Back
to the Unleashing Windows Index While the operating systems ocean seems to be endless waves of Windows 95, there is an undercurrent underneath that Microsoft doesn't really publicize. There is an undercurrent which will possibly bring computer users to, not Windows 95, but Windows NT. Microsoft hasn't put nearly as much effort into marketing Windows NT as much as Windows 95. It would, at first, seem this is the case because Microsoft has spend so much time and pre-release hype into the product only to have it beaten out by Microsoft's other 32-bit operating system. Upon closer examination, this isn't really the case.
For starters, Windows NT isn't designed to be a home computer operating system. At least not in its current form. It can't run as many of the older DOS and Windows 3.1 application that are usually found on home PC's. Games have a much harder time running on NT, and many like Doom II, can't run at all. Also, many home systems and business systems don't have the large hardware requirements to run NT. Windows NT Workstation requires a least 12Mb of RAM to run and about 100Mb of hard disk space which is much more than a lot of currently installed systems have. If Microsoft had tried to push NT as the replacement or upgrade of Windows 3.1, users would have never bought it.
However, some people predict that Windows NT will probably be the path that users will eventually move to. Windows 95 is a key component to making that happen. In fact, years down the road, Windows NT Workstation and Windows 95 will probably merge into one operating system for the stand-alone and network workstation computers. NT Server will still be Microsoft's Server platform. This isn't to say that this will happen overnight, but over a long period of time. Windows NT and Windows 95 are very different, apart from the interface. Deep down, both do things quite differently. Windows 95 is designed to insure backwards-compatability as much as possible without sacrificing 32-bit performance of newer applications as possible. Windows NT, however, is designed with 32-bit applications and high performance networking, rather than maintaining backwards-compatability. Merging the two into one is not a trivial task.
However, as more people move to Windows 95 with older machines and software, they'll find that newer Windows 95 applications require more and more hardware to perform at reasonable levels. Also, many vendors will produce 32-bit versions of their applications for Windows 95, replacing the 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications. All this means that more and more computers will gain the hardware to run Windows NT adequately and no longer use older applications that NT doesn't like. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will happen, but given the past history of the computer market, this does seem possible. If this does happen, it would seem less likely to keep both Windows NT Workstation and Windows 95 as separate products.
So, although Windows 95 has a very bright future ahead, Windows NT's future looks very promising in the long run as well. Of course, the computer industry is a very fast-paced industry, so things could turn out much differently. Many products want to compete with Microsoft's, like OS/2 and Linux. Only time will tell what appears over the computer horizon!