tcsenter: You're bringing some good facts to the table I wasn't aware of. Thank you. But I think that some of your argumentation is flawed, and if we recast my argument in a more nuanced way, it still has validity.
My point is that Microsoft showed a remarkable lack of foresight in enforcing that 640k barrier at the operating system level, since computer hardware was bound to grow and the 1MB hardware limit could be easily predicted to disappear.
Second, even the other products which only required minor driver tweaks would still require nearly as much cost, time, and overhead for companies to produce. The product development and delivery cycle for corporations does not just consist of software development. True, the development cycle would be much shorter. But the QA/QC cycles and full regression testing would be the same, if not longer, to validate the new tweaked drivers on a brand new operating system. And the product delivery cycles would be just as long, to bring the new drivers to market. It's no small feat to release a newer tweaked version of a software package, even if that package only requires a small change on the actual development end. Had Microsoft had the foresight to not release the vista 32-bit, companies would have had to develop brand new 64-bit drivers for these devices. But the overall time to market and costs for developing these new drivers may have not been significantly longer -- perhaps 30%, or even 50% more -- than the time to market and overall costs for releasing tweaked drivers.
Not to mention that most of these companies were anyway creating 64-bit drivers for vista 64. They could have combined the resources being used to develop and deliver them, instead of two parallel lines of development, testing and delivery, one for 32-bit drivers and one for 64-bit drivers.
In short, Microsoft majorly screwed up on this one and set us back years, as taltamir succintly said.
Fine, the original 8086 was limited to <1MB. But certainly by the 386 era, and I believe even the 286 as well (correct me if I'm wrong), that 1MB limitation was removed. But we were still stuck with the 640k barrier artificially created by MS-DOS, and we had no recourse except silly games like extended and expanded memory spaces. Meanwhile, linux could address all that memory normally and made ms-dos look laughable.
My point is that Microsoft showed a remarkable lack of foresight in enforcing that 640k barrier at the operating system level, since computer hardware was bound to grow and the 1MB hardware limit could be easily predicted to disappear.
I'm wasn't suggesting that Moore's law regulates the memory address space. I was invoking Moore's law to describe the growth over time of the amount of physical memory that can be cheaply put inside a normal computer. Memory is made of transistors, so I believe Moore's "law" applies to it. However, my point really doesn't depend on whether memory capacities fit the narrow, technical definition of Moore's law. I was saying that just like computer power and performance will predictably grow quickly in many different ways, of which Moore's law is one example, it was easily forseeable that memory capacities would quickly grow, and any operating system design had to plan for the immediate future and take that growth into account.
True. That's why it's still up for debate whether he said the original alleged quote. However, there is no doubt that most of the computing world blames him for the 640k scourge and how long it lasted.
Thank you for the information. I wasn't aware of these details. However, I don't believe they change the main point I'm making. First, graphics and sound cards make up a large percentage of hardware which require drivers. And as you said, those required a complete redesign for the new Vista driver model.
Second, even the other products which only required minor driver tweaks would still require nearly as much cost, time, and overhead for companies to produce. The product development and delivery cycle for corporations does not just consist of software development. True, the development cycle would be much shorter. But the QA/QC cycles and full regression testing would be the same, if not longer, to validate the new tweaked drivers on a brand new operating system. And the product delivery cycles would be just as long, to bring the new drivers to market. It's no small feat to release a newer tweaked version of a software package, even if that package only requires a small change on the actual development end. Had Microsoft had the foresight to not release the vista 32-bit, companies would have had to develop brand new 64-bit drivers for these devices. But the overall time to market and costs for developing these new drivers may have not been significantly longer -- perhaps 30%, or even 50% more -- than the time to market and overall costs for releasing tweaked drivers.
Not to mention that most of these companies were anyway creating 64-bit drivers for vista 64. They could have combined the resources being used to develop and deliver them, instead of two parallel lines of development, testing and delivery, one for 32-bit drivers and one for 64-bit drivers.
In short, Microsoft majorly screwed up on this one and set us back years, as taltamir succintly said.