the early 1990s deliberately trying to hijack standards for their own gain and trying to ensure that MS software powers your living room curtains. Where's the real 'innovation'? The best thing I ever bought from Microsoft was a vibrating joystick...
  
  

• 7 Sean Corfield // May 9, 2005 at 10:11 AM

  Roland, my experience reflects what "most users" would do. Go to the Windows Update site and download what it tells you to. There is no option for an all-in-one installer like you mention.
  
  And as for saying Windows enabled all those businesses - that's ridiculous! Gates happened to be in the right place at the right time. Without him, it would have been someone else. Something like Windows *would* have happened (so we'd probably still be complaining because whoever it was would have the ubiquity that Microsoft has, almost by definition).
  
  Damien, yes, I agree. I'm spoiled by Apple's approach which is to provide culmulative updates automatically as part of the built-in system software. It lets you do one install for all available updates and often doesn't even require that you reboot.
  
  Roger, not sure I want to comment on your vibrating joystick... this is a public forum, after all! :)

• 8 Roland Collins // May 9, 2005 at 11:10 AM

  Sean:
  
  As far as the Service Pack goes, I agree that they don't make it easy to find the network install. I loathe Windows update just as much as anyone :)
  
  Roger:
  
  I don't know how you're inferring so much from a one-line statement that I made! I think your obvious disdain for all things Microsoft is causing you to put words in my mouth. Or maybe I chose my words poorly.
  
  My point was much closer to what Sean summarily stated and what you state in the opening line of your reply - that while *some* company may have filled the void, the fact remains that it *was* Microsoft. Your post describes how things "could" have gone, but that is not the way things actually happened. So yes, in fact, MS did enable those businesses. I guess a better way of phrasing it would have been that, like it or not, most businesses rely on Microsoft for a large part of their technology.
  
  I would also wager that any company that grows to be as large as MS would struggle with many of the same issues that you chide them for. Oracle, IBM, SAP, Sun ... they've all had bad raps at some point as they struggled to manage their own bulk and maintain efficiency and market share.
  
  I am not pro-MS, anti-Apple, pro-"Any" technology - I use the best tool for the job, and believe it or not, MS does make some good tools. As does Macromedia, Apple, Adobe, a number of fantastic open source projects .....

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