The two things are connected. If you don't get into the market because you are bullet proofing your application, you will find out that someone else controls the market. The customers want it NOW.

Its a balancing act that I call controlling the level of chaos. If you move too fast, your level of chaos overwhelms you and you die. If you move too slow your competitors overwhelm you and you die.

At any given time, I have a couple of I7 Windows laptops for the work for my government clients, basically, I use them to log into VPNs.. my Govie laptop has the badge/smart-card authentication built-in, drive encryption, content encryption, etc. I'm fairly surprised it actually does anything with all of the Windows security overhead in it.

I also have my MacBook Air, with an outstanding Logitech keyboard & mouse that actually displaced my Apple/Mac BlueTooth keyboard & trackpad that I still have - just like the Logitech products better. The MacBook has a single connection using ThunderBolt to the monitor, providing both power to the Mac, Audio and Video to the monitor.

Boot time? milliseconds. I tap a key and it springs to life, it also power-naps when it sleeps, updating my email and if I'm transcoding and transferring media files to the media jukebox server for the house, it will finish that while sleeping as well. Obviously, SMS text messages, FaceTime, telephone calls, etc. from the iPhone or my iPad route automatically to the Mac and I can just take them with the monitor & camera.

I've been a high end (like 100 cluster server blades for a single application) systems engineer for about 20-25 years, but personally, I don't use a WinTel PC for anything if I don't have to, I only buy or use Macs for my personal stuff and 99% of my work I just do with the Mac... Office 2016 for Mac runs circles around its Windows counterpart, even Microsoft can't succeed in making their own platform look better for their own product line... and if I need a Windows app, VMWare Fusion just puts a Windows 7 subsystem into OS X and I run Windows apps as good or better than they run on my WinTel i7..

I travel a lot, around 100,000 miles a year, the MacBook Air has about an 11 hour battery life, which is why I originally switched, but quickly gave up on using anything else. The Mac/iPhone/iPad ecosystem is pretty unbeatable for productivity.

Updates for OS X are like one here and there, maybe every other month at the most, and most of those will be RAW camera file drivers for PhotoShop & such. I usually get an iTunes update about twice a year supporting the next generation of iOS devices, and of course, the bi-annual release of OS X is always free...

As for longevity, I had a 2009 MacBook Air using a DuoCore processor, then a 2011 MacBook Pro using a Core-2, and my current MacBook Air has an i5. All 3 are still in service in the family, my son uses the old MacBook Air for notes at college because it is light and still has a 8 or 9 hour battery life and uses the MacBook Pro at his apartment. Both run latest OS X without issue.

I'd love to look at a comparable 7 year old Windows Laptop as to how well it would run Windows 10...

they are trying to "force us" to w10 regardless.
this is a typical plan, I'm afraid. -- j
.

OS/2 was actually a joint Microsoft & IBM project, was incredibly stable, so much so that we used to use OS/2 workstations for Lotus Notes servers.

MS took their copy of the source code and that rolled into the original Windows NT, which could actually run OS2 applications pretty easily for a couple of versions after that.

IBM did a couple of additional versions of OS/2, but kind of gave up on the effort.

IBM makes great server products today, they just don't dabble much in the operating systems other than AIX unix. Most of their enterprise applications they design and market with a flavor of Linux. (WebSphere, DB2, Maximo, etc.)

We went to MACS to get rid of Microsoft. Unless you need the very latest new features, my macs from 10 years ago still work to do the things they did when new. If you ignore the system updates, and the resulting need for program updates, they seem to work just fine to do most things

I used to be a Novell GroupWise CNE back in the day, reminds me of a project I was on in Dubai for Zayed University. I was there for other reasons, but they wanted me to take a look at one of their dozens of Novell servers, I was able to fix it pretty easily over the wire with a keyboard, but I was kind of curious, looking at it's run time of about 1600 days since last reboot... went looking for it, couldn't find it, then it turned into a bit of an Easter Egg project over the course of a couple of weekends (of doing other work). We finally discovered it was in an abandoned server room that had literally been sealed up with cinder blocks during a remodel a couple of years earlier. Thing was still running ok, so we left it and added it to the backup scheme and figured if it ever dies, minimal data on it, so in that event they would just cut power to it.

Buy a Mac.

