3 ms·
But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways.
by RandVal30142 9y ago
But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination.
It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.
- ethbro 9y agoIt's a monopoly for those users * innumerable_similar_niches. Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice. And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."
- kbenson 9y agoYour example may be a monopoly (if there are no alternatives then Microsoft has a monopoly in that market, whether they actively pursued on or not, just as the first entry in a market has a monopoly until other entrants appear), but when talking about operating systems in general, Microsoft hasn't had close to a monopoly in a while. They still have significant market penetration and the majority of desktops, but credible alternatives exist in most cases, and more and more people are using them (thus the importance and interest in this MacOS release).