A look back on Windows XP: Success, simplicity and stupidity

English Soapbox
1

So consider this to be a bit of self indulgence as I give my own eulogy at windows XP’s funeral.
Windows XP was my first full time operating system, and as it ends its support cycle its time for me to do some fun looking back on one of the computing worlds biggest successes and how it all went so terribly wrong.

Now how can one of the biggest successes in the computing world be in itself a failure?
Well lets take a look at what Windows XP offered.
Firstly XP was the first OS to become popular overall to the masses , sure Microsoft had successes with 95 and 98 but XP was the first true mainstream system that brought many to the wonders of the home computer.
This is no small feat, Microsoft’s PR engine was on all four cylinders with XP by creating a system that was super user friendly with a no frills approach to computing.
Simplicity is a nice goal to have when making an OS, there are very good reasons why XP, OSX, Ubuntu, iOS and android has caught on with most of the computing world.
All offer simplicity for better or for worse depending on your perspective.
Lets take the better reasons why something like XP caught on:
Firstly the OS is extremely accessible from the total newcomer to the most pro computer user, the average Joe user like myself has benefited from the skills I have learned from XP.
Indeed XP taught me a lot about how an OS worked and functioned, how everything connected and how it all came to work.
I actually owe a lot to XP, it is the OS that got me really into learning about computers and how they worked.
Without it I would not be wanting to get a diploma for computing or even built the desktop I am posting this all from.
But even so the holes in the armor of XP and the other Microsoft operating systems can be seen from outer space.
How Microsoft integrated the whole kernel and the components of the OS into one big ball of insecurities, where if one pin was taken out the whole ship would sink.
Its like the Titanic of operating systems, Microsoft claimed it was unsinkable and the boat kept on taking on water.
Security holes were abound with XP, its “easy for everyone” approach was letting hackers become kids in a candy store.
And tying Internet explorer to the core of the OS was no help, one of the most dumb things Microsoft has ever done and XP suffered greatly for it.
But most learned to adapt to XP’s shortcomings and soon Microsoft became complacent and frankly rather arrogant.
Overconfident they blundered into windows Vista without any consideration to users of XP nor the computing world in general.
Vista is the main reason why XP’s lifespan was extended, it was a miserable release for many so Microsoft had to create windows 7 to bring back its consumer ratio.
And now they made the same blunder once again with 8.
Microsoft is a company full of blundering in when new challenges arise, first with apple now with android.
This is something that Microsoft is good at, being rich but very little brain matter when it comes to actually producing a good OS half the time.
And XP is the source of the blame for this mentality, so cocky was Microsoft that blundering stupidity was abound.
As the new computing age began Microsoft just seems to slip and makes you wonder how in the hell did it get so big sometimes.
Even from a pro Microsoft standpoint the blunders can be seen without the need of a telescope five million miles long.
Nevertheless XP was a semi decent OS once you plugged all its holes and built a bomb shelter around it.
C’est la vie Windows XP, and bon voyage.

2

Hi
But you can still buy support for XP, just like you can buy long term support for SLE, lots of corporations and educational institutions will continue to use XP.

3

yeah but most are opting out of it, probably for the best though.
Plus this is more for mainstream support then servers and whatnot.

4

95% of the World’s ATMs run on XP but a third of those were expected to
convert to Windows 7 by April 8th, when MS stop issuing bug-fixes.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-03/six-things-you-need-to-know-about-atms-and-the-windows-xp-ocalypse.html
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247072/Most_ATMs_will_remain_on_Windows_XP_after_Microsoft_pulls_plug_on_OS_support_

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2-m0 (64-bit); KDE 4.12.97; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 3.14.0-rc7; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

5

Unfortunately, Ubuntu will never be the next “XP.” I know its the fantasy on the Ubuntu Users Group on Linkedin, but it ranks somewhat lower than a 5 year old who believes in Santa in terms of reality.

6

I don’t share your nostalgia for XP. My first full-time operating system was DOS, and because of that ancient experience my eventual transition to Linux many years later was fairly easy: I was not afraid of the command line or editing plain text configuration files. That is not true of the “average Joe user” who only knows a graphical environment (and in my experience, hasn’t learned anything about computers and doesn’t want to).

As for the growth of home computers, I remember them being pretty common in middle and upper class homes well before XP. IMO, it was the graphical web that spurred that revolution, not XP. (Yeah, I’m also old enough to remember when the internet had to be navigated at the command line.)

If I were going to wax nostalgic about a Windows version, it would be Windows 2000. It had everything I want in an OS: stable, secure, and didn’t actively do things to annoy me. I knew from having to use XP at work that XP failed miserably on that last criterion, and that’s why I kept Windows 2000 on my home computer as long as I could, and upgraded to Linux when new hardware stopped including drivers for it. Windows 2000, RIP; Windows XP, good riddance.