My son who has been a software engineer, inventor, businessman, etc. ever since you needed to use an old B&W TV for a computer screen, warned me about W10 as soon as he looked at it. I have W7 and wife has W8, both functioning well after tweaks from my computer guru and heir. If you managed to avoid W10 even after all the prodding from MS, you have real mental toughness. If you got hooked by MS, practice saying the word NO ten minutes every day.

Today there's a little blue box on my PC screen that contains a message about how"110M people have already upgraded to Windows 10" and I can do it for free.
Why for free and what's the big rush?
Is Big Brother paying someone my tax money to keep an eye on me better kinda like he did in the novel?
I still have Windows 7. So does my far more than I tekkie son, who cautioned me at least half a year ago not to mess with Windows 10 until all the kinks are worked out.
The little old(er than me) lady next door told me three months ago that she "upgraded" to Window 10 and had to pay a geek squad to come over and get her games back and to fix other problems.
I believe she said that took 3 or 4 hours.
No freakin' thank you!
I'll switch after my son does--that depending on what happens when he does.

I'm not familiar with the IBM mainframe world having been in the Univac/Unisys world. In terms of complexity, though OSs of that era are much simpler than what we expect from a desktop like Windows. The wide variety of functions and types of hardware interfaced are much broader than you expect from a mainframe OS.

Novell Netware was incredibly solid. We had a customer lose a server. It was a small network and when we went to upgrade the server we couldn't find it! It was still running, and had been for several years but no one knew where it was. We finally found it in a counter cabinet behind some papers. Of course the functions we expected from it were simple.

A Google search gives me a size for MVS of about 20 million lines of code and for Windows of 40-50 million lines. I would assume for MVS that since it started in the 70s a lot of the core code has long been stable.

I never trust any Microsoft product until it is at least two years old and has gone through several bug fixes. I updated one of my computers to MS10 and noticed a huge amount of outgoing net traffic that was not related to any of the programs I was running. I could only conclude that 10 was uploading info to an external node. I removed 10 and set up that machine with Ubuntu.

I understand that! I had my parents on Linux for a few years. But a few hardware failures and they brokedown and bought windows laptops. I'm going to push my dad back on Linux again!

They had announced a few months ago they were ceasing support to Win7. Like in the next couple of years. Maybe they changed their mind on the time frame. I'm sure they said 2017... but i could be wrong!

IBM has managed to create ultra-stable OSs for many years. MVS simply does not fail.

I have had nothing but problems with W10 since I upgraded. Every month it is something new. Bluetooth devices not working one month, a game not loading another month, my home network not working another month, and I lost my internet connection just last week. I have had to use restore points constantly and now I just do not update at all. I immediately changed back to my personal windows log in right after I upgraded to W10. No way was I going to use a Microsoft login to my computer! I may go back to W7 as I had no problems with that OS.

My dad accidentally upgraded his laptop to windows 10... and it broke his keyboard. he cannot use his keyboard at all and the computer shops want like $200 to fix it. I think it's only like a $600 laptop... seems ridiculous! I am sending him a Linux install disk. It will definitely prove if his keyboard still works. I told him it's probably a driver.

I scolded him for upgrading! Didn't I teach him anything over the last 20 years?? My hubby refuses to click the upgrade on his computer (Windows 7) I run OSX and Linux.

I'm only a mildly interested bystander in all of this Windows flap. I've been a Mac user since the first one came out, and have never had the kind of grief that my PC compatriots have had to put up with. I've convinced a few to switch, but most are like the wife with the abusive husband, hoping he'll change.

Excellent post. Thanks. Statements like this are used by government hacks as proof the people need protected by evil businessmen.

Funny, I just read this article because it was promoted in a daily newsletter-for-geeks that I get. That guy has written a bunch of good articles.

So, MS says that W7 has problems. Well my experience with W7 disagrees. I have had several acquaintances upgrade to W10. Everyone of them has had major issues. I'll trust my experience and that of people I know before trusting MS.

Win7 is being supported until 2020, so no need to change right now. Microsoft just wants everybody to change to Win10. They want to make their numbers look good and they don't right now, only about 10% or so have changed to Win10. There are still somewhere around 15% of computers still running XP. The rest are running somewhere between Win7, Win8 and Win8.1.

I don't do updates unless and until software or hardware requires them. If it's not broken ... These days I think its just as likely an upgrade for the NSA, and not for me.

Amazingly, Android runs on Intel arch, so I would like to think someday we may see something, although I think the Intel Android is a sub species they had to tweak to get it to work.