Dear Dell and Microsoft: You're not Apple

Yes they were never that great, but

That's a little like saying "the only sense in which they were successful as a company was in having the biggest market share" - doesn't really damn them does it.

Erm Netscape

I think you need to go back and use some of the old alternatives to IE.

Netscape was a bloated clunky pile of junk. Only Opera provided a truly compelling alternative, but it was £30 or so to buy at that point and didn't work with all sites.

IE was fast and stable in comparison, it just had a lot of quirks when sticking to standards.

@AnotherNetNarcissist

Agreed. In the office you are a prisoner. You have a set routine and you are using their productivity suite day-in day-out. What do you do at home? You go one of two ways - you get something else because you don't want to pay and/or just want something else, or you get what's familiar to you which can now be had for cheap by piggy-backing your home license on your workplace one. It's not the greatest deal in the World but it's a pretty smart move.

It's a cycle so you're both right, depending on which bit you're looking at

"Windows success in the SOHO market is completely down to the fact it was what most people used at work". Very true. When you were far more likely to encounter a computer on a daily basis at work than at home, people's working experiences with MS stuff played a large part in influencing what they bought personally when having an (IBM-compatible) PC in the home started to become the norm. If using a PC was a requirement of your job, training would follow and those skills were carried back to the shiny new 286 or similar in the living room.

Since that point, a new generation have grown up with access to a Windows-powered machine and entered the workplace with those basic skills ready to use. Training budgets are now focused far more on specific tasks or applications and it isn't expected that a new hire is going to spend their first month trying to figure out how to use their computer instead of learning their job role. It's now reached the point where the scales have tipped entirely the other way and a lot of companies (who's IT involvement is purely out of necessity rather than their core business) are locked into MS primarily because that is all they can expect any new employees to be able to use.

The way out of the cycle is to re-train them to be as comfortable with an alternative (likely cheaper, more secure and arguably better) OS than Windows, which will ultimately change which OS the new generation of kids will be comfortable using. As that takes a significant investment of time and money in their employees, very few companies do.

I reckon Keith T's opening line should have read "Windows success in the home is the primary reason it is STILL a success at the office".

I'm just wondering....

WHICH US school corporations these people visited in the 90s. Every one I went to anywhere around the entire Midwest had a much larger number of Macs than they did DOS/WIN boxes.

Some still DO!!! XD

Although to be fair

Internet Explorer didn't exist when early Mosaic was kicking about. And yes, I remember it (when it wouldn't display pictures in the browser), and gopher too.

I do agree with you in principle though - Internet Explorer first appeared at version 2, and was rubbish. v3 was actually not bad compared to its peers (namely Netscape 2 and 3), and even though IE5.5 was an abomination for developing to, it was rather nice to use (again, compared to the bloated struggling mess that was Netscape 4).

Just because Microsoft declared the internet finished with IE6, and let everyone else actually do the job of making browsers conform to the standards, their browsers have *generally* been quite nice to use. That said, I can't remember when I last loaded IE on this machine - I'm using Firefox 4, and rather liking it.

re: Tried...

Scarily, I _am_ old enough to remember Mosaic and Gopher. Aughh.

Seriously, though... now that you mention it, I've often had a curious urge to dig out my old copy of Mosaic -- yeah, it's still buried in a pile of backed-up stuff on an old Zip cartridge someplace -- fire up my old G3 Mac running OS 8.x (still sitting around the studio, believe it or not), and see how many current sites it can load without imploding.

@Goat Jam

I think the problem is that we're now past the point where the bundling matters. It served it's purpose to the point that if you ship a machine to the general public (not the Reg readership) that has linux installed they will likely come back asking for windows. Not because it's better, not because they cannot do what they want to, but because it's bloody everywhere. This means that finding someone to demonstrate how to do things is easy, getting add-ons that work is easy (plug in, insert disk). Familiarity is there. Oh, and the apps for those that need them. The fact that for years you've had to run performance crippling AV software on Windows, or reinstall the OS every 18 months (XP), or constantly update the bastard really hasn't dented the desire for the OS. That should give an indication of what any other OS is up against. I have to use it at work and don't in general at home, but respect the stranglehold that it has.

Think Stockholm Syndrome for operating systems. People are using it by choice in a kind of fucked up way.