7

Bravo, well put!

8

I can not fully agree with you on some points.

[quote="“dimesio,post:6,topic:99445”]
I don’t share your nostalgia for XP. My first full-time operating system was DOS, and because of that ancient experience my eventual transition to Linux many years later was fairly easy: I was not afraid of the command line or editing plain text configuration files. That is not true of the “average Joe user” who only knows a graphical environment (and in my experience, hasn’t learned anything about computers and doesn’t want to).
\quote] I don’t understand your point heres why :
A. for the most part the OS is irrelevant, it’s what you need to do with the computer that is important, thus what’s important is the tools you need and tools that available for OS of your choice. my first OS was DOS as well so what? what could you do on simple bare install of DOS system except for plain text files editing. Nothing!
it’s the tools and utilities that made you productive. saying that you are not afraid of command line and editing text files is,with all due respect, kind of lame. I am not afraid of command line and text files editing either. I hate it. I hate it with all my bones and and all.
but I am not afraid to do it if needs arise. and what you say about “average Joe” is lame as well. we all have different needs and wants and we all have different abilities.
you might be good with CLI and text files, but an “average Joe number 1” may be the best dentist in a greater NY area. so should he smirk talking about you saying “ohh this guy like CLI and text files. let see him doing a root-canal or even plain teeth cleaning procedure”.

Computer first and foremost an appliance. and as any appliance it is expected to be user friendly to all it’s users, not the selected few. not everyone wants, or even can, to be a computer genius. most people just want to use a device for what ever purpose it was designed for , in case of the PC it is a multipurpose device, without need for an MBA in science and programming, and memorizing 100+ commands to do it.

do you want to learn how to build your own house, car, microwave?
how to melt metals to make your knifes and stuff?

[QUOTE=dimesio,post:6,topic:99445"]

As for the growth of home computers, I remember them being pretty common in middle and upper class homes well before XP. IMO, it was the graphical web that spurred that revolution, not XP. (Yeah, I’m also old enough to remember when the internet had to be navigated at the command line.) \quote]
you are right XP did not trigger the growth of home computers.
what did IMO is proliferation of Internet access and all the interconnect stuff along with it. Email, public chat access expansion, all the information and other stuff available on the net and the ease of access to it.
the falling prices of the computer hardware and accessories did not hurt either.

again I can agree that win2000 was very good OS, but you are forgetting that it was build on a Server Kernel.
it was not a Desktop OS. it was a Server OS adapted to PC use. good for techies and a like, not so good for everyone else. it was not very user friendly when it came to installation and configuration. very bad hardware support for SOHO hardware, specially Video card support. !?Games?! forget about it, see my previous point about Video support.
that is why XP came out and that is why it hold the market for so long.
it was the best of both world 95% at a time.
it was more stable than win95/98 yet still supported a lot of SOHO hardware since it could use drivers for win98 to run the hardware. it provided similar familiar GUI, it was more secure than win98. not as good as 2000 but still better than 98.
and it allow most user the ease of install and configuration that were missing from 2000.
if you had a good internet access you could practically install and setup any system with any hardware by just doing the initial setup, configuring the internet and run update. almost 99.9% of the time it would go out and find any needed drives on its own.
I had setup a lot of PC just like that. unless you had some special card or something too old to be supported it worked.
so why such hate for the OS that served faithfully most of the market for 13 years?
and even now many users do not want to give it up.

we all have our preferences and are allowed our POV but still…

9

I kind of disagree there, Ubuntu in its own way is the XP of linux right now so the connection isnt as fantastical as it sounds.

So you are saying the Joe user is stupid then, a bunch of slack jawed idiots who dont know about computers while you who knows command line is obviously superior to them.
Well you know what I have to say to that?

Not some very nice things and you should be ashamed of yourself for such an arrogant attitude, really if I could swear on this forum you will be getting a lot of nasty foul words on my end for being a blankety blank blank!

Jump into a body of water and wash your arrogance down the drain, meh!

10

I would say that Ubuntu is more like win8 right now as many people dislike like Unity just like many people dislike Win 8 metro.

if anything Linux Mint is like XP right now but that can be debated as well :slight_smile:

11

I bet the desktop market share of any GNU/Linux in the USA is under 1% nationwide. How could any Linux ever be compared to the historical value of XP, which at its peak must have had close to 90% market share or even higher?

Linux is for intelligent computer enthusiasts; it was never meant to be a serious desktop contender because there is no professional support structure for GNU/Linux on a desktop. If people have trouble with Windows on their Thinkpad, they call Lenovo, always open 24x7. If they have trouble with OS/X on their Apple, they have similar options.

