OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors. OS/2 was a mess for a ton of techni

OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors. OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make money from development tools. BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft. I don’t think I can be in a room with five people without getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed—it appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn’t have much of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some ways it was seen as more of a “toy” than its competitors. DEC’s business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s. Making good processors isn’t enough, it turns out. Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows. > This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop. To be clear, I’m not saying that that isn’t the main reason—just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did a ton of things right. They made new operating systems that consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as possible for developers. Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.