> Luckly, Linux and macOS never really could grow out of their niches to really hurt Microsoft. "Kind of" (indirectly as others pointed out) - the Dotcom bubbl

> Luckly, Linux and macOS never really could grow out of their niches to really hurt Microsoft. "Kind of" (indirectly as others pointed out) - the Dotcom bubble from a systems perspective was based on "Put these words on your VC funding paperwork and we'll throw money at you: Netscape Enterprise Webserver, ATG Dynamo (or similar), Solaris 5/6/7 on Sun E250s and E450s, Oracle Database and Java". I was at a services company doing systems work for Java engineers and built countless versions of this stack; java code was written on Windows workstations and deployed to the Sun servers (this might help explain why Java is deployed the way it is - many devs just zipped up a directory, uploaded it and unzipped it remotely). Then Blackdown JDK[1] entered the room and changed the game - it gained it's first release right after the Dotcom bust and turned that stack on it's ear; now you could use Apache, Tomcat and MySQL (because Java developers could run MySQL on Windows, it "won the war" against Postgres at that time) creating a way to survive in the money-vacuum years following the Dotcom bubble crash when things were very scrappy and people were looking to just survive the storm if they could. My services company had to lay off some 80% of employees because all the clients dried up during the bubble burst. There was a shot right here to have Java production workloads run on Windows Server (NT etc.) since all the java devs were doing it personally, but running on Linux was a much higher performing stack at the time and of course pennies compared to the previous stack even in the kernel's younger years or paying for Windows licenses (and more hardware). Red Hat's IPO in 1999 preceded the Dotcom bubble, putting them in the right place to handle these workloads post-Dotcom as they had a mature Linux offering with a business plan to Enterprise minded shops (appeal to the business folks - save money, have someone to blame if it breaks). Techs loved it because we'd been doing Linux for a decade and here it was about to take over the server world, and Java workloads were helping make that happen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java