If one has trouble with OpenSUSE, they come here? That simply is not an option for 90+% of desktop computer users.

12

sorry can not agree with you on this one.
first of all besides USA there is a plethora of other countries where Linux is used all the time. also if you could buy a PC with Linux installed today you would also expect support from the company just like you do with windows so that is a moot point.

BUT the real reason why Linux is not serious desktop contender is because of all diversity and fragmentation in the Linux world.

look around, main division is based on the base install package type deb vs rpm add the tar.gz to the mix and it’s an alphabet soup.

then you have all the different package managers in each distro. you use all of them differently with different syntax, different parameters and keywords.
you switch distro to another type you need to learn different command.
even with GUI there is a multitude of managers that look and work differently.

and all of this is done for the user not by the user.
in windows the fragmentation is done by the users not for them.
i.e. you may come across several different windows system simply because some people like win2000, some like XP , some like win7 some like win8. but at the core it is still the same eco system with certain rules and way of doing things preset and look/feel/work the same way or very similar way.
so if I sit in front win2000 and asked to install a program I know that I need to find the program (usually given where it is) and double click on the file than follow the prompts.
I can also go to Control Panel (exist and available on all windows system as far as win95 and maybe even win 3.x) and select install program and navigate to the install file.
and both of this approach will work on ALL windows installations.

on Linux I need to know what the distro I am using and know what app manager is in use there.
what type of files it is using for distribution. and if you found tar.gz you might need to use CLI and than you have to know the syntax for that.

and I can go on and on.
this is why it is not a contender.

I keep hearing the argument by many Linux users, that Linux makes you learn and explore new things , it makes you learn how to use your computer fully , it makes you think and all that.
problem is this people do not understand that unlike some one like them, many people do not want to learn anything beyond the bare minimum needed to achieve their goal. and they shouldn’t be expected to. years ago, when computer was still a mysterious magical device, it was a necessity to learn how to operate one, now it should not be.

13
  • I don’t have experience with a company like System76, so I have no idea how good their 24x7 support is for Ubuntu, but I would be willing to bet that if you dumped Ubuntu on it and put openSUSE, they would tell you to check forum sites, then click, good bye…
14

I know many mathematicians, physicists, programmers, biologists, other technical people here in the Princeton area - none use Linux, except one guy and he uses Arch, and he never pays for it and does his own support. I would say he is a Linux poster child.
Everyone else uses Windows, they are “users” only. I know Linux is used more in India, China, but that is an economic decision - they don’t want to pay for it, hence the plethora of $149 tablets running Android, not Linux. Oh I know it is Linux based, but it does nothng to further Linux on the desktop.

15

I started using both Windows (Windows 98) and Linux at the same time and Linux won hands down (http://johnrhudson.me.uk/computing/KDE_2000.odp). However, XP was such an improvement on 98 that I think it entranced everyone who had suffered from 95 or 98 and it was then difficult for Linux to get as much traction as it would have done if XP had only been a minor improvement on 98.

In the end, as Steve Ballmer has virtually admitted, the success of XP contributed to the decline in Microsoft’s overall market share because they took their eye off the market which they thought they had wrapped up and didn’t see the rise of the smartphone before it was too late.

16

My five cents here.

I agree with the general sense of the post, but I would rephrase the title. The basis for the success of Windows XP was not so much stupidity as sheer laziness. XP has been a “good enough” OS and it still is. As an OS in itself it was obsolete since its inception, but the end user cares bugger all about that, pardon my French. It has nonetheless the most extensive catalogue of applications and drivers. Not just extensive, but most if not all industrial standards have a version that runs on XP. So much so that many machines can’t be upgraded because there is no support for the programs they run on anything other than XP.

Apart from that, the Vista debacle (a half-decent idea very poorly implemented that literally destroyed my old laptop) and the netbook fad contributed to keep it alive. As a Linux user I am appalled by the dirty trick used by Microsoft to compete with Linux on netbooks: lower the price of the licenses and force the manufacturers to ship with XP preinstalled. But the long-term reasoning is quite good. Netbooks were most likely (at least in my home country) to be bought by the most budget-conscious and the computer illiterate who wanted something light and portable. Which means a big chunk of them would have a netbook as their first computer. It is an established fact that the first environment you’re educated in shapes your understanding of what a computer should feel like. Letting those fresh customers have a clean look at Linux and realise that it’s not some obscure command-line hell for geeks, or at least not any more than Windows can be, would be catastrophic for long-term business prospects.

