a coherent whole

[Mitch Stone <mstone@vc.net>]

--- From a message sent by Eric Lee Green on 12/19/99 10:03 AM ---

>It was a very good derivative of those ideas (I believe that the Mac's 
>slumping
>market share starting in 1995 is directly correlated to the fact that Windows
>95 was clearly superior to MacOS), but the only real innovation involved was
>Microsoft's ability to integrate all these disparate ideas into a coherent
>whole (at least from a user's point of view -- according to developers I've
>talked to, the actual internals are a bloody mess). 

I beg to differ with you on the descriptor "coherent whole" (Ask your 
average user to describe Windows in one word, and I don't suppose 
"coherent" would even make the top 100 list. But then, who asks users?). 
Nevertheless, Windows 9x does, as you say, succeed a sort of amalgam of 
borrowed characteristics from other systems. As far as technology is 
concerned, that's my primary beef with Microsoft -- that they've could 
have done so much more, had they the courage and the convictions.

I'd take this a bit further with the observation that Microsoft's 
integration of IE into Win 98 represents a pretty stark admission that 
they'd failed miserably in all of their previous efforts at creating a 
coherent user experience. Slapping a browser on the front-end of Windows 
was, from a user interface standpoint, a pretty desperate attempt to 
create coherence where little existed. And from my admittedly biased 
point of view, the Windows UI is still a pretty horrible muddle. For 
exhibits A...Z, I offer you the Windows Annoyances web site.

Your commentary on the Mac OS is also a bit off, IMO. Apple's market 
share did indeed decline precipitously during the mid-90s, but the 
reasons were more complex then you suggest. First, this was the period of 
Apple's great, failed licensing experiment. Apple ceded substantial 
market share to the competitors they'd created, but the evidence is far 
from clear that the Mac OS market share taken as a whole changed 
significantly during these years, thought it almost certainly failed to 
grow as Apple had hoped (significant growth was required for the 
licensing plan to succeed). During this period the press pretty 
consistently quoted Apple's declining hardware market share, omitting the 
units sales they'd given up to Motorola, PowerComputing, UMAX, et. al. So 
the tech media that had pretty uniformly badgered Apple into licensing 
the Mac OS also pretty uniformly ripped them when the going got rough.

Second, the consensus of opinion at the time (and this included many 
Microsoft supporters in the tech press) was not that Win 95 was "clearly 
superior" to the Mac OS, but that it was close enough in functionality 
and ease of use to persuade the mass market that it was. Big difference.

Mitch Stone
mstone@vc.net