🚀 go-pugleaf

James McArthur (jamesm@morinda.it.ntu.edu.au) wrote:
: G'Day Christopher L. Estep, you wrote:
: : "-=( Tyke/Samir )=-" <sjiwani@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote:

: : >On 18 Oct 1995, Upen wrote:


: But you forget to mention that Win95 sales are 25% of what is expecting.
: The majority of Win3.x users are *not* "upgrading" because they cant see the
: need. Perhaps there should be a survey of PC's that have Win95 installed,
: and PC's that actually use Win95.

: Having it preinstalled != use.

that's for certain.  i remember a while back a survey/poll in Byte or
PCMag that determinmed that there were fewer copies of Windows 3.1 actually
being used than there were Macs.  this would have been in about 1st half '94,
when the total DOS market share was about 10X the Mac share.  while it might
not have been accurate, it certainly seems to reflect my experiences.  i don't
know anybody who has windows of any version on their home computer.  if they
wanted a GUI, they bouth a Mac or OS/2.  more relevantly, a friend just bought
a PC, and it was cheaper to get it with '95 preloaded than without anything.
so the first thing he did when he got it plugged in was reformat the harddrive.
then he installed linux. several of my friends got PCs with windows 3.1 
preloaded, and the first thing they did was free up several hundred Megs o
drive by deleting it. 

on a related note: another acquaintance of mine (a die-hard anti-gui
freak, i might add) bought os/2 Warp a little while ago. MS says they're 
making a GUI that's easy to use, yet even if every copy of windows ever sold
was being used, that'd still be only a fraction of the number of users of
DOS.  sounds to me like they still haven't made a GUI as "easy-to-use" as
DOS.  now there's a scary thought. ;-)

in summation, i'd sayt hat '95 is mostly hype.  remember when Intel said that
they'd sell 2 million pentiums in the first year?  it was actually less than
5 million (ibelieve 300000).  apple said that they'd sell 1 million PPC in
the first year, and it turned out to be something like 1.2 million.  and that
doesn't even count sales by IBM.  the point is, it looks to me like the
Wintel standard is on the way out.  perhaps people are finally realizing
that redefining the standard down to your point is ridiculous.
--

woodelf
nbarmore@students.wisc.edu
woodelf@yar.cs.wisc.edu
http://dax.cs.wisc.edu/~woodelf

I did not realize that similarity was required for the
exercise of compassion.  -Delenn