[Someone1234]

It wasn't cmd that was the problem (although, it is weak); it was how Windows exposed APIs to allow automated solutions.

You had two options: VBScript (which is a glorified COM+ agent) or a "real" programming language like VB6/C# which mixed COM+ with Win32 API calls (which are too hard to use for most non-programmers).

Powershell within itself does improve CMD. But that isn't primarily how PS pushed Windows automation forward, Microsoft said that every major server feature and server function should work in Powershell, so engineers at Microsoft had to look at it (be it their lacking COM+ interface, provide a new PS interface, or something else).

The net result isn't that CMD got replaced by something better. It is that we have a lot more APIs and ways of interacting with Windows features and services than we ever used to.

The ironic thing is that today you could write MS Dos-style console applications that work in CMD which provide all of this new automation functionality because of the Powershell push. Back before Powershell you'd have to hack it using unsupported APIs, registry entries and similar.

[flukus]

> Powershell within itself does improve CMD.

Kind of depends on how you define improved. I find powershell slow enough that I usually still use cmd unless I'm dealing with a powershell script.

[toyg]

If all this API effort had gone into a real cross-platform language (Python, Ruby, or even Perl which was king in 2001), Windows would have flourished. They went for their traditional lock-in approach instead, so now they have to catch up.

[jjnoakes]

Windows did flourish...

And are you suggesting that Perl would have been a better solution for a Windows interactive shell and automation tool?

Are you going for the more readable argument? Or the more strongly typed argument?

[toyg]

> Windows did flourish

Late reply, sorry. I don't think we're on the same page: Windows sold relatively ok, basically doing tying the battle for the Enterprise sector, but in the meantime it lost the cloud war and was literally wiped out of several other segments (mobile, web etc). But don't take it from me: if everything were hunky-dory, they wouldn't be busy steering like crazy towards opensource, something that was unthinkable 15 years ago.

> are you suggesting that Perl would have been a better solution for a Windows interactive shell and automation tool?

From a mindshare/commercial perspective, yes it would have been (and I say this as a complete Perl-hater). By starting from scratch, MS then had to spend a decade evangelising their new solution, with mixed results. It would have been tremendously easier to just offer first-rate support for established sysadmin tools (ssh, perl/python etc) from day 1; but again, don't take it from me: the big new Windows Server features are Ubuntu-bundling and native ssh support. This would not be necessary, were Powershell and Windows dominant from a commercial perspective.

[rbanffy]

> Windows did flourish...

Sure. Just see all those buildings full of Windows servers running Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon...

[jjnoakes]

It's moving the goal posts a bit to suddenly restrict this discussion to only servers, no?

There are plenty of Windows servers running plenty of businesses. They may not outnumber non-Windows servers, but I don't think "majority" has to be a prerequisite for "flourish".

There are also buildings full of Windows clients...

[rbanffy]

This discussion is about PowerShell, which is primarily intended to automate server management and has been ported to Linux, presumably, for the same purpose.

[jjnoakes]

> This discussion is about PowerShell, which is primarily intended to automate server management

Many (me included) find PowerShell extremely useful for automating any sort of Windows management, client or server. So I disagree that the discussion should be implicitly assumed to be limited to Windows servers.

[nurettin]

I was administering windows computers at a university at the time of windows 98and most of my automation came from ActiveX where I could register external libraries and script most OS interfaces with vb or js. Powershell is just that plus lots of objects and types