Why is that windows is so much popular in comparison to UNIX?

Answer 1

Windows has a multi-billion dollar company marketing it.

Microsoft is NOT an engineering company. With very few exceptions
(this week may be one of them) ... they do not produce new concepts.

Instead, they buy up technology from other companies and repackage
it as their own. They've gotten very good at the repackaging.

However, as any engineer will tell you, taking parts that weren't
particularly meant to work with each other and jamming them all into
the same bag is a tricky process. It leaves you with lots of buggy
software.

And this is a major reason that Microsoft software is so buggy.

However, they get their arms around the concept of "office software"
in a way that corporations can handle. Although MORE functionality
is available through Linux, it isn't well packaged and the only people
plugging it are doing so on their own dime.

Microsoft is an excellent example of why marketing is so important
in the economy. Its enough to make most engineers very cynical.

By the way, many of the other answers talk about "user friendliness",
but anyone who has had a chance to compare products will tell
you that MacOS is far far friendlier than Windows, yet Windows still
holds the market place.

Microsoft made deals with the big PC manufacturers to have their
OS come standardly on the hardware ... so when you open up
your new PC, it "just works" (well ... to the degree that Windows
ever "just works"). Everything else requires that you invest
significant administrative time before you can use your machine
usefully.

Unix and Linux have made great strides in "user friendliness",
but its hard to compete with the "its already installed" and
"that's the way we've always done it" paradigms, especially when
nobody is funding it.

Answer 2

Windows (generally) is a consumer-ready product and like what you'll hear from other answers, it's "user-friendly". Majority use it because it's easy to get started with, not to mention the amount of support and software that is available for it.

UNIX, as far as I know is meant for specific purposes, server-side particularly. Why it hasn't "clicked" much is because it's an impractical way to do computing, like you would never purchase a bus to get to work everyday.

If you want a visualization of things, imagine you're about twenty years back, and you had two choices for a computer purchase. Windows would be the that supports both mouse and keyboard input with preloaded software like a graphical text editor, maybe a game or two. The UNIX one would probably support the keyboard only, have a monochrome screen, expensive in nature, and the fact that software has to be "tailored" for it.

Clearly most people would go for Windows.

Nevertheless, I still believe that the two shouldn't be compared depending on use!

I maybe wrong on some things mentioned here, so please anybody feel free to correct.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Windows has been around a long time, is a major commercial product that has been sold to businesses and businesses do not usually make changes quickly in this area. Microsoft early on went after the business market and built Windows and the Office suite to serve that market. Changing over to another OS is a bold move that is seen as risky and expensive. And frankly there are a lot of IT people that really aren't that good. So the best they can do is keep a business running by doing what Microsoft tells them to do.

Answer 4

Windows is more user friendly and this made it popular. Common Windows features (e.g. common printer, commn GUI icons, etc) that work among all applications furthers the ease of use. This caused software writers (word processing, spread sheet, e mail etc) to jump onto this bandwagon and both Microsoft and the software writers benefited.

Unix still has its place but not so much in the personal computing market.

Answer 5

User friendly.
You have to know computers to use UNIX. It dominates the web server industry, tho.

Answer 6

Windows comes built into the computer when you buy it. Most people are not going to experiment with other operating systems unless it is their hobby.

Answer 7

its is easier to use for the masses, (unless you are refering to a gui ontop of unix) then its all about who got it to market the fastest. and was able to make it available

Answer 8

windows has come bundled with pc's forever. people are just taught that it's the standard. although, lately a lot of pc's have started to come with linux os's like ubuntu. people don't like learning new things in general. baaah.

macs have always been nix.. :shrug:

Answer 9

The GUI (graphical user interface) people lik ebeing able to click things, look at things...see things...and famililarity...what have we been taught is the standard?

Answer 10

because bill gates owns all