Why we should all be using Windows 95
medium.com
medium.com
Maybe it's because I wasn't paying attention to computer stuff in '95, but I found the author's focus on "a memorable launch" somewhat out of place compared to the rest of the essay.
As a thought experiment, how would you even do a big launch for Windows 10 or the latest MacOS? I like both products quite a bit, but I'm not even sure what you would launch? A big pile of marginally useful features?
We purchased it when it was released at midnight and we then went home to stay up crazy late and install it. It was hands down the most memorable OS launch I have ever been a part of and a defining moment for my childhood.
Interesting. Re stability, people bitched Windows 95 a lot, but I only encountered serious issues when 98 came out. XP was very stable... but don't get me started on Windows ME.
The author of that was kind enough to send me the Delphi source code and since then I was hooked on OOP.
Such interesting times.
https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
You make a grown man cry, You make a grown man cry
They weren't thinking about it; they were actually testing it with users.
>And it did just that.
That's true. Nowadays, if an OS only gave you the ability to use a computer easily, would people like it or hate it?
I don't know. What does Windows 10 provide beyond the ability to use a computer?
You can get some versions of Linux that are pretty stable with the right hardware, but the lack of MS Office is a total bummer.
PS: First person to say that one can run MS Office using Wine, will get nailed to a tree.
(As an aside, LibreOffice puts into perspective how useful the Ribbon menu is)
MS Office is complex, full of bugs... but it has all the things in place that a power user needs. They gave a big though about the things people need. The CTRL+Y after a CTRL+X on excel is a great example of that.
I have a love/hate relationship with MS Office. I would lave to have something better... but we're still far away.
I rarely use MS Office like software so using LibreOffice has been perfectly fine for me.
If you’re an office expert you’d probably figure out how to use it, but for me I’ve only used an office suite maybe a dozen times in my life so I’m very new to it, and latest Office 2016 allows me to get started easily (the much-hated Ribbon UI works for me and is intuitive), where as I find myself Googling all the time to do even the basic stuff in LibreOffice.
Adding new features gives you a lot of fame. Fixing bugs and improving things does not.
Also, this might sound shallow to some, but the latest version of Office just looks a lot better than LibreOffice and I enjoy that.
Except the keyboard.
This is only true if you lived in a vacuum. Windows 95 was important in terms of Windows/x86 users, but let's not forget that Macs existed at this time.
Windows 95 might have been prettier than Mac OS back at that time (at least that was the view of the Windows people I knew), but it was not leaps and bounds better.
I left Mac in the mid-90s for Windows 95 not because the the UX was better in any meaningful way, but because it was what I used at work. And while 95 in my opinion was still not as good as Mac OS, it met the threshold of being "good enough".
Sure, the interface was a little bit better, but Program Manager wasn't terrible. The 'desktop' is probably one of the worst UI concepts developed. Multi-tasking was a little better, but 16-bit apps could still wreck stuff, and the same went for memory protection. It crashed just as damn much.
Yeah, it crashed, but people forget how horribly unstable 3.11 was.
On the other hand, I found anything made by Corel to be extremely fragile in the early days of Win95.
Quark and Adobe weren't any better.
It was an interesting product. Virtual desktops with drag-and-drop of windows between mini-views of said desktops, a file manager with a tree on the left instead of a flat list and with built-in zip support, and all wrapped up in a 3D look very similar to what windows 95 became. Many of its features took years to land in windows proper. It was a sort of vision of the windows that never was.
Quote from the Windows 10 launch that the writer is complaining about
>Our Product Design Process ™ includes multiple stages like benchmarking, UX, UI design, design of the technical architecture and development of the project plan.
>We apply the Software Development best practices and operate with a quality mindset.
Quotes from the website of the company that wrote the article.
It seems hypocritical to complain that the Windows 10 launch was full of dubious statements when you are doing the same thing yourself.
>It had a memorable launch, it was honest regarding its objectives, focused on the user, objective and transparent.
Really? This is your argument for why we should look to Windows 95 for inspiration? Who cares about whether a launch is memorable? I doubt that the launch of Windows 95 is actually memorable for anyone outside of the tech bubble, anyways.
Honesty regarding objectives is a somewhat reasonable complaint but compared to Windows 10 I don't see why someone would say that 95 was more honest about its intentions. They seem to be making this a dig at Facebook but I don't see why Facebook should be compared to an operating system in this respect.
