And, since Windows OS is so pitifully lousy, why do people continue to buy it, even without the computer attached; why do they continue to upgrade, even if it's so slow and bloated? Don't they realize Unix is better? Don't they realize they're just making Billg richer?
I use Linux primarily. People still buy Winblows for the same reasons I bought Winblows 95. Want to play a game from the store? Windows 95. Want to install a new image in your Flash RAM on your motherboard? DOS (Windows 95). Want to have vendor-produced drivers? Windows 95. Want to parse MS Turd documents? Windows 95 and MS Office. Want to use a Windows-specific bullshit class registration system at your university? Windows 95. Want to run that program your mother sends you and wants you to run? She uses Windows 95 because it was preinstalled on her machine, so you must use Windows 95 too. Some kind of bizarre hardware which the manufactuers won't release specs for? (The AWE32 is a good example. Eventually somebody got pissed and reverse engineered it.) Windows 95. Happened to buy a printer? It won't say "Yes! It works with Ghostscript!" In fact it won't say anything about hardware compatability. It'll just say "Windows drivers included" along with a list of a bunch of software that I don't want and don't need. So if it happens that the printer is nonstandard...Windows 95. Have a bunch of people in the office who don't care about platform compatability and pass around Windows-specific document types or programs? Windows 95. Have a bunch of people in the office who, simply because Windows and sometimes MacOS are taught as "computer education" in many universities and public schools can't use anything else? Windows 95. Have to use a university computer lab? The machines are probably running Windows 95. So you wind up with an incentive to use Windows 95 elsewhere. So...again, Windows 95. Want to have a working copy of PGP 5.0 while everybody else has started sending out DH-encrypted/signed messages and rolled DH keys? Windows 95. (Yeah, yeah. The source was released in book form.) This goes on and on and on. Sure there are counter arguments for these but it gets real touchy real quick. Ever try to pressure a game company into releasing Linux versions? Ever try to pressure an applications company to release Linux versions? Explanation and analysis: Microsoft spends millions on marketting. Linux, BSD, et al. simply don't have a massive marketting machine. The PC rags and TV shows like CNet are supported by Windows applications, Windows games, Microsoft, and platform-specific web sites. Microsoft has no qualms about outright lying in its marketting material. Look at the messages which display during Windows 95 installation for a good example. "What you want to do, and more, is now possible." Yeah. What if I want to have a decent telnet client? What if I want to have tons of free software? They don't qualify the statement, yet the Microsoft lackies think that Microsoft would never lie and it must be true. The Windows interface is "point and drool." This has the effect of attracting every lazy person possible. I say "lazy" because it's basically no work to remember "rm" rather than "left click and drag to the recycle bin." These people don't know how *anything* works on even the most basic level. The Linux/BSD/whatever developers aren't going to make an interface like that because they're competent, aren't trying to make money, don't want to cripple their platform with it, and they don't necessarily want to attract these people. Generally speaking, as "da web" has proven, if it takes no brains to use something people with no brain will be attracted to it in great numbers. Microsoft, their friends, and some of their enemies did everything they possibly could to break the web. HTML was designed as a relatively simple, platform independant method of storing information. The idea was that you could go throw in an image, but it was supposed to *augment* the message, not *be* the message. And regardless of what you did the page was supposed to be viewable from a text terminal. Netscape started by adding non-standard extensions to HTML, in effect encouraging people to make Netscape-specific web pages. Netscape Gold and other "web page designers" encourage people to release platform-specific web pages -- they *should* throw an error if somebody puts in an unnamed link. Then of course we had stuff like server-side image maps. And we have pages with frames which are impossible to correctly display in a text mode, and which bitch and moan and suggest you download Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator/Communicator to read it. And I've seen pages which are nothing but graphics files -- but hey, they're okay because they display correctly in MSIE or Netscape. Microsoft continues its little jihad by perverting Java, which is supposed to be another platform-independant language, into a Windows-specific language. While they were at it both Microsoft and Netscape decided to start slinging HTML and nonstandard MIME types all over email and news postings. When you buy a prebuilt computer in most cases you don't have a choice. You have to get Windows 95, MSIE, and whatever other crap they decide to pile on. Normally this wouldn't be a problem and you would just go to another vendor but just about every single vendor is like this. When you buy hardware you pay for all sorts of Windows software. So now you have all kinds of (bad) Windows software, so there's another reason to use Windows. Microsoft knows this. For example, when you buy a scanner you get Windows software for it, absolutely no design specs, no compatability list, and in many cases they flat-out *won't* release design specs. When you call for technical support many (most?) places tell you to do something like this: "Okay. Go click on the 'My Computer' icon--" "Uh, I run Linux." "Uh, we don't support that." (Hint: It was a *hardware* problem, *not* a software problem, but go boot up into Windows just so we know it was broken. Oh, and you better have the latest version because that's all we support.) Many vendors only release drivers for whatever the latest and greatest version of Winblows is going to be. Windows 3.1 drivers are starting to get scarce. DOS drivers are basically nonexistant. Say, for instance, you purchase or receive Windows NT Workstation 4.0. You then go out and buy an AWE64. Creative Labs has stated that they aren't releasing a decent AWE64 driver for NT 4.0, but instead are targetting it at NT 5.0. Compare this with the UNIX world where, for the most part, things are platform independant and people like platform compatability. Most of the time I can run something on Linux which I can run on BSD which I can run on SunOS, etc.