🚀 go-pugleaf

english@primenet.com (Lawson English) wrote:


>I don't criticize MS for taking so long to do WIndows 95. I DO criticize 
>them for pretending that it would NOT take so long.

And so do a lot of people.  But is slipping dates really MS's exlusive
territory?  It's standard practice these days.  

Apparently one of the reasons 95 shipped so late is due to Bill
becoming "aware" of the profit in the gaming world.  A year ago, 95
was shown to a bunch of game developers to see what they thought.  For
them (source: PC Gamer) it was barely an improvement over 3.1 for
fast-action games.  So Microsoft got the developers and hardware
manufacturers together, pooled their resources, got what they wanted
and improved 95's multimedia/gaming capabilities drastically to the
point where developers actually wanted to write games under the
platform, rather than being forced to.

This doesn't excuse the delay.  But there were sufficient reasons for
it, I don't believe it was soley attributed to debunking the
competition years in advance, although hype building (as with any
software product) always plays a part.


>OS/2 was a "from the ground up" solution. Windows 95 isn't all that great 
>at multi-tasking if you are using 16-bit apps (can we say "P6"?) and 
>COpland, the semi-smooth multitasking solution from Apple, will probably 
>be out within 6 months of the current shipment projections (ie, Jan 
>1997), whereas Windows 95 is how late?


Copland shipping "on time" is irrelevant when 95 will have been out
for almost a year, _if_ it even makes the early mid-96 date that most
are saying it won't.  Do you not think there will be a slew of 32-bit
apps by then for 95?

Yes, the P6 performance is not great news with 95, but we'll have to
see how much the 16-bit thunking affects 32-bit apps- it will have an
effect, but to what degree we don't know, I wasn't able to get any
answers out of Intel (shock).   The difference is that Microsoft
already has their next generation OS tested, tried, and ready to run
95 apps.  NT- and early next year, with the 95 interface.  Sans the
heavy object-orientation, it's Microsoft's "Gershwin"- just available
_now_.

Anyways, with the PPC 615 finally proving to be a reality, maybe I'll
just select "Windows 95- NT- Copland" upon bootup on my next machine-
hopefully.  Now there's an interesting topic, this chip could blow it
wide open, but it depends on how fast the Pentium section is.  If it's
say, close to a 75mhz Pentium, and comes out in the expected
second-half of 96, it may not be that exciting to PC owners.  At least
it's an option.