Well, yes, I agree in the grand scheme of short-sighted bad decisions from 15-20 years ago it's fairly low down the scale. But I'm still firmly of the opinion that the desktop CD burning revolution was decidedly foreseeable even then; I remember a UK Amiga mag editorial from the period ('94, I think) making that exact point having a disc sitting in front of them, about just how much this soom becoming a commodity product would shake up both the computer and music industries.
I suppose what this really boils down to is:
* Win32 predates Microsoft really thinking security was important by at least 10 years, and much of the industry by not much less
* IT as a whole is terrible at looking into the future, seeing what will be viable tomorrow and designing around that.
It'll be fun looking back in 2025 to see what obvious mistakes we're making now :-)
On the other hand, I remember reading a UK PC mag in 1995 (PC Format) that argued that home users weren't going to be able to create their own CDs any time soon, due to the expensive duplication process.
I'm guessing the writer was imagining the industrial CD pressing machines, and didn't realise that writers the size of a regular CD drive were already on the way.
(For reference, CD readers (4x) were about AU$400 at that time.)
I'm of two minds on the subject. On the one hand any professional working in this field who doesn't appreciate that change is a constant is just plain dumb. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to appreciate that the computers of next year are going to have faster cpus, more ram, more hard drive space, etc, and that this will continue, as it has, exponentially over time.
On the other hand, it's difficult to plan for the future. Even knowing that the hardware would be different it's hard to know how that will affect patterns of use and what variety of new uses will come about.
If the makers of windows 95 could truly have foreseen the future of the pc in just a few years (such as the prevalence of the internet and writable large format media) they would have not merely avoided the mistake of autorun they would have built a different product. But even so, making a product that would be viable in 5 years may not result in a product that's viable on the market immediately, it can be a tricky trade-off.
Windows 95 as it existed was a huge compromise on a variety of technological issues, largely to make it suitable for the consumer market of the time. The small ram footprint was very much due to significant security and fidelity compromises in running 16bit code, for example. Even after many of those reasons had gone away, the windows 9x code base was still difficult to fully replace, a classic example of the difficulty of any "full rewrite" project at scale.
As I said, the biggest mistake of that decision was in failing to appreciate the longevity of design decisions. Design decisions take on a huge amount of inertia, due to a variety of factors, even when they are recognized as being poor decisions they can be difficult to change.
I suppose what this really boils down to is:
* Win32 predates Microsoft really thinking security was important by at least 10 years, and much of the industry by not much less
* IT as a whole is terrible at looking into the future, seeing what will be viable tomorrow and designing around that.
It'll be fun looking back in 2025 to see what obvious mistakes we're making now :-)