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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Are you disturbed my Microsoft completely dominating the desktop? 90% market share for a decade and a half. Microsoft essentially beat the US govt. Nothing significant happened. By the time restrictions were imposed, the competition was dead.

In Google's case, it's highly doubtful that they will ever dominate social. The barriers to entry for the online world are way too low.

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>Are you disturbed my Microsoft completely dominating the desktop? 90% market share for a decade and a half.

Yes, I was but I don't blame MS for that. There were no competent alternatives during the mid 90s. Apple was on the verge of going out of business and Linux wasn't ready for the average user yet. I don't blame Google either for dominating search. They (MS & Google) are or were the best at what they do. The problem arises when companies leverage a monopoly to enter another business.

>In Google's case, it's highly doubtful that they will ever dominate social.

With this news it is far more likely that they will (when this is about the number of users) if a user's only intent is to create a YouTube or Gmail account and have to accept all three.

BeOS could have been an alternative in the middle to late 90's. If only Microsoft hadn't utterly kill it by threatening hardwave vendors who considered offering it with cancelling their OEM agreements.

OS/2?

IBM couldn't get out of their own way where OS/2 was concerned.

And lo and behold, Apple came along and completely out-innovated MS and is utterly kicking their ass on all fronts. No government intervention required.

You call Apple going from 5% market share to 10% kicking Microsoft's butt? Apple has done cool stuff but it really wasn't at the expense of Microsoft.

Maybe it was a bit of exaggeration, but I think maybe you don't realize how much things have changed. In the late 90's it was difficult to avoid using a Microsoft OS. First, the commercial operating systems available were mostly niche products with relatively little software available. What was available was not compatible with what most of the world was using.

Linux was gaining popularity, but it was difficult to install and use. It lacked the quality desktop apps that are available today. It lacked a coherent and usable desktop. I think it was around 1998 or '99 that I installed RedHat 5.2. It came with fvmw2 or something. It was hideous, and that was only after I spent hours trying to configure X in the first place. There was no free MS Office-compatible word processor. StarOffice came out around then, but it was commercial and pretty lousy. It was years later that there was decent office software that was compatible with the rest of the world. Netscape 4 was pretty much the only game in town for web browsing. Fonts looked like total crap. Oh, and that's if you could even get your modem to work in the first place. Winmodems were everywhere. I went out and bought an external 56k modem for like $75 and spent weeks getting it to work. I could go on, but I really don't like thinking about the bad old days.

Basically, you were stuck with Microsoft back then. They may have only lost %5 market share or some small number, but there are very good alternatives available. Market share hardly matters at this point for end users. Whether you choose MS, Mac or Linux you can expect wide support.

It's a very different landscape for end users, as well as Microsoft.

Looking at it from a non-MS fanboy perspective. Apple has repeatedly out-flanked MS, reinvented a couple of major industries and has hugely successful product lines beyond desktop PC software, so yes, Apple has been kicking MS's arse for quite a while now.

Yeah but they were talking about desktops there.

Yeah, and Windows sales dropped 6% last quarter.

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