Why Windows Won

The other day, a couple of Windozing friends asked me, in effect, "If the Mac was/is so great, what happened? Why did Windows win?"

Well...

Windows only really began to matter when version 3.0 was released in 1990. Before that, it was important, but hardly a standard. With 3.0, people finally had a good, capable GUI for the DOS + Intel platform. Combined with ever faster and cheaper Intel processors and the Clone Wars (which began when Compaq slashed prices across the board to prevent upstarts like Gateway 2000 doing to them what Compaq itself had done to IBM), users could afford "byte for the buck" computing power that would have been unbelievable only a few years before.

After IBM shot itself in the head with the PS2/OS2 debacle, the "leadership" of the PC industry fell to the Clonemakers, who then went at each other tooth and claw, creating a frenzy of price/performance competition that remains with us today.

I've been using Windows since version 2.0. Nobody I know has ever actually considered it superior to the Amiga, Mac, Unix, NeXTStep, or what have you...

I think Windows triumphed for these reasons:

1) The only REAL competition, Apple (sorry, Amiga fans), took itself out of the running by sticking to a controlled, proprietary architecture and moving the Macs "upscale" when Intel computers were becoming more affordable by the day.

2) MS-DOS. Yes, I know. I didn't like it either. But for vast numbers of people, Microsoft's command-line mediocrity WAS computing (Microsoft didn't even invent it, but that's another story). Since Windows worked "on top of" DOS, you could have a GUI and not have to buy a new computer - hell, you could even keep your old DOS software and run it outside of the Windows environment.

3) OS/2. The worst fiasco in the history of software, it took IBM off the playing field for years. Read Paul Carroll's book BIG BLUES to learn the whole sorry tale. So, let's look at Microsoft in the early '90s. Their two chief GUI competitors are Apple and IBM. Apple is playing a whole different game, and IBM has torpedoed its own ship. MS-DOS, their existing OS, runs the vast majority of the world's personal computers. And their GUI, Windows, has - at version 3 - finally found its legs.

Windows inched towards the Macintosh GUI for years. With 3.0, it was more than apparent. Certainly Apple thought so, because they promptly sued Microsoft for it - and lost after years of drawn-out courtroom wrangling. Bill Gates (and his counterparts at Intel) placed their bets on the idea that if your competition makes a gorgeous machine that costs a fortune, and you make an adequate machine that is affordable to multitudes of people, you will win.

People were willing to pay a premium for the Mac's capabilities in the days of DOS and early Windows, when it was the only good GUI show in town. But as Windows improved and prices dropped to the point where a capable Wintel computer cost less than HALF of what a medium-level Mac did, it became harder and harder to justify spending the price of a good used car on a Macintosh.

In the office environment, the situation was even worse. With the exception of desktop publishing, businesses had no need for a GUI, and they sure as hell weren't going to pay what Apple was asking. On top of that was the ascension of Novell Netware to the LAN OS throne - with a command-line interface straight out of DOS. The Macintosh and GUIs in general were irrelevant to Netware. You could configure Macs for Netware's IPX protocol and attach them to Netware LANs, if you wanted to. But that's the crux of it. Why WOULD you have wanted to?

Apart from aesthetics, why would the average 1990 business user buy a Mac when they could get a Wintel (or even DOS) box that did what they needed a computer to do - for a fraction of the Mac's price, ran more software, was infinitely configurable, and on top of that, was by that time firmly established as the industry standard?

Some argue that, were it not for the killer Mac+PageMaker+LaserWriter combination opening a whole new personal computing arena (desktop publishing), Apple would have been ground into hamburger in the late '80s. I wouldn't go that far, but it's sobering to remember that the Mac, originally, was not a sales hit. Only with DTP - the Mac's killer app, so to speak - did Macs really begin to move.