OS Upgrades?
July 23rd, 2005 by HenWindows Vista, Apple Tiger/Cheetah; I have to ask the question of why the companies behind said products believe we want to upgrade. It’s pretty excepted that hardware has reached a point at last where there is no real need to update, video editing seems to be the major home-based reason to have to go beyond the standard power desktop, but it increasingly seems to be that way with the operating systems too.
Apple seem to recognise that the only way to get people to upgrade is to increasingly add to the suite of bundled programs, hopefully turning them into a revenue stream later on. Microsoft know this too I assume, they just seem to get in legal trouble every time they try. Linux distributions are about nothing but this, adding applications to the basic OS.
OS 9->OS X was a worthy upgrade. As was Win 98->XP or, slightly less so, 2K->XP. This was largely due to the weaknesses of the prior versions than anything wonderful in the latter versions. OS 9 and Win 98 were, let’s face it, OSes from the home computer era of the late 70s/early 80s.