2 ms·
Windows was already dominant at the time. No other OS was as wide deployed, popular and known at the time. Most people I knew in the 90's had their first contac
by marcodiego 5y ago
Windows was already dominant at the time. No other OS was as wide deployed, popular and known at the time. Most people I knew in the 90's had their first contact with the internet through a windows box.
Microsoft may have been late to the party but, considering how they basically owned the client-side, they had time to recover. In just a few years IE ate 90%+ of the browser world.
- quanticle 5y agoYes, but that doesn't alter the fact that Bill Gates saw the web as an existential risk for Microsoft, and did everything in his power to ensure that the web evolved in a way that would benefit Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. I find the second part of Nadella's quote to be especially ironic: Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” That is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft tried to do. They tried to force their own proprietary standards on the web. It was only after they were slapped down by the Justice Department that they stopped engaging in anti-competitive behavior and created the space for alternative web browsers to grow. Even then, it was almost too late. How many decades did we wait for IE6 to finally die so that we could write web sites that would even pretend to conform to modern web standards?
- gowld 5y agoThat's not the same thing. Bad as it was, MS/IE never prevented websites from existing, or even partially-gated them by requiring them to get MS approval like console video games and iOS App Store.
- marcodiego 5y agoYes, but when IE also became dominant, then came exclusive extensions that, once widely used, broke the internet to everyone using other browsers.