Re: IS MICROSOFT AN INNOVATOR?
" change would have happened more quickly without Microsoft."
That seems unlikely. For pretty much the first time in computing history the same OS ran on a range of hardware from a range of manufacturers and people could buy software knowing it would probably work. Windows95 was just good enough to bring in people who wouldn't otherwise have bought a computer.
"16-bit consumer computing with pre-emptive multitasking, graphics and sound was already available by the mid-80s in the Amiga. Other windowed GUIs were already available from DR (Gem) and Apple."
I had a number of Amigas and a Mac. Both were too expensive for mass market adoption. How much did an Amiga-1000 cost? How much was an Amiga4000 compared to a 486/100 running Windows 95? About three times as much money.
"And what did MS give the market? DOS."
Yes, and the market *chose* Microsoft.
Win3.11 drove homologation in the business world and Win95 did the same for consumers. Prior to Win3.11 my work environment had such an array of different machines and user experiences that anyone who didn't consider themselves a computer expert threw their hands up in despair. We had SunSparcs, a Mac Classic, a luggable Intel thing, IBM5250s for terminal access, a Merlin Tonto, heck even a BBC-B plugged into an EPROM programmer. Gradually we stopped using specific machines for specific things and began using whatever application we needed on a generic PC. It was a tremendous change.
"Without MS competition in both software and hardware would have accelerated, and it's likely the Internet would have happened 2-3 years earlier"
Windows led to an unprecedented acceleration in hardware design, leaving single manufacturer platforms dead in the water in a handful of years. That was possible *because* of a single mainstream O/S, not despite it. Consumer Internet became possible once 56K modems dropped into affordability and was largely enabled by large drops in the cost of telecommunications. I paid over £200 for a 2400bps modem in 1990 - how would the absence of Microsoft have removed that barrier to entry?
"What MS did was kill all competition and create a monopoly selling stupid, crippled, boring, computers"
That's your view. My view is that they enabled a dramatic increase in business productivity. They weren't amazing, mind-blowing machines, but they were just good enough and just cheap enough, and that's what the market demanded. If there was a better option on the table, that's what the market would have chosen. It didn't.