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Zero competition?

OS/2, Linux, Apple, BeOS, etc.

Stifling innovation? How? The "web space" didnt even really exist.

The only one of those platforms that even kind of mattered on the desktop at the time was Apple and even they were way more niche than they were today. The web space certainly did matter and it was clear at the time it would come to matter a lot more if Microsoft wasn’t permitted to go on strangling it with IE and ActiveX.

And yet there was competition.

It is similar to today, respectively we have even less choice, we have two platforms, out of which one is mostly a lifestyle company and has a minor market share of ~20%, whereas the second is dominating the market at ~80%

And no, the web barely mattered in the mid to late 90s. That was the time when it was still nice there ;)

That was the first dot com boom. Are you seriously trying to argue the web didn’t matter at that point? It was all about the web.

The web was just slowly emerging at that point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage#/media/F...

15% vs 80% these days. And thats the "developed world", globally it was around 2%.

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