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by kroltan 1740 days ago
And while Mars and supercomputers are cool and important for society and humanity in general, there is also no denying of the immediate impact that Windows has in most human-interfacing applications.

Supermarket checkouts, public services, small-scale logistics, health, just plain old office workers, and so on.

An undeniably large slice of companies and public sectors that do not have a dedicated IT staff rely on Windows-based computers to organize and operate their activities. Outages to those probably have more direct impact on actual everyday people going about their lives than an outage in a Mars rover or lack of WiFi access.

Just to be clear I'm not playing teams here, *nix-based systems are ridiculously important too, but the open-source base is arguably a more - democratic? healthy? stable? I lack of a better word - development process, and its importance does not lessen the importance of other systems.