There's only one reason that MS has the market share they do, and it's quite
simple: IBM. It works like this; 1)IBM comes up with the PC. 2)Asks MS to
provide OS. 3)MS pays SCP to be able to port 86-DOS to the IBM PC, later
buys rights to DOS, yadda yadda yadda. 4)The PC is cloned, and all of the PC
clone makers come to MS and pay them to have the same OS as IBM. 5)Due to PC
being far more succesful than anyone imagined, the PC market becomes quickly
locked into MS software, since without it, you wouldn't have compatibility
with old programs, etc. This is, of course, totally over-simplified, and
could possibly be inaccurate about some of the minor points, but its the
general reason. And of course, OS/2 really isn't an MS compititor, since IBM
paid MS to write it and MS even sold it with their own name on it for a
while. Amusingly, even after MS stopped making OS/2, they still sold MS
LANManager, which requires OS/2. Heh.
Will J
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Received on Sat May 06 2000 - 13:59:34 BST