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The world's most widely used software.
Microsoft's Windows started in the mid-1980s as an unpromising
competitor to Apple's Macintosh operating system. Designed
principally as a glamorous front-end for Microsoft's lucrative MS-DOS,
Windows failed to catch on until its third iteration appeared in 1990. A
major cosmetic overhaul and some internal wizardry, which made it easier to
install and configure, helped boost its popularity, but the real selling
point was the huge amount of third-party software that Microsoft had
persuaded people to write. The industry quickly adopted Windows 3.0 and its
successor 3.1 as the new standard on which software was constructed, killing
off ibm's competing os / 2 and severely damaging MacOS
in the process.
With no serious competition, Windows has grown ever
stronger. Later versions. Windows 95 and Windows 98, proved to be easier and
safer to use than their predecessors (although still fundamentally flawed,
according to many critics). Nearly all commercial software is now written
for the Windows platform. The biggest strides forward have been made
in internet connectivity, which has been included in various forms since
1995. In particular, the addition of the internet explorer browser to
the standard Windows package has dramatically altered the internet
landscape. With this unmatchable distribution mechanism, Microsoft has
wrested the lion's share of the browser market from netscape. Such
dominance of the browser market and Windows' power to exclude competitors
from the marketplace led to the high-profile antitrust case brought by the
US government against the company in 1999, followed by dozens of civil suits
from competitors and American states.
Windows itself is still mutating rapidly and is gradually spreading
to every device capable of hosting an operating system, whether it needs one
or not. Windows xp, the latest version for desktop and laptop
computers, includes many advanced features for internet users and built-in
support for everything from blutooth devices to digital cameras.
Various other flavours exist for the server market, and these are
slowly replacing Windows nt and Windows 2000 as the operating systems
of choice for heavy weight commercial applications and web servers. A
cut-down version, Windows ce, is widely used in pdas, and new
versions are planned for set-top boxes, smart cards and eventually even
fridges and cookers, thus fulfilling Bill Gates's "Windows Everywhere"
promise from the early 1990s. |
