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.
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.