7 ms·

(2024) Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference. Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portabili

(2024) Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference. Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. They are symptoms of a desktop market that Microsoft locked hard enough that the rest of us had to reverse engineer our way out. Market damage, not collaboration. The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach. No CS curriculum holds up Win32 as exemplary API design. No system copied it. A successful API earns adoption. Win32 enforced it.

drdaeman 5mo ago
All true, but simultaneously, if you look at it not in the “how did we get here” but “what’s out there today” light, it’s an option that can run on a lot of platforms. Not by some particular merit but because history happened this way - but that’s not a problem with the technology itself.
- bruce511 5mo ago
  I concur. The article defines "success" in the Windows context as being "available everywhere". It does not address how it got to that point. And sure, you might not like Microsoft, and you may not like how it became successful (using the above definition) but the fact that it is available everywhere is not in dispute. Of course most successful things have murky pasts. We don't necessarily agree with how it got there, but there it is. That is, at least in the technical sense irrelevant. You may prefer LP's or CD's, but streaming is now the successful way to get your music. That doesn't mean it's the only way though, and of course you are free to not use Windows programs, or play games via Steam etc. That is your choice.
asdfaoeu 5mo ago
If you listen to CS professors you'd believe that Haskell would be very successful despite having limited if none real world usage. The reality is that catering to your users is much more important than having idealistic system. In my experience even with games that have native Linux support running through proton seems to have less issues.
ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
> "...embrace-extend-extinguish against Java..." Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a different wannabe monopolist, Sun Microsystems, spent heavily to get it pushed into CS curriculums. Fortunately, the one-two punch of Linux and Intel killed Sun or we might all be cursing them today instead of Microsoft.
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  Sun was actually a decent company once upon a time. Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money for so long that their hardware stopped being competitive, so that by the time Java made it so you could run some software on it, nobody wanted their hardware regardless. It was only after they went bankrupt and got bought by Oracle that things like OpenSolaris getting killed off and Java lawsuits started happening.
  - ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
    > "Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money..." That is not what happened. Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Microsoft was trying to duke it out with them in the server space but Windows Server was just barely starting to become decent at that point so MS didn't get all that much traction. When the dotcom bust hit, Sun went into a tailspin because of the glut of Sun server hardware from dead dotcoms at bargain basement prices. That eventually passed but by that time Linux + Intel was good enough to undercut both Sun and Microsoft in the server space. With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.
    - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      > Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware. > With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed. Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive. They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.
forrestthewoods 5mo ago
> Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. I emphatically disagree. It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Microsoft locking down the desktop market. It has 100% literally everything to do with Linux userspace being a clusterfuck of terrible design. Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked. They didn't have to. They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck. But that's quite hard. So yeah. I emphatically, but respectfully, disagree with your entire thesis.
- cmeacham98 5mo ago
  > Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked. Completely untrue - Linux "adopted" Win32 because the majority of video games are written for Windows (and thus Win32). They could not have invented a better API because the entire reason Proton exists is because developers don't build native Linux games.
  - forrestthewoods 5mo ago
    > because developers don't build native Linux games. Correct. However you grossly misunderstand why why dev don't build native Linux games. The answer is that distributing proprietary software that works on "Linux" is an absolute unmitigated clusterfuck of pain, misery, and woe. Cross-platfrom is very very easy. It's a solved problem. There are indie devs with custom engines that can easily ship for Windows, macOS, iPhone, Android, Playstation, Switch, and Xbox. If Linux userspace had an ABI that wasn't garbage then adding "Linux" to that list would be very easy. The fact that devs don't and it is your primary clue. I keep putting "Linux" in quotes because back in the day with r/LinuxGaming would spam Kickstarters begging for Linux support that's what they asked for. Of course there is no such thing as shipping for Linux. There is the Linux kernel and glibc and a kajillion different distros that are all unique and terrible in an myriad of different ways. And it turns out that Linux is such a minefield clusterfuck that the actually best ABI is Win32. It'd be great if Linux designed a new ABI that was better. Seriously, that'd be awesome. But in the meantime Win32 it is!
- 5mo ago
modeless 5mo ago
The point is not that Win32 is exemplary. The point is that it's compatible. More compatible, in some cases, than native apps for non-Windows platforms. A Win32 binary that runs in Wine is likely to work on more Linux distros than a native Linux binary, due to decisions made by glibc and distro maintainers over the years.
- arcfour 5mo ago
  Uh, no, a Win32 binary will run in Wine because of the concerted effort of thousands of talented developers for more than a decade, painstakingly reimplemting Win32 into a a compatibility layer for it to run on Linux. There has been little to no interest in doing the reverse, at least until WSL, which is just containers anyways. (WSfU barely counts as an "attempt.") I would hardly consider anything relying on a compatibility shim "compatible." Especially since Wine is not a perfect shim!
  - Asmod4n 5mo ago