I honestly have no clue what they mean by saying that Windows 95 was objective. Transparent is pretty much the same as "honest regarding it's objectives". Focused on the user is a good thing but they haven't made a case that today's products aren't focused on the user.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Zt8F-ZqANVVbq4T5VU...
This chart seems to be saying that computers today have less utility than a computer from 1995 running Windows 95. I don't think I even need to describe why that notion is ridiculous.
For those of you that came to the comments without reading the article, don't bother. It's just a poor attempt at marketing by some UI design company.
Anyway, I wasn't comparing computers and operating systems from 1995 to what we have today, regarding anything else than a few characteristics like objectivity and transparency.
We never had so much concerning technology and it's impossible to compare whatever was done a few decades ago with what we have now. However, regarding the mindset that surrounds a product launch, I think that we are moving in the wrong direction for some time now.
Imagine if the chart that you've posted here concerned video games, for instance. Wouldn't you agree it makes sense? The same applies to applications, to smartphones, web services... etc.
I don't think it's absurd, but you're allowed to think differently.
I get that you weren't trying to say that we should switch from a modern OS to one from the 90's. You make that clear. However, you absolutely spent most of the article comparing Windows 95 to modern day software.
>Take the launch of Microsoft’s latest version of their operating system, Windows 10, for instance. No music, no comedians, no party, no fun and a lot of dubious statements.
>I’m not saying we should solve every UI and UX issue with a start menu, but most web designs out there could surely learn a lot from how Windows 95 solved so many problems by thinking about how target users would deal with their product.
>All 19MBs of Windows 95 consisted on useful tools that you could expect from a computer. There was no Cry Translator or Electric Shaver app — wonders of the modern day, available on any smartphone — as it was focused on a few objectives only.
>Imagine if such a strange object as a phone that could only make calls existed. That would be the equivalent of Windows 95 on a computer back then. It had everything you ever needed from it, without the unnecessary waste of space.
>What really stands out are the main qualities that Windows 95, as a product, had and that are not common nowadays. It had a memorable launch, it was honest regarding its objectives, focused on the user, objective and transparent.
The problem I have with the chart is not that is shows junk and paid increasing - it's that it shows the utility decreasing. As a percentage of the junk/paid/utility trifecta, I might agree that utility's percentage is going down over time but the absolute quantity of utility has increased an insane amount in the last 23 years. Your chart does not show that, at least not very clearly.
This quote is what precedes the graph:
>Imagine if such a strange object as a phone that could only make calls existed. That would be the equivalent of Windows 95 on a computer back then. It had everything you ever needed from it, without the unnecessary waste of space.
Phones like that do exist. You can get one for your house still. If you're willing to accept texting as a feature, you can get a cell phone like this. You seem to be arguing that such a device is somehow superior to an iPhone or my Pixel because it doesn't have the "unnecessary waste of space". You completely gloss over the fact that the utility section of the 2015 graph should have things like a web browser, Google or Apple Pay, Uber, Slack, Netflix, Spotify, GrubHub, and many others in it which make it substantially bigger than the 1995 graph.
I believe that the "free" utility is decreasing, leaving space for some junk no one really uses (any smartphone comes with dozens of functionalities that we'll never use but are paying for) and paid features. These last features add utility, but for some reason, they are not included originally.
When I bought my first computer, with Windows 98, it came with Microsoft Office, Photoshop and a few other "free" tools. I've paid for the computer and those additional features were already there. It's added value that you now have to pay for and that's not only Microsoft's responsibility (at least, concerning Photoshop).
The same way you have to pay for several of the apps you've listed, such as Uber, Netflix, some Google services, Spotify premium... I don't recall the existence of "premium features" for what I used in 1995, but Spotify is the perfect example of what I illustrated in the graph.
The free version adds some utility, the paid version increases its utility and there's some junk in between that no one really listens to.
Anyways, if you can, I'd suggest putting another paragraph above or below the graph in the article explaining what you've said in this comment. I did not get this point from reading the article and I think a lot of other people will also struggle with it.
I will provide an additional explanation in the text to clarify this part. Thanks for your feedback!
