4 ms·
In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.
by bufferoverflow 6y ago
In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.
- egeozcan 6y agoAlso, as far as I know, even couldn't.
- singron 6y agoThey had different knobs available to them, and it's not clear given the opportunity that they wouldn't try it. E.g. it was less common for PCs to be connected to the internet and receive OS updates, so they wouldn't have an effective way of using a policy like that. They certainly did their best to prevent any other OS from being on your hardware.
- rightbyte 6y agoThey still are not doing it right? You just get the "downloaded from internet" warning.
- singron 6y agoI think you can argue that current day MS is a little more afraid of anti-trust action than 1990s MS. Game developers were legitimately scared that MS was going to do this for windows and start taking their own 30% cuts from all PC games. I'm not sure if Valve confirmed it, but it seems likely that SteamOS/Steam machines were at least partly a backup plan for ensuring there was a place to sell games without MS skimming off the top.
- dblohm7 6y agoNo, but there was that whole “Windows won’t run on DR-DOS” scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
- Iv 6y agoThey would have loved that though! I mean Steam was made as a panicked reaction when Microsoft announced its Windows store. People in the industry knew very well what they were trying to do.
- throwaway2048 6y agoSteam predates any windows app store stuff by almost a decade, it wasn't a "panicked reaction" to anything.
- Pxtl 6y agoYeah, grandparent is misremembering a real event. Steam did do a panicked reaction to Windows store: a hard pivot to Linux support and the linux-based SteamOS.
- Iv 6y agoSteam was nowhere near the app store we know today when it was created. It was Valve's auto-updater and match-making service. They had a few partner games using it as well. I may recall it badly but I am pretty sure they opened it to general companies and indie studios as a reaction to Windows 8 built-in app store: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377
- destrukt147 6y agoI've been on steam since a while after it's genesis. IIRC the store aspect of steam started in 2006-2007, which is way before even windows 8 which only came out after 2011-2012
- babesh 6y agoThey made PC makers pay a license fee per computer even if the computer didn’t ship with Windows. They coined the term embrace, extend, extinguish. See the history of Internet Explorer.