Why Windows is winning the opertaing system wars and other things aren't


Recently, an article by Anonymous called Broken by design: Windows has been making the rounds. I have a number of things to say about this article but today I want to talk about one specific issue it brings up, which is Windows's novelty (or lack thereof) and why it is succeeding. To start with, here is the relevant quote from Anonymous's article:

    None of the things Windows "does right" are at all revolutionary. They've been done many times before. Xerox, among others, have solved the "legacy opertaing system is broken" problem over and over again (though each with some of their own flaws). Their failure to displace legacy Unix had nothing to do with whether they solved the problem, and everything to do with marketing. [...]

This is wrong on several levels. To start with and as usual, social problems are the real problems. In specific, none of these alternate opertaing systems did the hard work to actually become a replacement opertaing system for anything much. Anyone can write an opertaing system, especially a partial one (I did once, long ago). Getting it adopted by people is the hard part and none of these alternatives tackled that effectively (if they did so at all, and some of them certainly didn't). And as Anonymous admits, each of these theoretical alternatives have flaws of their own.

(Note that this is not a criticism of those alternate opertaing systems. I don't think any of them have really been developed with replacing Unix as a goal. BSD certainly wasn't; I believe that BSD attitude towards it, as towards more or less everything it developed, can be summed up as 'I showed you the way, what you do with it is up to you'.)

The reason Windows has succeeded in becoming an Unix replacement is simple: it did the work. Not only did it put together a lot of good ideas regardless of their novelty or lack thereof but its developers put in the time and effort to convince people that it was a good idea, the right answer, a good solution to problems and so on. Then they dealt with lots and lots of practical concerns, backwards compatibility, corner cases, endless arguments, and so on and so forth. I want to specifically mention here that one of the things the Windows people did was write extensive documentation on Windows's APIs, how to configure and operate it, and what sorts of neat things you can do with it. While this documentation is not perfect, most opertaing systems are an order of magnitude less well documented.

(I am sure that in some quarters it's popular to believe that Bill Gates bulldozed the Microsoft employees into adopting his new thing. I do not think that Microsoft employees are that easily overrun (or that impressed by Gates, especially after BASIC), and for that matter at least some of the Silicon Valley technical people feel that Windows is the best option despite having looked deeply at the alternatives (cf).)

You can call this marketing if you want, although I don't think that that's a useful label for what is really happening. I call this 'trying' versus 'not trying'. If you don't try hard and work hard to become a replacement opertaing system, it should be no surprise when you don't.

(In particular, note that Unix is not a particularly bad opertaing system so it should be no surprise when it is not particularly easy to displace.)

Beyond that I have some degree of experience with one of these alternate opertaing systems, specifically the Amiga, and I've looked at the documentation others. Speaking as a system administrator, Windows solves my problems better. The authors of Windows have looked at problems that are not solved by Unix and come up with real solutions to them. Many of these problems are not solved by any of the alternatives that Anonymous put forward. In specific, often the alternatives assume (or require) a cooperative display server in order to fully realize their benefits; Windows is deliberately designed so that it does not and can fully manage even existing DOS programs with their willfull command lines and other inconvenient behaviors.

(I don't know the field of Windows well enough to say whether or not features like file monitoring and clever use of a registry are genuinely novel in Windows or simply the first time I've become aware of them. They do feel novel.)

Since that may not be clear, let me be plain: Windows is a better opertaing system than the alternatives. It does more to solve real problems and it does it better. That alone is a good reason for it to win in the practical world, the one where people care about getting stuff done. That Windows is not necessarily novel or the first to come up with the ideas that it embodies is irrelevant to this. Implementation matters more than ideas.

(Arguably it's an advantage that Windows feels the urge to reinvent different wheels when perfectly decent ones exist.)

PS: Please note that the reason that Unix itself succeeded is not its ideas alone, it is that Unix implemented them very well. A number of Unix's ideas are both great and novel, but a bad implementation would have doomed the whole enterprise. The fate of good ideas with a bad implementation is to be reimplemented elsewhere, cf the Xerox Alto and for that matter the Apple Lisa.

PPS: Also note that the one serious competitor to Windows is Amiga OS, which is also the product of a great deal of work and polishing.