On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:01:12 +0000, irneb <> wrote:
>Well, you say OS stability in MS Win ?????
When I mean "OS stability" I mean the stability of an OS as a development
platform over the long haul, not how much uptime a particular OS is reputed to
provide. Having 4 or 5 different OSes to write for is not a stable solution for
any software developer.
> The core of Windows has changed at least 3 times in the last 10 years:
>- 16bit on top of DOS for Win3.1 to Win98.
>- 32bit extension to the above Win98 & WinME.
>- 32bit native windowOS NT3 to XP
>- 64bit native WinXP64
>-32bit but new core (more in line with Linux) Vista
>- 64bit as above Vista64
Windows 95 is 12 years old, but fully-32-bit Windows NT is even older.
Regardless, the MAJORITY of Windows and AutoCAD users have been wed to the Win32
API using Windows NT, Windows 2000 and then Windows XP. AutoCAD has required a
full 32-bit OS for quite some time.
>Every single one of the above uses different libraries through which the programmers have to accomplish their tasks.
And adding additional OS support would increase this tenfold.
>So not just a recompiling exercise (as with Linux) but many coding need to be changed as well.
There's no such thing as a "recompiling exercise." Every iteration of AutoCAD
has required extensive testing.
>Whereas Linux is still using the same thing of 15 years old (based on the older Unix cores) - they've just added to it & made it work faster & on the newer hardware. And they've introduced the XWindows system which accomplishes all those same tasks which MS Programmes rave about so much - just that the XWindows libraries are backward & forward compatible (so your new programs could even run on an older operating system) unless you've used new features (not so with Windows try run AutoCAD2008 on Win95 it should be possible, yet isn't, because AC doesn't realy use anything new from what was available then but the libraries have changed so much that the same function is programmed in a totally different way).
Wrong: AutoCAD 2008 has a MINIMUM system requirement of Windows 2000 SP4 or
newer.
>The programs you could run in the early 90's still work without change of source code on the latest Fedora 7 release - Fedora did not even exist then, nor did it's original base Linux system (Red-Hat). The only thing good about AutoDesk's choice was that they got a lot of market share riding on the MS back. As everyone knows: "All good things come to an end eventually." And MS is starting to loose ground (especially in the Operating System market) - simply because there's now too much competition, and they can't get their products out soon enough: i.e. send an incomplete buggy program out so people start buying it instead of the slightly better competitor's product (compared to our previous release). This starts eating at MS customer's patience - not to mention bank balance. The MS market share has been falling for the last 5 years, while the Linux share has been increasing - sooner or later a critical mass will happen and (as was MS's market oblivion in the DOS days) nearly
everything will go the Linux route, unless something better comes along VERY SOON.
Whatever. The technical status of today's OSes is largely irrelevent. And anyone
who thinks AutoCAD would somehow be magically better if Autodesk ported it over
to Linux or Mac OSX needs to have their head examined. It would only give the
user more choice, and given the benefits (possibly better stability, a more fun
OS experience, cooler hardware) the user MAY benefit in the overall scheme of
things. But any AutoCAD performance gains becuase of OS choice is not a given,
and would have to be extensively tested and tweaked.
But also remember that choice travels up the line. The whole IT department of
your company would have to get on board. That ship does not turn on a dime; a
company would have to purchase ALL new software, and evaluate if those other
programs they use would benefit as well.
And please, back up any claim as to Microsoft's dwindling OS market share with
some facts. I don't buy the assertion that Windows is in ANY way threatened by
alternative platforms, and Autodesk isn't losing any sleep over them either.
Regardless, anyone who goes from 1% of the market to 2% and boasting that their
market share has grown 100% isn't being entirely straight. Linux may be making
gains on the desktop, fine. But it's nowhere near a critical mass stage. in fact
Apple overtook the Linux market share almost overnight.
Autodesk's market share is in no way tied to the MS Windows platform (more
Windows users did not ever equate to more AutoCAD users). Autodesk's market
share grew because of interoperability requirements between companies to
effectively share information. This is why DWG is such an important
lowest-common-denominator. And Autodesk has always been committed to providing
PC based CAD sofwtare, which again equals Windows.
Autodesk simply decided to develop for the single most popular 23-bit platform
out there, which was Windows. And they would have been stupid to pick anything
OTHER than Windows.
The Mac with it's less-than-phenominal 0.0009% market share was proprietarily
tied to overpriced, slow Motoroa hardware which was entirely incompatible with
the Intel processor and x86 instruction set. If you think Bill Gates controls
too much of your desktop, get a load of Steve Jobs.
Linux did not even exist.
Unix was for the most part pretty expensive and had 50 different flavors to
boot, plus the only ones who knew how it worked all looked like the bass player
from ZZ Top.
In short, the decision to devote 100% of their development time to Windows was a
no-brainer.
Matt
mstachoni@verizon.net
mstachoni@bhhtait.com