Heh -- sorry, but sometimes you do show your youth. This was 1999: Linux barely existed yet, and nobody even believed it was possible for it to be used as a consumer-level OS. Linux (like all Unix derivatives) was used for servers and embedded systems, not consumer boxen. The geeks loved it, but far less than 1% of the population had even heard of it.
As for Apple, it was the usual story: Apple's "my way or the highway" attitude turned a lot of folks off, and the variety of hardware and software available for it was a small fraction of what you could do with Windows. It was basically a comfortable high-end niche player.
So basically, there was no competition to speak of -- indeed, that "sheer force of inertia" was much, much stronger at that point. (*Now*, Windows is in serious trouble, because iOS and Android have badly disrupted the assumptions underlying it.) Everyone know that Windows was crappy (certainly all the programmers did), but it was what the consumers had, so we targeted it. And since all the programs ran on Windows, all the consumers bought it. It was very sweet for Microsoft, for quite a while...
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Date: 2013-10-29 06:51 pm (UTC)As for Apple, it was the usual story: Apple's "my way or the highway" attitude turned a lot of folks off, and the variety of hardware and software available for it was a small fraction of what you could do with Windows. It was basically a comfortable high-end niche player.
So basically, there was no competition to speak of -- indeed, that "sheer force of inertia" was much, much stronger at that point. (*Now*, Windows is in serious trouble, because iOS and Android have badly disrupted the assumptions underlying it.) Everyone know that Windows was crappy (certainly all the programmers did), but it was what the consumers had, so we targeted it. And since all the programs ran on Windows, all the consumers bought it. It was very sweet for Microsoft, for quite a while...