I wrote the comment and I too grew up in the MS-DOS/Windows world. My family had a Mac and an Apple ][e, but I didn't use them as much as the various PCs. As

I wrote the comment and I too grew up in the MS-DOS/Windows world. My family had a Mac and an Apple ][e, but I didn't use them as much as the various PCs. As I say in another comment, I think Gates's view was right for that time. The Jobs view was needlessly limiting the potential market for his machines. Gates didn't make the machine, but he was making a thing that was sold with every machine, and he understood that more apps means more reasons why people might want to buy a PC. One problem with the Gates view today is that if you make it easy for anyone to write and distribute any kind of app, you end up with not only a lot of low-quality software but even negative-quality software like ransomware and malware. It's surprising that so many people want to write that stuff, but apparently they do. Every modern platform, including Windows, has gone to extreme lengths to block this stuff, even though the more laissez-faire approach would be to just ignore it and assume other 3rd parties will write programs to block it. The problem was that malware was an existential threat to the entire Windows platform, and Microsoft couldn't afford to just let the market sort that one out. I believe the Jobs view is the correct one for the present era. Every platform has app stores, code signing, DRM, and other kinds of security and non-security restrictions. It's certainly easier to run random code on Windows 10 than macOS Ventura (or especially iOS), but no platform vendor is completely app neutral these days.