I can be a murdering psychopath and express in my memoirs from prison that while I love killin', murder is immoral. Murder is still widely accepted as being immoral regardless of who asserts the opinion.
That aside I found the article's author heavily corralled observations to support his opinion.
> I’m not trying to compare operating systems with social media or mobile applications,
Yes, yes you are.
> I’m not saying we should solve every UI and UX issue with a start menu
I find it hard to actually understand what the author is really saying, perhaps he/she is saying nothing at all. The irony about substance and honesty isn't lost on me.
Seeing as no other reason was expressed in the article, I am comfortable taking the hypocrisy as a sign that the they don't believe what they're writing. In my experience, this usually means they are trying to sell me something.
In short, Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) was a card house built on quicksand. Windows NT 3.x made good on the promise of stability at the cost of performance and resource consumption. Windows NT 4.x improved performance at the cost of stability by moving drivers - which in earlier versions ran in user space - back into kernel space. Windows 2000 was probably the most balanced version, XP coming in second (after removing the Fisher-Price interface that is...). Given that many of the long-standing problems with Windows still have to be fixed I don't see any utility in the later versions, Windows 7 included. For those looking for an operating system to do the 'usual stuff' - internet-related activities, document processing, some multimedia - one of the more polished Linux distributions - Ubuntu, Mint, etc - is a much better choice which will save the user many a frustrating moment. If you need to run Windows-only software wine might be an option, otherwise just run it in a VM using Windows 2000 or XP if possible.
Windows on the server has been a no-starter from the beginning, this is not even worth discussing. The only reason for using it is running something like Microsoft Exchange, the question here is whether this is worth the hassle of having a Windows-based server park.
I ran NT4 for a number of years, and it remains by far my favorite windows version. Maybe it wasn't stable enough to run a server (although I've heard otherwise, with uptimes measured in years), but I have no recollection of it crashing. It was essentially a modern OS that could happily run in 32 MB of RAM, which isn't even enough these days to launch a single windows program.
My favorite desktop OS overall is BeOS R5. It was just so much fun to use. Not actually very useful, with the lack of apps, but definitely fun.
You should check out Haiku, then. The same old BeOS R5 desktop you remember, with modern customizeability, a package manager, and tons of ported software. :)
You're failing to account for the fact that using Windows everywhere allows firms to leverage their codebases and developer expertise throughout their organization.
The sweet spot OS for me at the moment is Ubuntu MATE.
I use a Gtk2-derived desktop environment (Cinnamon/MATE/Xfce), which is heavily Windows 95-inspired in its UI, so I'd say I have the next best thing. Plus FLOSS.
Did they succeed, or did we (meaning the tech industry) just change the abstractions that are presented to the use to match what they thought a computer was?
Also, the article is crap.
Companies tend to resort to a release schedule that packages a bunch of necessary and useful refinements with more flash, changed UI, and added partially-broken features. That ends up making the products worse by removing functionality some users depend on, making the products slower or less efficient in some cases, and requiring users to re-learn interfaces.
Windows 98, for example, was a better version of the OS, in almost every aspect, but it was not as important as Win95.
We are about due for something to shake things up, but I'm not really sure what that is going to be. Maybe it's Chromebooks, or tablets, but it seems like they'd have taken off already. Maybe we are just waiting for someone to drop a revolutionary release and suddenly it will be obvious in hindsight. I'm excited to see what's coming next though.
Personally, I've ditched my personal laptop and moved to an LTE iPad full-time. Between native apps, web apps through Safari, and access to a remote server over MOSH I have everything I need in a mobile computing device. For "real work", I have a MBP that my employer provides... but honestly, I probably don't get enough utility from it to justify the cost. I could work at ~90% capacity from my iPad. If more people adopt my approach, in time we'll see things like full IDEs on iOS and Android that operate against a remote server.
I think Windows and macOS will continue to dominate the desktop environment for the foreseeable future and continue with evolutionary updates, but people will be using mobile phones, tablets, and eventually wearables to do more and more of what they used to do on a desktop OS. We're seeing a slow but thorough redefinition of what people see as a "computer".
I'm looking forward to the rise of AR. VR still feels like it's in its infancy to me; it's fun to play with and you can see the potential, but the real utility hasn't become apparent to the world and won't until several more iterations have happened. I believe the future will look more like Google Glass than Windows 95.