Full Circle - Part III (Final)

When I left you in Part II I said there were 18 versions of Windows.  Add three more to the list.  On October 1992 Microsoft introduced Windows 3.1 Workgroups.  Until then Novell, Inc. owned the networking market.  If you wanted to create a network you bought NetWare.  Eventually Microsoft did to Novell what they did to Netscape.  In the early days everyone used Netscape if for no other reason it was not a Microsoft product.  Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer with Windows and went on to crush Netscape.  In March 1997 Novell hired Eric Schmidt from Sun Microsystems to stop the attack.  They still got crushed but Eric didn’t, he left to become the CEO of Google.  Smart move Eric!  Who knows he may buy Microsoft but since Microsoft announced yesterday their intentions to buy Yahoo the battle lines are now clear.  Microsoft/Yahoo will claim to be the king of operating systems, desktop applications, and search.  No matter what they say Google is still the real king of search.  Google will continue to claim that the Internet network is the OS of the future and cloud applications are the alternative to desktop apps.  Sun’s Scott McNealy’s has been saying this forever.  Gates “missed” the Internet search revolution and is playing catch up.  Don’t ever count him out.  2008 is going to be interesting.   

Recently I just learned of two more versions of Windows.  Windows XP 64-bit and Vista 64-bit.  The later is offered in five editions.  Learning Windows is not trivial; learning which edition to buy is equally difficult.  If you don’t buy the right edition, sooner or later you will find a critical piece missing.  Currently only high end applications like engineering analysis (Cosmos, ANSYS, AMPS, Abaqus, et.al.) and mechanical CAD packages (SolidWorks, ProE, Catia, el.al.) need take advantage of the huge memory (up to 128GB+) capabilities provided by Vista.

So were do we stand?  You are probably using XP but are still confused (or scared) to switch to Vista.  There are some horror stories.  Then again there were horror stories when you were asked to upgrade from 98 to XP.  As Lance Ulanoff said in PC Magazine “Vista will recover in 2008, and by the end of the year people will forget why they hated it so much.” 

So what alternatives does a person have?  Buy an Apple iMac with Tiger or Leopard? But you will not get all the high end apps available on the PC unless you want to run an OS emulator program which is bound to slow things down.  There are also some Leopard upgrade horror stories on the Internet.  Welcome to the club Apple.  How about buying a Linux based computer?  Great idea, be free once and all from Microsoft/Apple.  You can access cloud applications the way Google says you should.  I am going to explore doing so but I am not yet ready to give up my trusty Word, Excel, PowerPoint (et.al) and trust my “sensitive” data to the cloud.  Maybe someday, maybe sooner than later.  Will keep you posted on my progress.

In all fairness Windows works most of the time.  It is a marvel that it works as well as it does plus buying a computer is like buying a new TV with many price points available.  It is when your computer acts up that you are in a quandary.  If you work in a company with an IT/network guy you call him just like I did in my Part I piece.  Yep….we have come full circle.  You and I no longer own our own computer.

If you work at home like I do, and you have a problem, pick up the 4.5 pound manual and dig (and pray).  Along with the manual be sure to subscribe to the free Windows Secrets newsletter, windowssecrets.com.  If things still don’t work out  buy a new computer with a freshly installed OS, it is bound to work for the next two years and by that time Windows 19 (or 22 depending how you count) will be out.  Of course you will have to once again learn a new OS.  Microsoft will just not let a sleeping dog lie.

Go Giants!  Go Google!  Life is good.