In my personal experience it’s not those who know a lot about IT who are more reluctant to try FOSS, nor the computer illiterate (if you don’t know what an OS is, just that you need a computer to read your mail, browse teh intartoobz and maybe compose some documents, Linux GUI distros are as good if not better than Windows, since most of them include software for that so you don’t have to install from other sources). No, the worst kind of person to convince to try something new with a deprejudiced look is the semi-literate user. That who knows something, and uses IT every day, maybe is an expert in some particular app, but does not know about computer science quite as much as he thinks he does. In other words, someone like me. If I had a cent for every time that en expert in Photoshop editing or Patran structural analysis has uttered some stupid comment about Linux, free and open source software or computing in general, I’d be rich by now.

And that is precisely the target that XP has nurtured for so long. Now it’s time for Microsoft to focus on their upcoming challenges. We have seen with Android that the Linux kernel is not just for servers and specialised services, but suitable for the average Joe Schmoe and on any common platform. It has taken the lead on a new market, so it might be the turn to compete on the saturated market for PCs. and for that we need (ahem) corporate support. If industry-standard applications are ported to Linux, the huge advantage of Windows on the corporate sector vanishes. And about gaming, Steam might break the one and only advantage of Microsoft on the home market. With the demise of XP there is a window of opportunity (pun unintended, I swear) for Linux on PCs. If we can relegate Mac to the third place, things will get very interesting.

Thanks for your attention.

17

I agree completely, but that’s not what you originally said. What you said was that XP taught people about computers. No, it didn’t. GUI systems allow people to use computers without having to learn anything about them. That’s wonderful, but being able to point and click does not mean someone knows computers. And as you yourself noted, XP was far from the first GUI OS.

the falling prices of the computer hardware and accessories did not hurt either.

I definitely agree with that.

again I can agree that win2000 was very good OS, but you are forgetting that it was build on a Server Kernel.
it was not a Desktop OS. it was a Server OS adapted to PC use. good for techies and a like, not so good for everyone else. it was not very user friendly when it came to installation and configuration. very bad hardware support for SOHO hardware, specially Video card support. !?Games?! forget about it, see my previous point about Video support.

I’m not a techie; I’m an English teacher. I did not find installing Windows 2000 difficult: hardware drivers came from the vendors, just like they did in every other version of Windows I’ve ever worked with (don’t know anything about Windows 8). I never had any problem playing the games I had back then (things like Myst, Riven, SimCity Deluxe; I’m not a hardcore gamer).

that is why XP came out and that is why it hold the market for so long.

Well, I think XP came out for the same reason every other version of Windows came out: Microsoft needs to force people to upgrade every few years so they can continue to make money. As to why it held the market for so long, IMO, it’s not because XP was so good, it’s because Vista was so bad. Windows 7 was better, but it also broke compatibility with some older applications. Many of the businesses holding onto XP are doing so because they have specialized, in-house applications that they absolutely need that won’t run on newer versions of Windows.

18

I said no such thing. I was responding to the contention that XP was responsible for teaching people about computers. I disagree with that, on the basis that those of us who started under DOS were forced to learn something about computers whether we wanted to or not, whereas users of preinstalled GUI systems aren’t, and in my experience most of them don’t want to. That’s certainly their choice. Nowhere did I call anyone stupid or say that made me superior, and if you’re reading that into my post, that’s your problem.

19

On Tue, 08 Apr 2014 16:26:01 +0000, dimesio wrote:

> MadmanRB;2635615 Wrote:
>>
>> So you are saying the Joe user is stupid then, a bunch of slack jawed
>> idiots who dont know about computers while you who knows command line
>> is obviously superior to them.
>>
> I said no such thing. I was responding to the contention that XP was
> responsible for teaching people about computers. I disagree with that,
> on the basis that those of us who started under DOS were forced to learn
> something about computers whether we wanted to or not, whereas users of
> preinstalled GUI systems aren’t, and in my experience most of them don’t
> want to. That’s certainly their choice. Nowhere did I call anyone stupid
> or say that made me superior, and if you’re reading that into my post,
> that’s your problem.

Guys, while this is the soapbox, let’s keep it friendly and avoid
engaging in any personal attacks.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

20

I think that fragmentation in linux is overrated. Why? Because if you need professional support, you can get it, provided you buy SLE or RH. And you get them much cheaper then Windows in any way. Otherwise, you can get a free system, and help from the forums.
Now, my argument is invalid, if desktop users in the US actually use and call support (and pay for support, ofcourse). Where i come from, you don’t know how to format a computer? A friend does it for you. The whole concept of support lines is non-existent. So basically, if we manage to gospel some friends to the secrets of linux :smiley: , we also offer them assistance, as we did any way while they were using windows.