Reply 20 of 28, by VivienM
jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-09-10, 02:12:Even without the stick of the Designed for Windows 95 program, a "carrot" is that DOS/WfW 3.11 would not have taken advantage of any PCI features like grabbing the vendor/device ID and finding or asking for drivers, but Win95 would. So extra motivation to get PCI in place before Win95 whereas WfW 3.11 users wouldn't notice.
Has the PC industry ever actually done any forward planning of the "we are going to include thingy X that's useless today because Microsoft is going to roll out Windows Z in 6 months that runs happier with X" kind?
Generally speaking, I would say it's the other way around - the PC industry delays including thingy X as long as they can and forces Microsoft to design Windows Z to run just fine without X. Which then, if anything, causes the roll-out of X to be even more delayed because, well, Windows Z doesn't actually perform visibly better with X.
I'm sure we can think of a hundred examples - the one that comes to my mind as the most egregious is how the PC industry shipped tons of systems with integrated graphics that couldn't do Vista Aero Glass in 2006. Everybody knew the next version of Windows was going to require those GPU features, people who were on top of things (e.g. I had a Dothan laptop from summer 2005 with the optional-not-that-expensive ATI discrete graphics chip and that could do Aero Glass just fine) had video cards with those features, but if anything, Intel got Microsoft to manipulate the logo programs so that they could ship as many lousy integrated GPUs as possible. Then, of course, it was Microsoft who was left holding the bag when 2-month-old systems couldn't use one of Vista's marquee features.
(When you look at it with the benefit of hindsight and how, 15 years later, the lousy Vista reception was basically the end of innovation in the Windows desktop PC world, I hope Intel is really proud of themselves. They got to sell a year's worth of i915Gs and now, well, I hope they enjoy selling N4500s and seeing people keep their C2D/C2Qs/sandy bridges 10+ years. And when they realize that Chrome is the new OS for anything designed in the last 10-12 years and that Chrome doesn't exactly require an x64 Intel chip to run... and in fact can be very happy on TSMC-made ARM chips... they should remember that this is all the legacy of them torpedoing Vista and creating a culture where no new software can require Windows version X until Microsoft stops supporting Windows version X.)