    glibc is the main reason linux on the desktop has such a low adoption rate. you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. glibc only targets one audience, one which can recompile its apps when needed. What linux badly needs is a stable ABI for Userspace Apps, and Win32 is just that sadly.
    - WhyNotHugo 5mo ago
      Use statically compiled musl :)
      - Asmod4n 5mo ago
        Can’t run most desktops apps that way, nor apps that depend on mesa.
    - arcfour 5mo ago
      > you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. Sure you can! It's called AppImage or Flatpak or Snap! I'm also not sure why compiling is treated as some taboo? It's not like Windows where it's actually impossible to set up a toolchain. Your distro comes with one installed! So that means you can run a single installer file, just like in Windows, except this is a shell script or anything else—and it can just compile and link everything for you, quite easily! The user doesn't have to know or understand how this works at all. Why is that bad? It's bad to run binary blobs...! It's good to tailor your software to your specific environment and hardware!
pjmlp 5mo ago
Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,... I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it wasn't for gaming and .NET, I would probably be on macOS instead. Taking care of Linux deployments is part of my job, so I know pretty well how it goes today, don't need the have you tried standard Linux forum replies.
- arka2147483647 5mo ago
  > Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. > Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. It is a huge hassle to make a new build to a new platform. You double build system, release management, and testing. Compared to just one plat. Games are complicated, and testing all the dynamic behaviour is also complicated. Making just a Win32 build really saves resources. Also Win32 has been a stable api for a long time. Linux apis tend to change, and old games don't get re-built. The win32 build is therefore also provably a lot more long lived, compered to anything you build on linux. Thats also important because of the Dont Kill Games effort and so on.
  - dlcarrier 5mo ago
    Microsoft releases new APIs too, but no one uses them, especially not games.
    - pjmlp 5mo ago
      XDK, GDK and Agility SDK are also part of API updates.
      - Jach 5mo ago
        And Unreal Engine 5 needs the Agility SDK, creating problems where games wouldn't run if your Windows version wasn't new enough. (Same as the typically encountered glibc problem of the user having an older version than the build needs, really.) (I think most of those particular issues were "solved" now with Win10 being EOL and so the developers just rub their hands of it and say "upgrade". Or use Linux and Steam, where no thanks to MS or the gamedevs themselves, games old and new can just work.) Dependency hell comes for everyone, win32 may be stable but the broader ecosystem for Windows is little better than anything else. I say little because at least MS does still commit to a lot of backwards compatibility and ensuring some very old DLLs are still part of new Windows 11 installs. As another comment notes some older Humble Bundle linux builds just don't work anymore on modern systems; some of those are just because they assumed a particular libjpg or libxml or whatever would be part of the base distro install and be around indefinitely. Bad assumption. But fixable the same way as missing DLLs from Windows builds.
nurettin 5mo ago
winapi introduced event based programming to the masses and took it to the next level. You could argue that they weren't the first, but blanket singling it out as bad design makes no sense. This control flow has been taught everywhere and is the basis of node's async loop (node waits on io, winapi waits on kb/mouse/timers) so "no system copied it" is complete ignorance. It is the first thing I think of when I'm designing an async flow.
MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago
> The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. This is always the case.
liquid_thyme 5mo ago
Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it still works today without any modification. With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking or some other craziness, or open up your source code and let someone else take the headache. Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies. And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module. >The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach. Windows has broad hardware compatibility, a stable enough application platform (see above), aggressive backward compatibility, a large developer ecosystem, and distribution through OEMs. Those are technical merits, even if they are not the only merits.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- RandomGerm4n 5mo ago
  You can also simply use Flatpak with the Freedesktop Runtime. It runs everywhere regardless of the distribution. For games Steam offers something similar with the Steam Runtimes. You simply develop for that one container and the software will still be running in 20 years. Even though, of course, making software proprietary isn’t best practice. If you make everything open source from the start the various Linux distributions and users can adapt it themselves for their distribution and eventually modernize it as well.
  - Silphendio 5mo ago
    From the flatpak docs: > A given branch of the Freedesktop runtime has a 2 year support period after which they are declared EOL.
gorjusborg 5mo ago
Came to say similar. We should see the success of Wine/Proton as success hard won despite attempts to lock software in to Microsoft's business, not some triumph of design or something beneficial MSFT did.
didntcheck 5mo ago
> Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference. "Win32 is the only stable Linux desktop API" has been a common observation in the Linux community for years. I'm not sure why you're acting like it's a Microsoft-sponsored smear Microsoft may have indeed won first place via dirty anticompetitive tricks, but Linux/*nix would need a similarly stable API first in order to have won at all. And obviously plenty of companies and initiatives have tried (from Red Hat to Valve), and yet progress has still been glacial Also nobody's saying it's a particularly good API, but it is stable. As "Worse is better" famously observed, the technical elegance of a standard has barely any effect on its adoption, versus more boring social and commercial factors

drdaeman 5mo ago

All true, but simultaneously, if you look at it not in the “how did we get here” but “what’s out there today” light, it’s an option that can run on a lot of platforms. Not by some particular merit but because history happened this way - but that’s not a problem with the technology itself.

