I was listening to the TWIT podcast the other day and they were talking about how Vista (consumer edition) is being delayed-again. They also mentioned how Vista is going to have almost nothing new as the new filesystem and many of the other big enhancements have been pulled.
My initial thought was to laugh, yet again, at M$'s incompetence. But then I got to thinking...M$ actually hasn't done *that* bad of a job when you really think about it. Look at all the failed attempts to build the next gen Mac OS through the 90s. We had Taligent and Pink and Copland and whatever else.
While most people look back on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 as a joke, these were widely used in corporate america, especially Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Then came NT for corps and Win95 for the home users. You almost have to look at the Win95-->Vista time frame as the same as the System 7.5--->Tiger timeframe in the Mac world.
So from Fall of 1994 to present Apple went from System 7.5 to Mac OS 8.0, to Mac OS 9/9.1 to Rhapsody, Jaguar, Panther and Tiger.
In the same time frame M$ went from MS-DOS/Win 3.1 to Win95, Win98/WinME, WinNT, Win2000 and Win XP.
Microsoft had a much larger installed base, drastically larger 3rd party support issues (both software compatibility and hardware drivers), and the internet boom to deal with while creating their new OS's. Probably bigger issues than Apple had to overcome. On the other hand, M$ had billions of dollars to throw at development. But, anyone who does software dev knows that more money/more bodies isn't always the answer.
If the roles were reversed and Apple held 80% market share in the late 90s do we think Apple would have or would be doing a better job than M$ of getting new, stable and back-wards compatible OSs out the door?
My initial thought was to laugh, yet again, at M$'s incompetence. But then I got to thinking...M$ actually hasn't done *that* bad of a job when you really think about it. Look at all the failed attempts to build the next gen Mac OS through the 90s. We had Taligent and Pink and Copland and whatever else.
While most people look back on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 as a joke, these were widely used in corporate america, especially Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Then came NT for corps and Win95 for the home users. You almost have to look at the Win95-->Vista time frame as the same as the System 7.5--->Tiger timeframe in the Mac world.
So from Fall of 1994 to present Apple went from System 7.5 to Mac OS 8.0, to Mac OS 9/9.1 to Rhapsody, Jaguar, Panther and Tiger.
In the same time frame M$ went from MS-DOS/Win 3.1 to Win95, Win98/WinME, WinNT, Win2000 and Win XP.
Microsoft had a much larger installed base, drastically larger 3rd party support issues (both software compatibility and hardware drivers), and the internet boom to deal with while creating their new OS's. Probably bigger issues than Apple had to overcome. On the other hand, M$ had billions of dollars to throw at development. But, anyone who does software dev knows that more money/more bodies isn't always the answer.
If the roles were reversed and Apple held 80% market share in the late 90s do we think Apple would have or would be doing a better job than M$ of getting new, stable and back-wards compatible OSs out the door?
