Security a work in progress for Microsoft

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You're not being accurate or fair

I agree that the version 3 thing is a bit overblown but the rest of your points are off-base. I'll address a couple of them. First, IE. The first version or two of IE did suck. I used them. But IE 3 WAS the best mainstream browser at the time. It wasn't even close. Netscape had poorer standards support, was slower and if you actually used it you'd know that it was poorly designed in terms of UI/ease of use. I'm not saying that IE hasn't had problems since then. I'm not particularly thrilled with the IE6 but IE was and is a solid browser.

Regarding NT...Windows NT 4.0 was in many respects the best server operating system of that time. Think about it. Microsoft was NOWHERE in the server OS business at the time. Old style Unix and NetWare dominated the market. Microsoft had zero leverage to "make" businesses buy NT 4.0. The fact that was adopted so widely is a credit to its quality. The fact is it worked great and still works great for many many businesses. Even today there are millions of NT 4 boxes out there.

The easiest example you used to refute is Windows 95. Windows 95 was without a doubt a big breakthrough. The MacOS at the time just sucked. It was buggy, there was little good software and the hardware wax expensive. Microsoft - long before the monopoly - made an OS that was easy for users to use, worked on literally millions of conbinations of hardware at reasonable prices, supported a huge range of software including old DOS apps and the best games. It provided a platform that lots of great software companies including Netscape used to build innovative apps. 10 years later Windows 95 looks rather lame but it was a very very good product.

The question is whether or not Microsoft can repeate themselves.

Posted by: marksashton   Posted on: 01/15/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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