Thursday, August 25, 2005

Windows 95's Birthday Passes Quietly

Yes yesterday the 25th of August was Windows 95’s 10th birthday. It passed quietly with no comment by Microsoft. There was no party, no balloons, and no excitement shown by Bill Gates or Microsoft.

This is unfortunate as a comment should have been made.

Come on Bill Windows 95 was your baby and it is why your company continues to dominate the OS markets to this day. I could easier see a Disney with out Mickey Mouse than a Microsoft with out Windows 95. (Yes I know some people see a resemblance to Mickey Mouse in your software anyway but that’s another story.)

Without Windows 95 the Mac OS would now be the leader in OS software and you and Microsoft would be a distant 2nd.

So if you won’t praise your baby I’ll take a moment to say a word or two.

Windows 95 was a mile stone in computer software development and for better or worse started the "modern" era of easy computer use. While Windows 3.1 was the first real Windows it was so unstable and resource intensive that it only hinted at what was to come. (Yes I know that Windows 95 wasn’t all that stable either. But it was so much better than Windows 3.1 that there was no comparison.)

No one software release has made computers more open to the general population than Windows 95. With a common look and feel across all programs, a simple development environment, and common drivers for all programs even the newbie could handle a computer. And with that change computer use took off and grew in ways never imagined by anyone.

In just 10 years the computer has made inroads into daily life that it’s hard to imagine. Much of that would not have happened the way it did without Windows 95.

Anyway HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY WINDOWS 95!!!!!

PS It’s also interesting to note that I still have two computers that I and others in the family use occasionally that run on Windows 95 and they still do the basic tasks that I use a computer for just fine. (Some days I wonder if NT, 2000, ME, and XP are really worth the extra trouble and cost.)

(Look Mac users don't take this article personally. Mac is a great system and is in many, many ways better than Windows. But it just has never been as popular and for that reason hasn't had the effect that Windows 95 has had on general computing. Just stay cool Mac users because with Mac’s new OS and move to Intel chips Windows may not win in the end after all. I see a new Mac on a lot of desktops with in the next few years.)

No comments: