I can see iPod and Adsense, but Windows? Windows won for very, very different reasons. When Windows first appeared, it was far from the best product on the market. It won because it was already everywhere (because of DOS). Microsoft practically invented the "give it away to ensure market dominance" game (Ok, slight hyperbole there). It took the court system to slow them down.
What consumer OS on affordable computers (that leaves Macs out) was/is better than Windows?
It took the court system to slow them down.
That was not for their dominant desktop OS, it was for using their monopoly to push IE and server products.
You can call out Microsoft on dodgy anti-competitive behaviour in some respects, but you cannot take away credit for building the solid product that is Windows. Heck, even now after goofing up with Vista, they are back with Windows 7.
Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were pretty significantly better. It's not a coincidence that it took this long (Windows 7) for MS to produce a decent operating system - they are now having to compete on quality. But you don't even have to buy the argument that Windows was sub-par. It doesn't matter, because that's not why MS won.
Just as MS used the omnipresent Windows platform to push Office, IE, and countless other products (with varying success) they used DOS to push Windows. That is why Windows won.
There's nothing dodgy about it - the point is there is more than one way to win the market, and being the best product is pretty far down on the list.
Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't
the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were
pretty significantly better.
No, they weren't.
The hardware requirements OS/2 were higher, Windows had better drivers support and provided better tools for developers. And the real battle was in '94 when IBM released OS/2 Warp. In '95 it was already game over.
People weren't using OS/2 for the same reasons they wouldn't go for Win NT 4. It was technically superior, but incompatible with what people wanted.
Win 95 had the same quality as Mac OS ... both were pieces of shit that got the job done, the difference being that you could get Win 95 for a better price and that it was future-proof (Win NT was already on sale for businesses).
IMHO, with Windows Microsoft only had 2 fuckups ... Windows ME and Vista. For all the other versions Microsoft just provided what consumers wanted.
It seems a lot of people forget just how crummy mac os was before x.
I used OS 7.x for a good while, and it was generally speaking not better than its contemporary, windows 95.
In fact it might have been even worse, at least as far as multitasking and stability go.
Windows 98 SE was actually a fairly good system as long as you didn't overtax its somewhat limited multi-tasking ability & ran it on high quality hardware (far less crash prone than Mac OS 8.x)
Of course, Microsoft used DOS to push Windows and perhaps OS/2 was better in some ways, but the Wikipedia article suggests OS/2 lost because Windows was better in some important ways.
The collaboration between IBM and Microsoft unraveled in 1990, between the releases of Windows 3.0 and OS/2 1.3. Initially, at least publicly, Microsoft continued to insist the future belonged to OS/2. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft even took to calling OS/2 "Windows Plus".[9] However, during this time, Windows 3.0 became a tremendous success, selling millions of copies in its first year.[10] Much of its success was because Windows 3.0 (along with MS-DOS) was bundled with most new computers.[11] OS/2, on the other hand, was only available as an expensive stand-alone software package. In addition, OS/2 lacked device drivers for many common devices such as printers, particularly non-IBM hardware.[12] Windows, on the other hand, supported a much larger variety of hardware.
The other question to consider is why another PC OS didn't come up to compete with DOS/Windows considering that Microsoft actually helped open up the hardware ecosystem. A dominant player with most of the "market share" need not stop a new better player (see web search). Maybe it's worth acknowledging that making a good OS is a hard problem which MS cracked better than the rest.
Actually previous poster made a good point with Vista problems - after a few years of bad press and Apple being a favorite, MS made a killing with Windows 7. Not for free.
OS/2 wasn't good enough, unfortunately. It was very expensive at the start -- and then there was OS/2 Warp which was ok, but not compelling. If the world were as web-enabled as it is now, it might have been fine -- the way it was -- you needed all of your software to work, and it didn't.
Even Windows 95 wasn't great (especially for programmers) -- it was Windows NT 4.0 that was good enough to use to get work done. It was a combination of being less crashy and having more native software available.
Agreed. From the point of view of the customer, Windows is free since it is bundled with their computer and cannot be unbundled. (There now are some chinks in that bundling armor, but not much.)
I agree. I think it would be almost impossible to introduce a new, non-free OS now since from day 1 it would have to be not only better than Linux and BSD, but significantly better.
