From: Thomas Bridge (tbridge at domain vianetworks.ie)
Date: Thu 28 Jun 2001 - 15:13:03 IST
At 13:59 28/06/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>there were plenty of software houses around that would have filled in
>had say, eg, gates been knocked down by a bus in 1980. and instead of
>1 utterly dominant software house, we might instead have had 2, 3 big
>software houses vying with each other.
On the other hand the result of three different desktop OSes might have
been that the desktop PC market would be smaller as user's tend not to like
changing between different systems. Part of the reason the PC has really
taken off as the home user PC is down to the fact that there is only one
really affordable combination for a home PC that has most of the features
home user people require[1](PC + Windows - with maybe the Mac coming a
distant second) and that makes it a good environment for games programmers
and the like.
It is also the fact that the nature of the IT market in a business level is
that staying in a dominant position means you'll probably stay there - IT
managers tend to like uniformity and comparative simplicity (it is not
unreasonable these days to assume that most users can use Windows as a
Desktop OS with comparative ease - it's only in the last couple of years
that you can claim the same thing about Linux).
I would point out that I was not saying earlier that M$ drove the market in
the 80s - I (tried to) made the point that if Apple had split the OS from
the hardware in the way that happened with the PC clones, I think they
would have dominated the market.
T.
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