> Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. And that's the point. It took 25 years from them to drop from 95% to 70%. It happens, but it's not

> Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. And that's the point. It took 25 years from them to drop from 95% to 70%. It happens, but it's not fast. And that's a long time for things to be in a bad way. > There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop. Which is why it's 70% instead of 95%. But if you've actually used both modern Windows and modern Linux, you might notice that one has ads on the start menu, keeps pushing Microsoft apps and services on you even if you prefer alternatives and heavily pressures you to sign in with a Microsoft account, etc. It's a fairly hostile experience. And, sure, some people are actually switching. I've heard more people saying they're going to dump Windows 11 for Linux this year than in the ten years prior combined. But there still plenty of people stuck with it. They have legacy software that isn't supported well or at all on other platforms, or their company is all in on Active Directory and Microsoft Office and those things don't work as well on other platforms but take a big one-time effort to switch away from once they're entangled with your business. Now suppose there were a dozen companies that had a license to modify and sell Windows, like there had been with Unix. They'd all support legacy Win32 apps but the first one that tried to put ads on the start menu would lose customers to the others. Then they'd start to diverge from each other, so there would be a call to create a compatibility layer so developers could target all of them, which would end up being something like Qt or GTK that can also target Linux and Mac, only all the developers would use it instead of a minority. One of the Micro Bells might go for an open source strategy, and then you get the Windows equivalent of BSD, forcing the others to innovate to gain an advantage. Back in the day people would use Solaris specifically for ZFS and things, even when BSD was free. What would be the downside of this, compared to what we have now?