You’re exhibiting a serious hindsight bias. The monopoly of Wintel (remember how they were often viewed as inseparable) was full and complete. The only thing that made a dent was a rise in mobile that made the desktop less relevant and the incredible success of Google. All through the nineties though Microsoft’s monopoly on consumer level computing was complete and unshakable. A couple of major slip ups with the ActiveX rollout and their fumbling with mobile is a happy accident of history as we were very close to having a Standard Oil of computing which the feds would very likely do nothing about as the twenty first century robber barons got much wiser about playing the feds to their advantage. Microsoft’s Antitrust trial being the prime example.
We still see the echos of it to this day as PC based gaming is confined to the closed platform of Microsoft DirectX as they managed to squeeze out and nearly kill off OpenGL. To this day no alternative has threatened this monopoly as Linux and OSX gaming has been utterly subdued by Windows and never took a foothold.
I agree it "felt" like wintel was unstoppable in the 90s. But (as we know from hindsight) it was in fact an illusion. In retrospect it's totally obvious why. It wasn't an accident of history that virutal machines (especially Javascript) won.
There was no "slipup with ActiveX rollout" - it worked fine on a single CPU architecture and did what it was supposed to do. But it was never going to have adequate security to be widely used on the low-trust web, and i86 was never going to take over mobile. It was a technology dead end.
So you'd be fair to talk about how things felt in the 90s, but the current state of the world is not an "accident of history".
>We still see the echos of it to this day as PC based gaming is confined to the closed platform of Microsoft DirectX as they managed to squeeze out and nearly kill off OpenGL. To this day no alternative has threatened this monopoly as Linux and OSX gaming has been utterly subdued by Windows and never took a foothold.
There's lots of 3D graphics in the majority of my Steam library that I can play on my MacBook.
We still see the echos of it to this day as PC based gaming is confined to the closed platform of Microsoft DirectX as they managed to squeeze out and nearly kill off OpenGL. To this day no alternative has threatened this monopoly as Linux and OSX gaming has been utterly subdued by Windows and never took a foothold.