>Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of ev

>Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius But I didn't >Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them. Are we really going to rehash 15 years old arguments? It's a lot easier to give a smooth hardware support experience to the user when you do it for them, if you had to install windows from scratch back then it would have been different. Windows XP was successful for the same reasons Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95 were successful, backwards compatibility and you got it preinstalled on every computer.