CompuServe Thread

It is Mico$ofts short-term plan to move everyone to NT @ work, and '95 at home. You're right, most people really don't _have_ to upgrade to '95 from 3.1x, but they will eventually. Everybody will move away from DOS. Realize that NT is not your run of the mill OS. This is UNIX in sheeps clothing. And hell yes it's going to be picky about the hardware because unlike every operating system for the PC, NT talks directly to the hardware. An NT driver is only there to tell NT "how" to talk to the hardware. Also, In order to maintain it's C2 level security, NT wants to know exactly what's in the machine. '95 is for your home office, or you family computer. Sure, it's 32bit. But the API in '95 has much more functions than the other systems. The real heart of the matter is OLE. NT and '95 are MUCH better with OLE than 3.1x. OLE is future. Even for MAX.

<<On Win95 being a small step on the way to WinNT: If that's the plan, then why doesn't Microsoft SAY SO?>> Its written in the wind <g> <<Furthermore, won't any system that supports Win95 ALREADY support WindowsNT??>> Exactly, that is the plan, you see as more and more Win95 32-bit applications are being developed they can be used automatically on WinNT. Microsoft is slowly bridging the gap between the two operating systems. But the step is a hardware one. If everyone had Pentium 90s with 16M then everyone could use a more powerful operating system, i.e. WinNT, but unfortunately not everyone does so Microsoft developed Win95 which is an improvement on Win3.1 but still not yet WinNT, but one day they will integrate into one product. Until everyone has the hardware to support WinNT many people will still NEED Win95 since WinNT just can't run on their system. <<but why not just make WinNT 'friendlier' rather than introducing yet another variant that will make half the buyers happy and the other half mad as heck?>> The "friendly" difference is just the interface, which WinNT will be adopting the Win95 interface in a few months, so visually and interactively there will be no difference. The other problem is once again a legacy issue. Microsoft can't just tell everyone "Well we want everyone to buy new computers and throw away their old ones for our new operating system." The world, especially the business world, simply can't afford to make the jumpt from Win3.1 compatible machines to WinNT machines since the cost is too prohibiting. Instead Win95 gives an interim step that allows some improvements in speed, ala 32-bit applications, while at the same time allowing you to easily run these new applications on faster machine equiped with WinNT. <<Worse, why introduce another variant that's incompatible with NT?>> But Win95 applications are compatible with WinNT. So you can make use of the Win95 applications right now on WinNT. This is the key to making the switch. You play around with your applications on Win95 then when you decide to upgrade to WinNT your existing applications still work. YOU decide when you want to make the transition since your applications run on both systems. <<Did this gentleman have any pressing need to spend $90 on an OS upgrade? Nope. Do you think a tenth of the users out there really needed the aggravation of moving to a new OS? Not likely. How many casual users REALLY needed honest multitasking?>> Then why give them WinNT? It does all that an more. Does this guy need C2 security and networking? Probably not, so he is going to choose Win95 since it gives him everything he has now and some more. No-one forces the users to buy the upgrade, if they are happy with what they've got then don't change, but professional people need to increase cost/productivity so upgrading to a better operating system is logical since that is where the APPLICATIONS that these people use are going. The choice is yours.