The lines that follow that only makes the statement worse.
> (Or, if you are being uncharitable, you’re writing an MS-DOS shell.)
> An operating system with exactly one application: Windows 95 Setup.
It's basically what every DOS graphics program has been doing before Windows. I'd say the article is being uncharitable here--a setup program isn't an OS. I'm sure MS made enough from Win 3.x to cover a graphical DOS setup program.
Microsoft actually used Windows as graphical shells for "DOS" applications, it was in fact major source of sales for windows before release of Windows 3.0.
Reusing windows 3.x runtime is exactly what you're telling they should have done, except with less reinventing the wheel and being able to reuse all sorts of drivers including for hardware that wasn't exactly ibm pc compatible (like Japanese specific high resolution video)
MS didn't get rich by writing code they didn't need to.
(Although the Win 95 upgrade process from the previous blog sounds like an example of code they didn't have to write. I wonder why they didn't have the floppies directly load a "Win 95 PE" environment into RAM then run the installer on that.)
For one thing, I'm fairly sure they didn't yet have a PE environment ready to go; another would probably be a lack of RAM. Installing it to disk first lets you load as needed, instead of all at once.
We're talking about making a single setup program that runs in DOS+VGA. None of that's needed. As for the RAM you can assume minimum requirements for Windows 95. Also C compilers (e.g. Watcom) came with DOS 16M memory extender bundled to use 16MB of it as early as 1989.
> (Or, if you are being uncharitable, you’re writing an MS-DOS shell.)
> An operating system with exactly one application: Windows 95 Setup.
It's basically what every DOS graphics program has been doing before Windows. I'd say the article is being uncharitable here--a setup program isn't an OS. I'm sure MS made enough from Win 3.x to cover a graphical DOS setup program.