Quote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems"
I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. Asia market was and still is dominated by Microsoft when it comes to desktop.
OK, here are the receipts: internal MS emails from just a couple of years after this (in the run-up to Vista) literally saying that they expect to be compared to Tiger and found wanting:
That's about right. Here in the UK you were lucky to see a mac ever back then. A colleague bought the lamp style iMac unit in 2002 and we were quite frankly shocked at it. It was actually a pretty horrid machine compared to our windows 2000 PCs at the time.
There’s an important distinction between what people bought for themselves and what they were given at work. Apple had a big lead on a quality GUI, and things like color matching, which made them preferred in certain fields and generally had more of a premium cachet (the PC market was still shaking the low-end image of things sold without sound cards, slacking on USB adoption, shoddy drivers, etc.).
Microsoft was shooting for 100% market share and was trying to close every niche keeping Apple alive even if the inertia of all of those business sales meant their total market share was never in question.
Depends upon how you define Personal Computer and what time-frame you look at.
So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... and mobiles selling way more than other forms of computers.
the big three have been Lenovo, HP and Dell for a long time, order of those has switched sometimes. so depending how you slice the share, you could find a niche where somehow it would appear as whatever you want it to be, usual thing when reporting market shares: "we are top in this is super-niche slice of the overall market"
It is untrue. Microsoft kept Internet Explorer and Office for macOS. MacOS was Microsoft's joker card for arguing they were not a monopolist, and that card was valid when they were under antitrust investigations by US, EU, and others ie. when Windows XP was current.
Market share is often measured in both units and sales (or 'dollars'). Both of these are important to a company's future but when markets are segmented then the smaller number of units can be worth pursuing.
Think of it as "rivalry", perhaps. Think of a mass-market car company that outsells a luxury brands 5x or 10x but whose designers still swipe ideas from them.
Rivalry? In 2001? When only 2 years earlier Billy boy had to buy Apple's shares to keep them afloat? I know Billy boy did that to get off the hook with US govt., not like he was any saint - but from that to "rivalry" is a tall order.
>But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro.
I'm also dev in the West and no, it's not even close to being 95% MacBook Pro. Maybe in The Bay Area it's 95% but where I live(Europe) It's mostly Windows 10 + WSL or Ubuntu.
And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Again, Maybe in the Bay Area they are but here nobody cares about what your job is or what expensive laptop you have.
My data does not support that conclusion. To the contrary, the vast majority of business decision makers are still on a Windows based machine in the US.
I can validate this directly as we operate the largest library of long-form professional/technical content library on the web. Over 700k professionals per month are registering and downloading content specific to their needs.
Below is the current breakout of their device factor for 2020:
Windows = 97.26%
Mac = 8.21%
Linux 2.92%
Chrome OS = 0.27%
Clearly just one perspective into the market but we've never seen Mac approach any level of critical mass within the US professional marketplace.
>Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India.
Well in 2000 there wasn't much computer in China or India.
Of course today that is a lot different. But if Apple's numbers were correct [] then MacBook Pro market share isn't growing, as a matter of fact MBP usage may be shrinking in the West.
[
] For a number of years they claim nearly 50% of Mac buyers are new to the platform. That is nearly 10M per year.
Nearly all of the new Mac users are from China.
And yet their reported Active Mac User dont grow any where near as much.
2019 was also the first year in recent history Apple stopped reporting on Mac user satisfaction.
XP was the peak of desktop customizations. There were "theme packs", one of the most popular being a Vista Theme Pack.
The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter, desktop CPU-o-meter dials to a whole modern look.
I'd argue that Linux desktop was always the peak of customization via themes, and today remains the last platform to even allow such customization. Most Linux desktop themes don't look all that great (simply because of the '90% of everything is crap' rule), but there are a few really great ones that are aesthetically much more pleasing than both Win10 and macOS (of course this is very personal and subjective, which makes it all the more important to allow theming).
Old Mac OS - System 7.5 days and thereabouts had a really great theming situation, with Kaleidoscope schemes making it possible to change everything. I remember I made my own.
Something like this shows the diversity in themes:
It's the peak of customization yet the community is full of people saying "I didn't like GNOME's palette so I use Plasma now." I never know how to respond to those people. If they're happy, whatever, but it feels like most people are unaware themes exist.
It was definitely the peak. I was heavily involved in several communities, and also ran plenty of other desktops environments, but XP had the largest following by far. The sheer number of websites devoted to skinning XP was astounding. Popular websites had thousands and thousands of themes. Winamp 3 was thriving too.
Enlightenment got me into linux, and when I discovered you couldn't run it on Windows, I discovered Litestep. And then spent so, so many hours of my life tweaking themes. Ahh, memories.
Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ...
The article suggests that it was being used to test theming. In other words, it was not intended to ship. It is probable that it would be shot down if anyone proposed shipping it. (Why elicit a lawsuit from a competitor over something trivial?)
Given that, why would they go to the effort or recreating the whole visual appearance. The actual "feel" part was unlikely to be within the scope of the project.
I loved the XP theme! It was undoubtedly very polarizing though, even to this day people argue over whether it was a beautiful step forward (as I believe) or a horrible Fischer-Price kids UI.
Yes, obviously the complete finished product of Mac OS looked better than this half-finished "programmer art" demonstration that never even shipped. What were you expecting?
Windows XP original theme was the best. Not at a nostalgic level only (which of course affects me and my memory), but I felt it was so easy to use and so easy to find everything. Today, Windows 10 control panel is a mess.
The Control Panel in Windows 10 is now legacy, with most things now under Settings. Eventually it'll go away I guess, but some apps still install their own little control panel applets.
