3 ms·
I don't know if there was room back then. Suppose Microsoft made no agreements with OEMs. I guess OEMs would have to agree on some open standards to fairly supp
by hot_gril 3y ago
I don't know if there was room back then. Suppose Microsoft made no agreements with OEMs. I guess OEMs would have to agree on some open standards to fairly support a broad range of OSes efficiently, which would've been hard but doable in theory. Even then, apps would be OS-specific, and one OS would win the market, at which point hardly anyone would have a reason to use the others. Cause the apps matter far more than the OS to end users.
And now the web browser matters more than the native apps or OS to many users. And Chromium has dominance there.
- xp84 3y agoYeah, I guess you're right that the necessary prerequisite for alternative OSs like ChromeOS to be viable for consumers was the Web eating software for most tasks. I think most people doing business or personal computing on a laptop today are doing 100% of those tasks either in a browser, in a first-party app the OS vendor made, or in a simple Electron app that just wraps the webapp (Like Slack and Spotify). Obviously not true 25 years ago. It started coming true right before Chromebooks started coming out. Arguably it's also the only reason Macs became viable for consumers instead of dying off. Imagine if you couldn't use any webapps on a Mac, nor "apps" that were built with Electron.
- hot_gril 3y agoI've used a Mac from 2003 onwards, and it was rough in some ways before large web apps became common. Microsoft was seemingly throwing Apple a bone by making Office for Mac, otherwise I think the Mac would've been non-viable. And also Age of Empires II, which later on became Windows-only.