Windows: The Cadillac Of Operating Systems

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Windows: The Cadillac Of Operating Systems

It wasn't that long ago, as far as history goes, that the ideal car was a hulk of convenience, a bench-seated, chrome-plated, three-ton luxury missile. This ideal had many aspirants, but perhaps the one who most embodied it was the Cadillac, perhaps even the '59 pictured. That's more of a matter for vintage car enthusiasts, but it occurred to me that this particular car has a lot of things in common with Windows 7.

Bear with me here.

The pace of advancement in technology is such that ideas are often outpaced in just a few years. Formats, applications, and services pass by the wayside, having grown, bloomed, and withered at a speed which some years ago would be considered ludicrous. It's a bit like the fins, wings, grilles, and other flourishes that increasingly decorated cars in the 50s. They sold, they were outdone, they were forgotten as the next version came along. And critically, at the time, the competition was between flourishes, not between cars. Yet at some point, that whole type of car would no longer be relevant. Are you picking up what I'm putting down?

It wasn't long ago that when you said operating system, you meant that thing on your computer. Microsoft did a huge amount of work putting computers in every home, making them everyday devices, and to most people, they were the first visible evidence of such a thing as an OS. The "personal computer" as center of the home was an idea pioneered by Microsoft and pursued to a point which now is beginning to look impractical.

Improvements in miniaturization are essentially to be credited with all the consumer technology advances of the last quarter of a century (and more, though only the last 20 concern us for now). Part of Microsoft's coup was making a compact machine that could do all the things you needed it to. But when you think about it, the boxes we were using then — 486s, LC-IIIs, and all the others — are the same size as the ones we have now. Sure, we have smaller PCs, but really, what's become smaller is the die size of the processor, the cell size of the RAM, the width of a sector on the hard drive. We've been stuffing more into the same package for 30 years.

But recently (about ten years ago was, I would say, the tipping point) things started going the other direction. Instead of putting more power into the same size box, we took the same power and put it into a smaller box. And then a smaller box. And a smaller one. And today we have system-on-a-chips the size of your thumbnail, that perform at the same level as a high-end PC from 2001.

This is more than a competing model for Microsoft. It's the end of the world...

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