4 ms·

Why was Microsoft dominant from Windows ME to the release of Win7? Why: It is hard to break a dominant position when they enjoy 2 order of magnitude more corpo

by Elv13 13y ago

Why was Microsoft dominant from Windows ME to the release of Win7? Why: It is hard to break a dominant position when they enjoy 2 order of magnitude more corporate support than their closest rivals.

nknighthb 13y ago
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying every operating system Microsoft released after Win98SE and before Windows 7 was on the same level as ME? Have you forgotten about 2000 and XP?
- Elv13 13y ago
  Security wise and feature wise, they were. Stability got better, but even KDE2 was better at that point in time. Same goes for IE6 vs. Netscape Navigator/Mozilla Suite. Once they got to the top and locked the corporate lock, it was over. It took years or awesomeness until Firefox got big
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    I'm sorry, I'm not at all sure how to respond to this comment. It aligns not at all with the world I experienced between 2000 and 2009. From my viewpoint, each non-ME desktop/workstation iteration of Windows during that period -- 2000, XP, and Vista and their service packs -- provided significant advancement in security and features, even if in Vista's case, the total package was arguably undesirable. The comparison to what has happened with GNOME seems particularly off-base, since Microsoft was not actively seeking to destroy existing workflows and pitch anyone -- power user or not -- overboard. On the contrary, their fanatical devotion to backward compatibility largely remained and paid great dividends, as it has for ~30 years. I say this not as someone who has any need to defend Microsoft, by the way. My livelihood has never substantially depended on anything Microsoft-related, and my own first choice of productivity OS was Linux by the late 90s, and OS X by 2006. Your apparent worldview simply cannot be reconciled with my own experiences. It's as if you'd said what a lovely shade of puce the clear blue sky was.

by Elv13 13y ago

Why was Microsoft dominant from Windows ME to the release of Win7? Why: It is hard to break a dominant position when they enjoy 2 order of magnitude more corporate support than their closest rivals.

nknighthb 13y ago

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying every operating system Microsoft released after Win98SE and before Windows 7 was on the same level as ME? Have you forgotten about 2000 and XP?

Elv13 13y ago
Security wise and feature wise, they were. Stability got better, but even KDE2 was better at that point in time. Same goes for IE6 vs. Netscape Navigator/Mozilla Suite. Once they got to the top and locked the corporate lock, it was over. It took years or awesomeness until Firefox got big
- nknighthb 13y ago
  I'm sorry, I'm not at all sure how to respond to this comment. It aligns not at all with the world I experienced between 2000 and 2009. From my viewpoint, each non-ME desktop/workstation iteration of Windows during that period -- 2000, XP, and Vista and their service packs -- provided significant advancement in security and features, even if in Vista's case, the total package was arguably undesirable. The comparison to what has happened with GNOME seems particularly off-base, since Microsoft was not actively seeking to destroy existing workflows and pitch anyone -- power user or not -- overboard. On the contrary, their fanatical devotion to backward compatibility largely remained and paid great dividends, as it has for ~30 years. I say this not as someone who has any need to defend Microsoft, by the way. My livelihood has never substantially depended on anything Microsoft-related, and my own first choice of productivity OS was Linux by the late 90s, and OS X by 2006. Your apparent worldview simply cannot be reconciled with my own experiences. It's as if you'd said what a lovely shade of puce the clear blue sky was.