3 ms·
My impression is that Microsoft was a lot stronger than Facebook or Google are now. Not having a Facebook account is annoying, but there is a very large world o
by phicoh 10y ago
My impression is that Microsoft was a lot stronger than Facebook or Google are now. Not having a Facebook account is annoying, but there is a very large world outside of Facebook. If you have a website that is not in Google's index, then you have a problem. But for just about anything else from Google there are plenty of alternatives.
When Microsoft was dominant, basically a PC implied that the operating system came from Microsoft. Very few people had the option of not running DOS or Windows. People would regularly send Word or Excel document and there were no reasonable alternatives to Office to deal with those.
And without the Internet, finding details on how to avoid Microsoft was also hard.
- mr_spothawk 10y ago> People would regularly send Word or Excel document and there were no reasonable alternatives to Office to deal with those. Corel, Word Perfect, Lotus... others.
- phicoh 10y agoMy recollection of that period is that Microsoft kept changing the formats of Word and Excel files fast enough that trying edit those files with Word Perfect or Lotus was domed to fail. At some point even finding a common version among different versions of Word was almost impossible.