bruce511 5mo ago
I concur. The article defines "success" in the Windows context as being "available everywhere". It does not address how it got to that point. And sure, you might not like Microsoft, and you may not like how it became successful (using the above definition) but the fact that it is available everywhere is not in dispute. Of course most successful things have murky pasts. We don't necessarily agree with how it got there, but there it is. That is, at least in the technical sense irrelevant. You may prefer LP's or CD's, but streaming is now the successful way to get your music. That doesn't mean it's the only way though, and of course you are free to not use Windows programs, or play games via Steam etc. That is your choice.

asdfaoeu 5mo ago

If you listen to CS professors you'd believe that Haskell would be very successful despite having limited if none real world usage. The reality is that catering to your users is much more important than having idealistic system. In my experience even with games that have native Linux support running through proton seems to have less issues.

ThrowawayB7 5mo ago

> "...embrace-extend-extinguish against Java..." Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a different wannabe monopolist, Sun Microsystems, spent heavily to get it pushed into CS curriculums. Fortunately, the one-two punch of Linux and Intel killed Sun or we might all be cursing them today instead of Microsoft.

AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
Sun was actually a decent company once upon a time. Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money for so long that their hardware stopped being competitive, so that by the time Java made it so you could run some software on it, nobody wanted their hardware regardless. It was only after they went bankrupt and got bought by Oracle that things like OpenSolaris getting killed off and Java lawsuits started happening.
- ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
  > "Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money..." That is not what happened. Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Microsoft was trying to duke it out with them in the server space but Windows Server was just barely starting to become decent at that point so MS didn't get all that much traction. When the dotcom bust hit, Sun went into a tailspin because of the glut of Sun server hardware from dead dotcoms at bargain basement prices. That eventually passed but by that time Linux + Intel was good enough to undercut both Sun and Microsoft in the server space. With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.
  - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    > Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware. > With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed. Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive. They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.

forrestthewoods 5mo ago

> Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. I emphatically disagree. It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Microsoft locking down the desktop market. It has 100% literally everything to do with Linux userspace being a clusterfuck of terrible design. Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked. They didn't have to. They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck. But that's quite hard. So yeah. I emphatically, but respectfully, disagree with your entire thesis.

cmeacham98 5mo ago
> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked. Completely untrue - Linux "adopted" Win32 because the majority of video games are written for Windows (and thus Win32). They could not have invented a better API because the entire reason Proton exists is because developers don't build native Linux games.
- forrestthewoods 5mo ago
  > because developers don't build native Linux games. Correct. However you grossly misunderstand why why dev don't build native Linux games. The answer is that distributing proprietary software that works on "Linux" is an absolute unmitigated clusterfuck of pain, misery, and woe. Cross-platfrom is very very easy. It's a solved problem. There are indie devs with custom engines that can easily ship for Windows, macOS, iPhone, Android, Playstation, Switch, and Xbox. If Linux userspace had an ABI that wasn't garbage then adding "Linux" to that list would be very easy. The fact that devs don't and it is your primary clue. I keep putting "Linux" in quotes because back in the day with r/LinuxGaming would spam Kickstarters begging for Linux support that's what they asked for. Of course there is no such thing as shipping for Linux. There is the Linux kernel and glibc and a kajillion different distros that are all unique and terrible in an myriad of different ways. And it turns out that Linux is such a minefield clusterfuck that the actually best ABI is Win32. It'd be great if Linux designed a new ABI that was better. Seriously, that'd be awesome. But in the meantime Win32 it is!
5mo ago

modeless 5mo ago

The point is not that Win32 is exemplary. The point is that it's compatible. More compatible, in some cases, than native apps for non-Windows platforms. A Win32 binary that runs in Wine is likely to work on more Linux distros than a native Linux binary, due to decisions made by glibc and distro maintainers over the years.

