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Comment by laborcontract | Hacker News Reader

There was no reasonable alternative to Windows for any consumer. There's a reason that the 90% market share number was for Windows.

Also, you could have developed whatever you wanted, but made an active choice to try to extinguish those applications with OEMs, ISPs, and content providers to squeeze out Netscape. It's truly lost on people today how Bill Gates was an absolute killer back in the day.

    > How? Just like Apple, Microsoft was only being mean spirited to SW and HW vendors and competitors, not to consumers.

The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day. People were scared of Windows.

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>There was no reasonable alternative to Windows for any consumer.

Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. Look at WinRar or the thousands of other small companies who made a living selling SW for Windows without paying Microsoft a cent.

>The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day.

UX is subjective and debatable. And there's a difference between one having poor UX, and one being "mean spirited towards users".

    > Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you.

If Microsoft could have, they would have. The only way to sell software was in boxes and intermediaries took 80% of developers money.

>The only way to sell software was in boxes and intermediaries took 80% of developers money.

But did Microsoft take their money like Apple does today?

The internet and shareware distributions was also a thing back then, where you get the SW for free from anywhere, and send a payment to the developer and received an activation key over the phone/post.

I think you're taking all of the decisions that led up to the success of the iPhone for granted. For instance, if this path is such a no-brainer, why doesn't Microsoft install a walled garden of their own? It's not due to the beneficence of their hearts.

Something that is a surefire success in one platform is not necessarily a surefire success in another. Which is why saying in hindsight "this is monopolistic behavior!" is such a silly thing to do.

Well, for one MS Visual Studio used to cost a fortune. Sure you could use whatever other -- also expensive -- DE or compiler but the end result and the ergonomics weren't as good.

If I'm not mistaken you also had to pay to redistribute or link to system libraries so yeah, you had to pay a pretty penny to play.

> Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime

Microsoft would charge you up-front for things like dev tools (Visual Studio), documentation (MSDN), server software (MS SQL, Windows Server), etc. Yeah, you could get alternatives, but it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that you started to see FOSS really take off in a way that would be appropriate for an enterprise-style environment.

App stores take a cut of revenue, while Microsoft would get its revenue before your project shipped.

If there was no reasonable alternative then why was it 90% and not 100%?

Because Microsoft injected money into Apple to prop them up and maintain 10%.

MS wasn't buying those machines. Someone one was buying them... as an alternative to a Windows PC.

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