Re:"With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a..."
by SamAtt on Thursday October 08, 2009 @03:07PM
(#869695)
The 10 years line is kind of BS anyway. Yes XP has been around for 2 years but there have been 2 massive overhauls of security (2 services packs). Tons of Microsoft enhancements (Desktop Search for example) and even more tons of 3rd party apps that add functionality.
It's not necessarily an OSs job to innovate. The OS is supposed to make it easy to connect hardware to software and get the annoying hardware interaction stuff off the 3rd party programmers plate. So XP is fine because it's solid and allowed 3rd parties to innovate around it
Then again, if you aren't really into computers, and just use them, you might look at it as a tool like any other. My car is 10 years old, there are probably people at Ford who hate that I still have it, but I don't yet see a reason to change it.
Similarly, while I'm very aware of how the actions of one dominant company (Microsoft) have made the computing industry practically stand still, I am also mostly aware of this because I'm in that industry. There could be a Microsoft of vacuum cleaners, that has kept us away from truly great cleaning machines for the past 50 years, and I wouldn't know. People don't generally have the time, or take the time, to figure out which products could be truly great for them.