Even in the 90's MS was only successful because they were heavily into
anti-competitive tactics.
As a begining developer in the early 90's ('92)
I was already recognizing what MS was doing to the market and personally was
moving away from MS.
Taking Wikipedia with a grain of salt, it indicates
Windows 3.1 was
released in March 1992. It was specifically designed to give a non-fatal error
message if it detected someone installing it on non-MS Dos.
1995 roles
around and MS decides Netscape is a threat so produces Internet Explorer. IE
didn't take the market by appealing to customers - nope. They packaged the
software with the OS for "free" taking the market via the agreements with OEMs.
Agreements which at the time said that if an OEM sold a computer without a copy
of MS OS, they still had to pay MS as though they did sell a copy.
Those
are just two examples in the very early '90s where MS had identified "threats"
to it's market position and used anti-competitive means to destroy those threats
rather then compete on the merits. There's plenty more examples both before and
after that point of time. MS has never in its history tried to compete on the
merits of the product.
It's my humble opinion that MS didn't commoditise
the computer industry. There's plenty of reasonable evidence to conclude that
the computer industry was able to be commoditised in spite of MS.
Keep in
mind:
The definition of a commodity is a product that has gotten so cheap
and easy to build it's selling for peanuts relative to a non-commoditised
product.
And given the OS and Office software have hit a point of maturity
that it meets the primary state in the market the average home requires - they
should be considered a commodity. Yet the price is well inflated above where it
should be.
Except to those of us who have moved to FLOSS.
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