3 ms·

How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from t

How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM.

Jtsummers 6y ago
MS Window's presence in the market made PCs true commodities and drove down the price for home and office computers in a way none of their contemporary competitors would have achieved. Most of their competitors were tied to hardware, and received a lot of their revenue and profit from the combination of hardware and software sales. MS only needed to sell the software, and let HP, Dell, Gateway, and others compete on hardware prices. This probably put more computers out there (within that time span) than would have been achieved without them.
p_l 6y ago
It's less about the deal, and more about MS following a pretty strict philosophy that if your software, the software you bought runs on OS version X, the only reason it may not run on version X+1 is a dumb bug in the software. Also they kept at "computers accessible to everyone", and as much as they fought competition, I have to admit they did it.
webmaven 6y ago
> How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM. I've occasionally seen speculation that in the absence of the de-facto DOS monoculture that deal created, CP/M may have been the most likely desktop platform winner, at least initially.

3 ms·

How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from t

by ragnese 6y ago

Jtsummers 6y ago
MS Window's presence in the market made PCs true commodities and drove down the price for home and office computers in a way none of their contemporary competitors would have achieved. Most of their competitors were tied to hardware, and received a lot of their revenue and profit from the combination of hardware and software sales. MS only needed to sell the software, and let HP, Dell, Gateway, and others compete on hardware prices. This probably put more computers out there (within that time span) than would have been achieved without them.
p_l 6y ago
It's less about the deal, and more about MS following a pretty strict philosophy that if your software, the software you bought runs on OS version X, the only reason it may not run on version X+1 is a dumb bug in the software. Also they kept at "computers accessible to everyone", and as much as they fought competition, I have to admit they did it.
webmaven 6y ago
> How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM. I've occasionally seen speculation that in the absence of the de-facto DOS monoculture that deal created, CP/M may have been the most likely desktop platform winner, at least initially.