Firewall For Windows 95

Why Windows Is Obsolete

Windows 7 was rude enough to crash catastrophically Friday, an hour before a column deadline. After 45 minutes of hopeful auto-repair, an error message unceremoniously notified me that, no, nothing will be repaired automatically today. “Would you like to shut down?” Um, no, I wouldn’t.

The only solution was to reformat the disk and rebuild the system — a procedure I’ve done maybe 50 times since first installing Windows 3.1 in the early 90s.

I’m thankful for Carbonite. As of this writing Tuesday, the online backup servive has been restoring my 172 gigabytes of data since Friday. So far it’s 22 percent done. I should be all restored up by July.

Sigh.

The failure took my column with it, of course. I had to re-write it on my iPad.

Which got me thinking about the future of Windows, a future looks bleak from the perspective of turning to an incredibly stable $500 appliance while my $2,000 PC restores itself after yet another crash. Don’t get me wrong. I actually think Windows has always been underappreciated. It’s an OS designed to run the widest possible range of software on the widest possible range of hardware. It runs 15-year-old shareware just as easily as it does brand-new enterprise management software. The company gets a lot of grief, but it achieves something every day that no other company has been able to achieve, which is to sell the world’s most widely used platform without actually controlling either the application software or the underlying hardware.

Microsoft’s model is actually breathtakingly ambitious. Unfortunately, it’s also obsolete.

In the 1990s, Windows was in fact the best model from a business perspective. Before social networking, the Web 2.0, cloud computing, apps, and all the rest, applications were the only game in town. What most users wanted was more of everything – more features, more applications, more capabilities. The Windows platform had far more applications in just about every category than its competitors in the market. In some categories, such as gaming, Windows was for years the only significant platform player. Microsoft’s model of supporting everything paid off, made the platform totally dominant, which enabled Microsoft to get into the habit of charging a lot for both its OS software, and also application suites.

But now the world has grown infinitely more complex. We no longer want more. Now we want less.

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InfoWorld

A firewall for Windows 95/98 personal computers

InfoWorld

Microcomputer abstracts

Guide to Securing Microsoft Windows XP Systems for IT Professionals: A NIST Security Configuration Checklist, Recommendations of the NIST