My point is that windows is pushing the hardware unnecessarily with excessive resource usage and forcing people to upgrade when there is no real need. If your a computer enthusiast you want the latest cutting edge hardware but for the general population they want something that works well and does the tasks they require without getting forced to upgrade and spend more money than necessary.
Bill Gates retires from Microsoft
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My point is that windows is pushing the hardware unnecessarily with excessive resource usage and forcing people to upgrade when there is no real need. If your a computer enthusiast you want the latest cutting edge hardware but for the general population they want something that works well and does the tasks they require without getting forced to upgrade and spend more money than necessary.
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I think we'll have to agree to disagree with this one. I can't see how forcing an upgrade is a bad thing, nor can I see a problem with forcing hardware vendors to push the boundaries of their current tech.
Burnsy
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Hardly, the demands Windows makes of a system are more in terms of memory usage and drive access. You can really claim it boosts CPU or GPU development.
No, with games in particular the market would not exist in its current size had a unified platform not dominated - and if it weren't for MS's monopolistic practices, there's no guarantee that we'd all be running the same thing now, the market might've been fragmented.
Partly, but OpenGL was there early enough and would have been the standard now even had DirectX never been developed to the degree that it did.
Well the argument is a bit hypothetical anyhow.. who knows what would have happened if MS did not exist. Maybe all those companies who MS acquired and all those developers who chose to develop for windows could have created something revolutionary.
I don't see it as impossible for multiple different platforms to exist in harmony which an abstraction layer is created (for example to support OpenGL) in which everyone could play games successfully.
I thought this was meant to be about Bill G, haha.
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Yes, but then you don't have the benefits of the DX API, which makes it slow and expensive to develop.
Burnsy
There's nothing stopping DirectX be ported to other platforms, anything is doable. The problem with closed source software is your either breaking the law or impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time. Sure you could manually develop a toolchain to target different platforms but that means you got to spend a ton of time tooling up. If all DX efforts were put into making something which would run on multiple platforms then everyone would be happy. This is never going to happen though imo.
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Which came first - the chicken or the egg?
Without Bill Gates those developers wouldn't have beem creating software for MS-DOS/Windows in the first place.
Bill Gates gave the software developers a focus and what a fantastic job he and his company have done.
Well obviously, they might have been writing software for CP/M, OS/2 or UNIX derivative instead. Its impossible to know what could have been.
Yeah, writing software for potentially hundreds of different operating systems that aren't the same or uniform, not the best situation for the average joe public is it? You take Microsoft and its Windows platform out of the picture, what are you left with? A mishmash of several different operating systems with their own structures and routines. You have a million variations of Linux, Unix, and the Mac operating system. They're not similair at all. How are businesses supposed to keep up with that, and be certain their software of choice will work with that system without any issues? How are the software developers supposed to make sure their programs work without any issues? One program will work just fine with Red Hat but refuses to run on Yellow Dog - what then?
People are quick to say Linux and its derivatives are open source, but they're even quicker to ignore the fact that you can't install anything willy-nilly on them. This makes it difficult for software developers to sell to a wide ranging market - if only so few operating systems could use it without any hitches, not as many would buy them, so the incentive to develop and release is highly reduced.
Microsoft's Windows platform enabled the vast majority of computers to be uniform - to be able to let software developers make programs in the assurance that the vast majority of users can buy, install and run them. Businesses strive on being able to keep their software running and up to date, they know it will run on Windows. Without the assurance of a platform that is guaranteed to work, there would be no incentive to develop further, to innovate and to improve. It is for this reason that without Windows, programs and software would be stuck in the dark ages. The alternatives are too splintered and unconforming to allow for real growth. You need a solid foundation across the entire board of computer users, and having several different operating systems with different requirements and behaviours is detrimental to that.
TLDR: businesses like knowing their software will run on Windows. Software developers like knowing they only have to develop for Windows which is used on the vast majority of computers.
WTF?
, is that a joke??
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WTF?
Well obviously it's not serious, but it was shown at CES2008 during Bill's keynote.
Burnsy
I think the point he was making was that if MS-DOS hadn't become the de facto operating system for IBM PCs and compatibles, something else would have. There was no technical reason why MS-DOS gained the advantage it did.
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Indeed, I was going to post something similar yesterday. Without Bill Gates, Someone else would have just lead the way. It makes you wonder what would have been the lead OS now. OSX for MAC? Would MAC have been as successful without the drive to compete with Microsoft?
We'll never know
Ah, I see. Well I don't think that if MS-DOS/Windows didn't become the dominant system, something else would have - it would have been a lot of smaller systems with more even market share instead of one dominating system and lots of smaller ones. It's all about seizing the opportunity, and there really weren't any other company around at the time that tried to capitalize on computing systems the way Microsoft did at the time, and hadn't been for over three years, until Apple released the Macintosh 128k amongst a backdrop of several startup open source developers. By then it was too late, MS was king.
And as we all know in the world of computer hardware and software - three years is a hell of a head start.
How is it slow and expensive? You could use SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/) which works on multiple platforms and all you have to do is write your application to SDL.
ID Software managed to do it with Doom3. (not sure what specific APIs they used though bar OpenGL)
He means slow as in terms of developer productivity time (and time means money), I guess. Especially when your publisher is pushing you hard to release. I'm not a games developer but the way I understand it from my housemate is that SDL is no where near as feature complete as DX/OpenGL. OpenGL could have course be used... as shown by Doom 3 but that means supporting two API's for rendering.
Id Software are one of the companies who actually make a good job of cross platform games because Carmack is a fan of OpenGL. They actually write their own games engine.. a lot of studios just license out the engines so its worth their time to do this. This shows its totally possible though and a good thing! GL implementation on windows is pretty patchy thus the reliance on DirectX (I wonder why that is
).