Sometime today, premstud@vsnl.com wrote:
how many people do u think can afford macs......
I agree with you that not many people would be willing to pay for a Mac, either because they don't see enough value in it or because they simply cannot afford it. Or because they don't know about it (how many people know what a Mac is?).
and by the way seeing the success of windows worldwide, i dont think u can call that failure. remember unix was there in the market for so many years
Commercial UNIX vendors were busy making money at the time without thinking enough about advancing the technology. Selling UNIX had been reduced to just a way of making money. That's why they're now killed by either Windows or GNU/Linux. BSD was the only UNIX where the progress was happening (is still happening), and any progress was given away to AT&T, which in turn would licence it to UNIX vendors.
AT&T messed up the UNIX scene completely.
The maximum number of pc penetration in the world is thanks to windows.That is a fact.
I would say it's the other way round. DOS/Windows was lucky to be around when progress was happening on the hardware side. In the past 2 decades, there has been a lot of progress in processor and related technologies. From 386 to Pentium, et al. Nobody else was really there in the game then, so Windows got most of it. There's a lot of luck involved in this.
Even now, Windows is the `best' (as you might say) because nobody's there to challenge it. Standing against M$ is like committing suicide. Let's say you set out to develop an OS for the desktop. How many people would be willing to invest in your venture? The GNU/Linux system is the only one that is a _real_ threat to M$, because there's no stopping it.
386BSD (later, FreeBSD and forks) and Linux were the first unices for x86 in the early 1990's. DOS/Windows came before them, so it won. Of course, IBM has always been there, but I would prefer M$ to IBM any day.
I have spent 1/2 hr. today explaining how to set up Outlook Express to someone over the phone. I guess it would have been quicker if it was GNU/Linux. 1 line of fetchmailrc, start sendmail daemon and use Pine out of the box. So it's not as though Windows is easy to use. Some people just refuse to learn on their own; whether it's Windows or GNU/Linux doesn't make a difference to them.
I agree that GUIs are more approachable and easier to get started with, but CLI is easier to use in the long run.
Manish