Either way, the best way to access everything you can do in Windows 10 is do it via the 'god mode' folder:
1. Create a new folder
2. Rename it to: GodMode.{ed7ba470-8e54-465e-825c-99712043e01c}
3. Open it
The 'GodMode' part of the name, can be anything you like tbh.
Yeah that's the problem, it's not. Microsoft should really be more focused on usability, the whole "i wanna be touch-panel" is just stupid, MS you are a PC! Even Apple said that.
Oh gosh, yes. It gets a little bit better if you organize it alphabetically, but then it is alphabetical left to right, top to bottom. It's as if somebody intentionally designed it to be as difficult to scan through as possible.
Upvoted this, because I always found rtl-then-down ordering confusing af. On top of that, every generation of windows renamed items, like "Software ...", "Programs ...", "Add/remove programs ...", etc.
Window XP was the reason I had to reset my PC almost every week for a summer because I would mess up the registry files trying to modify icons or startup screen or while trying to make it look like a mac because I couldn't afford a mac. XP was the era of theming!
1996 - Neil Banfield was working on windows blinds whilst on the same set of courses at the university we both went to. Sold to stardock soon after. Just looked it up and things are still going strong!
A lot to be said for the OG windows hook APIs and whatever modern magic they are grabbing into these days.
Wow, Stardock. That brings back memories. Theming my computer was how I learned most of what I knew about graphic design and inadvertently lead to me becoming a developer.
I loved those themes so much. What a fun way to kill time as a teenager.
Windows Codename Whistler (beta codename for XP) actually contained a Watercolor theme that looked like a modernized version of the classic theme[0] that this seems to be based off of. That theme actually looked quite nice.
I forgot about this! I ran this theme for many years, it was a great balance of understated (compared to the blue and green default) and visually appealing (classic theme is fine, but dull)
Does anyone remember Stardock's WindowBlinds from around the same time?
I'm pretty sure it included a Mac theme in the installer?
Or at the very least Stardock provided a place you could go to after installation to download more themes of which a Mac theme was one.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I'm not entirely convinced this is the deal it's made out to be as there were other companies out there with the same or similar offerings.
Readit News
I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. Asia market was and still is dominated by Microsoft when it comes to desktop.
https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsoft...
Marketshare isn’t everything. You can have outsized mindshare with a tiny market share. You can compete for more than marketshare, too
Microsoft was shooting for 100% market share and was trying to close every niche keeping Apple alive even if the inertia of all of those business sales meant their total market share was never in question.
And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.
So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... and mobiles selling way more than other forms of computers.
Right but you can differentiate markets.
Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India.
But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro.
Which market do you think they care more about?
I'm also dev in the West and no, it's not even close to being 95% MacBook Pro. Maybe in The Bay Area it's 95% but where I live(Europe) It's mostly Windows 10 + WSL or Ubuntu.
And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Again, Maybe in the Bay Area they are but here nobody cares about what your job is or what expensive laptop you have.
I can validate this directly as we operate the largest library of long-form professional/technical content library on the web. Over 700k professionals per month are registering and downloading content specific to their needs.
Below is the current breakout of their device factor for 2020:
Windows = 97.26% Mac = 8.21% Linux 2.92% Chrome OS = 0.27%
Clearly just one perspective into the market but we've never seen Mac approach any level of critical mass within the US professional marketplace.
Not in the late 1990s, when Windows XP was being developed.
Well in 2000 there wasn't much computer in China or India.
Of course today that is a lot different. But if Apple's numbers were correct [] then MacBook Pro market share isn't growing, as a matter of fact MBP usage may be shrinking in the West.
[
] For a number of years they claim nearly 50% of Mac buyers are new to the platform. That is nearly 10M per year.Nearly all of the new Mac users are from China.
And yet their reported Active Mac User dont grow any where near as much.
2019 was also the first year in recent history Apple stopped reporting on Mac user satisfaction.
The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter, desktop CPU-o-meter dials to a whole modern look.
Something like this shows the diversity in themes:
https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=25
Wayback machine link
https://web.archive.org/web/20040404162223fw_/http://www.kal...
“Skins” were popular in the windows ecosystem around XP, but it was far from the peak of customization.
It was most definitely peak customization.
XP theme customizations wasn't even close to what you could do on Unix at the time.
Only if you consider computing is limited to Windows/Mac.
Dead Comment
Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ...
/tangentially related rant
Given that, why would they go to the effort or recreating the whole visual appearance. The actual "feel" part was unlikely to be within the scope of the project.
I really miss the windows XP theme. It was super clean and consistent compared to the shit show we have now.
Probably my fav was during the betas before they added the intense blue/green "Luna" theme.
Either way, the best way to access everything you can do in Windows 10 is do it via the 'god mode' folder:
The 'GodMode' part of the name, can be anything you like tbh.Yeah that's the problem, it's not. Microsoft should really be more focused on usability, the whole "i wanna be touch-panel" is just stupid, MS you are a PC! Even Apple said that.
Which one?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/954/660/350...
My favorite though was Windows 2000. Very stable.
Oh gosh, yes. It gets a little bit better if you organize it alphabetically, but then it is alphabetical left to right, top to bottom. It's as if somebody intentionally designed it to be as difficult to scan through as possible.
A lot to be said for the OG windows hook APIs and whatever modern magic they are grabbing into these days.
I loved those themes so much. What a fun way to kill time as a teenager.
[0]: https://www.deviantart.com/rainingskies/art/Windows-Whistler...
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I'm not entirely convinced this is the deal it's made out to be as there were other companies out there with the same or similar offerings.