An article in the Washington Post talks about the “5 years of XP”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/23/AR2006092300510_2.html.
One thing that always seems funny to me is that most people see XP as the upgrade from Windows 98, and that XP was the one that provided real ‘stability’.
But before XP, there was Windows 2000, and before that there was NT4. XP is better than 2000, and 2000 better than NT4, but stability is a common trait to all three, so to say that Microsoft didn’t solve it’s ‘stability’ issues until XP seems somewhat ignoring certain parts of history. Sure, a lot of consumer desktops didn’t run Windows 2000, but Windows 2000 was depolyed widely in corporate world, and most enthusiasts who weren’t stuck with the most imcompatible of programs switched to 2000 when it came out, since it was far better than Windows 98.
Criticizing XP for not shipping an anti-virus seems unfair as well. Not shipping an anti-virus is not the main problem, since a newly written virus can always circumvent existing anti-virus software. Also, OS X, Linux, nor any other OS platform ships with a virus scanner built-in. As the article correctly points out, the default permissions model in XP is the bigger problem, but until recently, nobody in the UNIX world had figured out how to do it in a user friendly manner (the graphical ‘sudo’ method that OS X and Ubuntu use seems to be what most systems are converging towards).
And not to sound elitist, but it is also not guaranteed that you’ll have to deal with viruses and spyware just becuase you use XP. I know plenty of colleagues at work who have used XP for many years and never dealt with any such problems. An informed user can avoid these problems if they know what to do and what not to do.
That’s no excuse for Microsoft not making it easier to avoid these things, but there is still, and will always be, what developers like to call “user error”. And even if Windows implements a more UNIX like permissions model, that doesn’t solve all the problems. A virus that takes over a particular user’s program, while not being able to mess with system files, can still go ahead and delete all the user’s files.
And besides, most of the viruses that spread like wildfire had nothing to do with MS’s lax permissions model. They just took over Outlook and required no Administrator priveleges at all.
That’s also not to mention that common vulnerabilities like buffer overruns can affect programs running with Administrator-level access just as equally as those running with user priveleges.
Just wait till the first big OS X virus hits. I’m sure people are going to have a field day with that one.
Personally, I find it quite remarkable that XP is 5 years old, and still feels rather modern and useful. I tried OS X for a year and a half, and while it does do some things better (and some things worse), it’s not night and day. The ‘age’ of the XP platform also points to it’s stability, something that is extremely desirable to developers who build software for that platform.
The fact that even after 5 years, most PC’s ship with Windows XP shows that even after such a long time, nobody else has come up with anything revolutionarily better. Which means that, while it’s far from perfect, those MS guys did a pretty good job. They took Windows 2000, and kept themselves from messing it up too badly 😉