made, by and large, shitty products that
at best people have tolerated because they
felt they had no alternative
Microsoft Office was quite good from the get go. WordPerfect may have been better, but Office was more affordable. It won on merits, and although later they preserved this newly acquired monopoly through proprietary formats, Office is a pretty good product.
Internet Explorer kicked Netscape's ass. It only stagnated after version 5, when there was no competition remaining, but IExplorer was then the equivalent of today's Chrome ... fast and innovative.
Also people only remember Windows 9x and cry about the failure of OS/2, but NT 4.0 was released in Jul 96 and it was a pretty good operating system. It evolved later in Windows 2000 and XP. And it wasn't sold to consumers because consumers didn't want it. Instead consumers wanted 100% backwards compatibility - this was a hard constraint to workaround as hardware was not powerful enough for emulation modes.
People also cry about how Microsoft killed Netscape and yet how many people are willing to pay for their browser? Some people do, but not that many. And the Internet is useless without a browser. The irony of the situation is that many of the people blaming Microsoft for Netscape also love free stuff. And you really should do some reading on what Netscape did, because the truth is they killed themselves with whatever remained going on to live as the Mozilla Foundation, which is doing fine.
The thing is operating systems are natural monopolies. And when owning such a powerful monopoly, it is hard to not abuse it ... witness Apple, they don't even have a monopoly yet and are acting like total jerks. Witness Google for that matter and how they basically killed WebOS and MeeGo.
Is it fair? Probably not, but MeeGo is also dying because of Nokia's incompetence and WebOS is also dying because of HP and Palm. You can't blame only Android for that.
I got my first computer 16 years ago. It came with a licensed MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups. It was built by a local computer shop. It was a lot cheaper than what I could buy from any US company.
Yeah... which was incompatible with previous version of itself, which happily saved deleted information in the file, crashed like hell and (in my opinion) taught people to just mark stuff and change it, instead of structuring documents properly.
Most people don't really care about most of the things you mentioned. Office was and is still stable, useful and easy enough for most people and businesses.
Internet Explorer kicked Netscape's ass. It only stagnated after version 5, when there was no competition remaining, but IExplorer was then the equivalent of today's Chrome ... fast and innovative.
Also people only remember Windows 9x and cry about the failure of OS/2, but NT 4.0 was released in Jul 96 and it was a pretty good operating system. It evolved later in Windows 2000 and XP. And it wasn't sold to consumers because consumers didn't want it. Instead consumers wanted 100% backwards compatibility - this was a hard constraint to workaround as hardware was not powerful enough for emulation modes.
People also cry about how Microsoft killed Netscape and yet how many people are willing to pay for their browser? Some people do, but not that many. And the Internet is useless without a browser. The irony of the situation is that many of the people blaming Microsoft for Netscape also love free stuff. And you really should do some reading on what Netscape did, because the truth is they killed themselves with whatever remained going on to live as the Mozilla Foundation, which is doing fine.
The thing is operating systems are natural monopolies. And when owning such a powerful monopoly, it is hard to not abuse it ... witness Apple, they don't even have a monopoly yet and are acting like total jerks. Witness Google for that matter and how they basically killed WebOS and MeeGo.
Is it fair? Probably not, but MeeGo is also dying because of Nokia's incompetence and WebOS is also dying because of HP and Palm. You can't blame only Android for that.
I got my first computer 16 years ago. It came with a licensed MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups. It was built by a local computer shop. It was a lot cheaper than what I could buy from any US company.