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Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

shkspr.mobi

41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#41

I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…

No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft (or IBM) :)

A lot of professional grade display screens also come with a built in computer running embedded Windows. Although for web based signs a Raspberry Pi works really well: https://shutdownscanner.com/Blog/Posts/Raspberry-Pi-Digital-...

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#42

I'm not a fan of Windows, but when I saw this post it reminded me of a picture I took at 30th street station in Philadelphia. I guess this was an attempt to use Linux for an visitor information kiosk. http://imgur.com/oULGTjJ

I think maybe it's actually good for Linux image that it's not being used more for this kind of stuff.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#46
Inaccurate title. It should read, "Why Do Companies Still Use Something I Hate?"

Seriously, complaining that an out of disk space error message pops up on signs? I have a Slackware Linux box that has been running for years. Probably ran out of disk space a dozen times since I first installed it so I know from personal experience it's not immune from running out of disk space.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#47

Because .NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs, and Visual Studio is what they use to write them. In theory, this developer could just use Mono to run his .NET app on Linux. But that requires them to learn how to do that. Personally, I've never found a clear tutorial on how to take a .NET GUI app that you've just written in Visual Studio and get it running on Mono. I haven't looked in se…

Not to detract from your points (you make good ones); web is probably not a good medium for such displays. Not always, at least. You'd want them to be reasonably functional without comms. Last I checked (I may be wrong), HTML 5 constrains local storage to 5Mb, which is precious little, if the display uses images/media.

localStorage isn't for resources, it's for data.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#50

Because .NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs, and Visual Studio is what they use to write them. In theory, this developer could just use Mono to run his .NET app on Linux. But that requires them to learn how to do that. Personally, I've never found a clear tutorial on how to take a .NET GUI app that you've just written in Visual Studio and get it running on Mono. I haven't looked in se…

".NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs" - it makes it easy for any kind of developer, that's the defining characteristic of best frameworks.

It makes it so simple, any idiot can write a GUI program ... so you get GUI programs that look like they were written by idiots.
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