Windows 7. Has anyone else started to plan for the upgrade?

[Greg Peterson]

Back when I was teaching networking and all (in a Microsoft school), I used to have students ask me why Windows was so dominant, and I could never answer them. I'm more puzzled by that now than ever.

MS had Excel and then penetrated Novell's market. Novell was a better network OS, but MS had the graphical interface. I'm sure there are other factors that influenced MS' size in the early years. But having Windows 3.11 on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of PC's, introduced the concept of networking to a much larger market than Novell.

[paul cottingham]

I understand the mechanics of it, but not the logic....:-)

[Greg Peterson]

I agree, it doesn't make sense. But MS offered a nice, shiny product and the masses assumed since it looked cool it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

People are easily sold something that is against their best interests because Oh look, something shiny............................................. ....

[paul cottingham]

You know I knew a company that had a Novell 3.12 server that had been running for 7 years and had never been rebooted. We had a web server running FreeBSD that was up for 5 years, no reboots, never hacked.

and yet Microsoft dominates,,,,

[Greg Peterson]

I think MS got in through the back door. They got an army of developers to code programs for Windows.

[Scott Shepherd]

For those "Apple Bashers" that think people that use Mac's do it because they are status symbols, here's a comparison chart between the 2 companies over 10 years. Which one would you rather have invested in?

With performance like that over a 10 year period, it's clearly more to it than "people think they are status symbols" or "real companies don't use Mac's", etc.

Apparently somebody, somewhere, in much bigger numbers than some of you think are using them. If not, then the chart wouldn't look like this. Apple's stock in the last 5 years, on fire, Microsoft's, not so much.

See attached chart.

p.s. I don't own a Mac, so you can't group me in with them!

[Anthony Scira]

"You know I knew a company that had a Novell 3.12 server that had been running for 7 years and had never been rebooted. We had a web server running FreeBSD that was up for 5 years, no reboots, never hacked.

and yet Microsoft dominates,,,, "

Yeah ummmmmmm thats a fair comparison. There is a HUGE diffrence between a dedicated server and a home PC. You do not have people surfing the net on it, installing flash games and all kinds of other stuff. Lets see how well your Novell server and FreeBSD connects to my camcorder and edits my AVCHD video and then formats it to upload to a website.

[paul cottingham]

"You know I knew a company that had a Novell 3.12 server that had been running for 7 years and had never been rebooted. We had a web server running FreeBSD that was up for 5 years, no reboots, never hacked.

and yet Microsoft dominates,,,, "

Yeah ummmmmmm thats a fair comparison. There is a HUGE diffrence between a dedicated server and a home PC. You do not have people surfing the net on it, installing flash games and all kinds of other stuff. Lets see how well your Novell server and FreeBSD connects to my camcorder and edits my AVCHD video and then formats it to upload to a website.

It would do just fine. I know from experience, cause I do it every day on my home machine.

[Anthony Scira]

It would do just fine. I know from experience, cause I do it every day on my home machine.

Linux is fine for more tech oriented people. And I have even installed a copy of Ubuntu for my parents that surf the internet on an older machine.

Yeah to get drivers to make their printer work was a PITA. It works but still lost the functionality of the scanner.

I'll pop an old 250GB drive in and test drive FreeBSD and see how well it edits the AVCHD video. Any reccomendations on programs or will there be an editor already installed ?

[Greg Peterson]

I read an article today that MS for the first time ever, sat down with computer makers (Dell, Acer, Sony, Toshiba, HP...) and asked for their input.

A lot of the security issues with Windows is the result of users using the administrator account for their main logon. Then they start loading every which widget, program, add on and plug in from who knows where.

MS is finally getting the message that we want a light, fast, stable OS. They have asked the computer makers to stop pre-loading their machines with all the crap trial programs one typically finds on a new machine. I know, MS is guilty of this too as my machine came with trial versions of Office and Quicken.

Take the IPod and IPhone out of the Apple line up and they've not much to hang their hat on.

And are we so far removed from the stock bubble that we have forgotten how inaccurate share prices are as a measure of a companies dominance in their market?

Apple stock may or may not be higher than MS stock at this moment, too lazy to check. But which company has a bigger foot print/install base.

[paul cottingham]

I'm sorry, I meant Ubuntu. I am no masochist, and would never run xserver on freebsd.

[Scott Shepherd]

Take the IPod and IPhone out of the Apple line up and they've not much to hang their hat on.

And are we so far removed from the stock bubble that we have forgotten how inaccurate share prices are as a measure of a companies dominance in their market?

Apple stock may or may not be higher than MS stock at this moment, too lazy to check. But which company has a bigger foot print/install base.

Another factless statement about the core of their business. Read their earnings reports. The iphone came out about a year ago, they have been on fire for about 5 years. So that argument can get squashed.

They are selling 12,000,000 computers a year. I'm not sure what industry you are in, but selling 12,000,000 of just about anything is hardly a feat to dismiss as a "fad".

[Anthony Scira]

Another factless statement about the core of their business. Read their earnings reports. The iphone came out about a year ago, they have been on fire for about 5 years. So that argument can get squashed.

They are selling 12,000,000 computers a year. I'm not sure what industry you are in, but selling 12,000,000 of just about anything is hardly a feat to dismiss as a "fad".

Yeah and HP alone sold 14,000,000 laptops. Acer adds another 11,000,000 laptops. This is not including all the other manufacturers and their previous mentioned desktop lines.

And the iphone was released 2007, and iPods way back in 2001. So yeah the 5 years times about right for the iPod and iPhone sales to make the stock zoom.

[Kelly C. Hanna]

Another factless statement about the core of their business. Read their earnings reports. The iphone came out about a year ago, they have been on fire for about 5 years. So that argument can get squashed.

They are selling 12,000,000 computers a year. I'm not sure what industry you are in, but selling 12,000,000 of just about anything is hardly a feat to dismiss as a "fad".

True....Apple has been doing very well since the imac came out....can't wait to have one personally. Except for XP I am MS free right now.

While XP is the most stable MS product I have ever seen [and I've used them all since Win 3.1 came out], I grow sick to death of all the viruses that get written and all the scanners we have to have to prevent them from melting our hard drive. With Apple's OS this is not an issue.

Since I am going to be converting over to digital drafting versus the pencil soon, the Apple computer makes more sense. The graphics capabilities are vastly superior to windows.

[Eric DeSilva]

They are selling 12,000,000 computers a year. I'm not sure what industry you are in, but selling 12,000,000 of just about anything is hardly a feat to dismiss as a "fad".

It strikes me as odd to compare stock performance of a company that gets the majority of its revenues from hardware sales against a company that just markets operating systems.

If you want to look solely at the OS side, MS has, as of about July 2009, about 86% of the client OS market. On the server side, Apple barely registers at all.

Yes, Apple may have better customer satisfaction rankings. If MS was a monopoly hardware provider, it might have better customer satisfaction rankings too. But, there are obvious costs to the consumer associated with having a sole source hardware supplier.