Number 196 - September 1999

Windows 3.1 Still Useful
by Carrington Dixon
Microsoft is certainly trying hard to make 16-bit Windows go away. I do not think that they can manage it in the short term; say, the next two or three years.     There remain a lot of people happy to continue running their old 386 and 486 machines using Windows 3.1. These machines are no longer current state-of-the-art, but they still do everything they did back when they were state-of-the-art. Many people are perfectly happy with how their old software performs on their old machine. There are people out there still running DOS. There are even a few hardy sould who are still running CP/M.     Of course, most of these people are not buying new software. If they were the only ones running Windows 3.1 Microsoft could breathe easy. However, there are a lot of small to medium sized businesses that do not intend to replace their entire PC inventory just to please some software vendor. These businesses are still buying software, if only incrementally as they grow. Somebody is going to have to supply software to these people.	There is little doubt that the Windows 9x user interface is an improvement over the old interface. There is even less doubt that the 32-bit programming environment makes many programming tasks much simpler. this has persuaded a lot of people to make the move from Windows 3.1 to Windows 9x.     If you are buying a new machine, it will almost certainly come with Windows 95 installed. As people replace their old 386 and 486 machines with new Pentium (and beyond) machines Windows 3.1 will yield to Windows 9x (or Windows NT). In one sense, these older are already obsolete, but I do not think that everyone can afford to change systems just because the old obe is "obsolete".     Windows 3.1 will remain for years to come. There will become progressively less and less new software for it. Microsoft is not the only company trying to push its customers to 32-bit; Version 2 of Borland's Delphi is 32-bit only--16-bit users must stay with version 1. At some point the installed base of Windows 3.1 will dwindle to the point that no new software supports it. I thinl that the inertia of the huge Windows 3.1 installed base means that point is several years in the future.
Number 196 - September 1999