The other day, in responding to less-than-serious email from me on the subject, an acquaintance reminded me how hundreds of millions of people use Windows around the planet. To his way of thinking, that’s because they preferred that operating system over the Mac OS or Linux.
Well, that may be true in part. But history shows that Microsoft has not dominated a market by building superior products. In large part, they used bait and switch and other deceptive tactics to push their mediocre imitations to customers.
In the early 1990s, for example, when several advanced operating systems were available or being developed, Microsoft said that they were working on their own, Cairo, which would be far superior, so there was no reason to choose an alternative to Windows.
Cairo, however, eventually vanished from Microsoft’s talking points, simply because it was all an illusion. Maybe they did at one time have hopes for such a thing, just as they actually planned to add an advanced file system to Windows Vista. But neither ever saw release. In the case of Vista’s Win FS file system, it appeared in beta versions, but was pulled for further development. No, it won’t be in Windows 7 either.
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter. [1]