Ok, I know it's cool to make snarky comments about Microsoft, but what Microsoft has managed to achieve with Windows during the 90s was a truly historic leap. They created incredibly accessible OS that could be used by the masses even without any previous computer experience. And to give credit to Microsoft marketing, they sold this product so well that they had over 90% of market share. It's debatable whether that's a good thing or not. But if it weren't for Windows 3.1, 95, and 98, I am pretty sure millions of people wouldn't have purchased their first computer for years to come during the 90s.
My comment wasn't intended to be snarky. I do not begrudge Microsoft their success. Rather, I wanted to point out that Android's success, much like Microsoft's in the 90s, is due to it being a commodity OS during a period of rapidly decreasing commodity hardware costs. "Open" really has little to nothing to do with it.
What Microsoft managed to achieve in the market with Windows was impressive. Windows itself has never been particularly interesting interface-wise, or technologically. Microsoft was successful at putting their software in front of people. If they didn't, someone else would have - in all likelihood, someone else with superior software such as Apple or Commodore.
Good heavens, that's a complete rewrite of history. It certainly wasn't the case that Microsoft created this incredibly accessible OS. What they did was make a crude and far less accessible copy of the Apple OS. What they did well, was allow it to run on generic hardware (what we used to call "IBM clones"). It was simply a strategic marketing decision that made it affordable and therefore brought it to the masses.
Windows and Mac OS both derived their GUI idea from Xerox lab. While it is true that Gates got a glimpse of it initially from working with Jobs, Windows is hardly "a crude and far less accessible copy of the Apple OS". This statement you made is the one that's sensationalist and fictional rewrite of history.
Yeah, the Apple OS source code (loaned to microsoft for the purposes of writing Word for Mac) that ended up in the windows code base was just .. uh... That was really from xerox. Honest! Oh no wait, it was just an accident, and had nothing at all to do with copying the Mac OS and it'll never happen again.
Microsoft's monopoly power originated from their success with Windows, and was used to abuse competitors later on. Without the initial success of Windows, they wouldn't have had that power. Make no mistakes, Microsoft was evil (and probably would be if it wasn't such a shell of its former self), but the initial success of Windows was (more or less) legitimately won.
Remember DOS? The operating system, if you could call it that, of the original IBM PC, and MS-DOS, the OS that ran on all the IBM-compatible clones? The PCs that took the market away from Apple? The ones that established Microsoft's monopoly?
The market was different back then. There were a lot of choices, like PC-DOS, and even other computer systems like Mac, Atari, Amiga etc. MS-DOS itself did not give them a monopoly. It was an advantage of course, but not a "competition killer". It could have been IBM's OS/2 that would have "won", or a world with more cross platform development.