arcfour 5mo ago
Uh, no, a Win32 binary will run in Wine because of the concerted effort of thousands of talented developers for more than a decade, painstakingly reimplemting Win32 into a a compatibility layer for it to run on Linux. There has been little to no interest in doing the reverse, at least until WSL, which is just containers anyways. (WSfU barely counts as an "attempt.") I would hardly consider anything relying on a compatibility shim "compatible." Especially since Wine is not a perfect shim!
- Asmod4n 5mo ago
  glibc is the main reason linux on the desktop has such a low adoption rate. you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. glibc only targets one audience, one which can recompile its apps when needed. What linux badly needs is a stable ABI for Userspace Apps, and Win32 is just that sadly.
  - WhyNotHugo 5mo ago
    Use statically compiled musl :)
    - Asmod4n 5mo ago
      Can’t run most desktops apps that way, nor apps that depend on mesa.
  - arcfour 5mo ago
    > you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. Sure you can! It's called AppImage or Flatpak or Snap! I'm also not sure why compiling is treated as some taboo? It's not like Windows where it's actually impossible to set up a toolchain. Your distro comes with one installed! So that means you can run a single installer file, just like in Windows, except this is a shell script or anything else—and it can just compile and link everything for you, quite easily! The user doesn't have to know or understand how this works at all. Why is that bad? It's bad to run binary blobs...! It's good to tailor your software to your specific environment and hardware!

pjmlp 5mo ago

Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,... I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it wasn't for gaming and .NET, I would probably be on macOS instead. Taking care of Linux deployments is part of my job, so I know pretty well how it goes today, don't need the have you tried standard Linux forum replies.

arka2147483647 5mo ago
> Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. > Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. It is a huge hassle to make a new build to a new platform. You double build system, release management, and testing. Compared to just one plat. Games are complicated, and testing all the dynamic behaviour is also complicated. Making just a Win32 build really saves resources. Also Win32 has been a stable api for a long time. Linux apis tend to change, and old games don't get re-built. The win32 build is therefore also provably a lot more long lived, compered to anything you build on linux. Thats also important because of the Dont Kill Games effort and so on.
- dlcarrier 5mo ago
  Microsoft releases new APIs too, but no one uses them, especially not games.
  - pjmlp 5mo ago
    XDK, GDK and Agility SDK are also part of API updates.
    - Jach 5mo ago
      And Unreal Engine 5 needs the Agility SDK, creating problems where games wouldn't run if your Windows version wasn't new enough. (Same as the typically encountered glibc problem of the user having an older version than the build needs, really.) (I think most of those particular issues were "solved" now with Win10 being EOL and so the developers just rub their hands of it and say "upgrade". Or use Linux and Steam, where no thanks to MS or the gamedevs themselves, games old and new can just work.) Dependency hell comes for everyone, win32 may be stable but the broader ecosystem for Windows is little better than anything else. I say little because at least MS does still commit to a lot of backwards compatibility and ensuring some very old DLLs are still part of new Windows 11 installs. As another comment notes some older Humble Bundle linux builds just don't work anymore on modern systems; some of those are just because they assumed a particular libjpg or libxml or whatever would be part of the base distro install and be around indefinitely. Bad assumption. But fixable the same way as missing DLLs from Windows builds.

nurettin 5mo ago

winapi introduced event based programming to the masses and took it to the next level. You could argue that they weren't the first, but blanket singling it out as bad design makes no sense. This control flow has been taught everywhere and is the basis of node's async loop (node waits on io, winapi waits on kb/mouse/timers) so "no system copied it" is complete ignorance. It is the first thing I think of when I'm designing an async flow.

MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago

> The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. This is always the case.

liquid_thyme 5mo ago

Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it still works today without any modification. With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking or some other craziness, or open up your source code and let someone else take the headache. Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies. And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module. >The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach. Windows has broad hardware compatibility, a stable enough application platform (see above), aggressive backward compatibility, a large developer ecosystem, and distribution through OEMs. Those are technical merits, even if they are not the only merits.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
RandomGerm4n 5mo ago
You can also simply use Flatpak with the Freedesktop Runtime. It runs everywhere regardless of the distribution. For games Steam offers something similar with the Steam Runtimes. You simply develop for that one container and the software will still be running in 20 years. Even though, of course, making software proprietary isn’t best practice. If you make everything open source from the start the various Linux distributions and users can adapt it themselves for their distribution and eventually modernize it as well.
- Silphendio 5mo ago
  From the flatpak docs: > A given branch of the Freedesktop runtime has a 2 year support period after which they are declared EOL.

gorjusborg 5mo ago

Came to say similar. We should see the success of Wine/Proton as success hard won despite attempts to lock software in to Microsoft's business, not some triumph of design or something beneficial MSFT did.

didntcheck 5mo ago

> Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference. "Win32 is the only stable Linux desktop API" has been a common observation in the Linux community for years. I'm not sure why you're acting like it's a Microsoft-sponsored smear Microsoft may have indeed won first place via dirty anticompetitive tricks, but Linux/*nix would need a similarly stable API first in order to have won at all. And obviously plenty of companies and initiatives have tried (from Red Hat to Valve), and yet progress has still been glacial Also nobody's saying it's a particularly good API, but it is stable. As "Worse is better" famously observed, the technical elegance of a standard has barely any effect on its adoption, versus more boring social and commercial factors