My theory: Microsoft triumphed by basically adopting the Macintosh approach. More power to them!
Fact is, much has been opined about why MS succeeded, about what effect the Mac had, about the value of command line vs. WYSIWYG and GUIs, about alleged bundling of programs, etc.
Some background for my beliefs and biases:
--an Intel employee from 1974 to 1986, when I moved to the beach to do what I wanted. I still own Intel stock, so I am obviously glad to see it do well.
-- a user of PCs since 1983 (as well as a home-built SOL PC, corporate use of a PDP 11/34A, and my lab's VAX 11/780 running VMS. I also gave a presentation on Unix to our group in 1978)
-- I began using WYSIWYG / GUI systems in 1984, with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. DOS was a major step backward, Unix was not economically available in the mid-80s, and the Macintosh was, despite its limits, the closest thing to what I had gotten used to that was personally affordable.
-- a user of Windows 1.0 (barf), Microsoft Word 1.0 for the PC in 1983-4, and a user of all Word and Excel versions afterwards.
-- most importantly, a user of Macs since 1985 and a current owner of half a dozen (Titanium Powerbook, PowerMac tower, iBook, and several older machines). I do all of my work on my Macs, which have this kind of software: OS X, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), AppleWorks (integrated programs), Mathematica 4.1, FrameMaker, Smalltalk, Virtual PC (running Windows 98 SE), and a whole slew of other applications and utilities. I find OS X, based on a robust Unix (BSD) foundation, to be a joy to use.
OK, so why did Microsoft triumph over Wingz, dBase, Symphony, and all the rest?
First, they'd worked with Apple from the early 80s on what was to become the Macintosh. (Insert usual history about PARC, the Lisa, Jef Raskin, etc.) In particular, they were already tuning Microsoft Word to better use a windowed environment. Remember that Apple was already bundling MacWrite in for free. No greater advantage can be imagined. And yet when Microsoft Word for the Mac came out, as version 1.05, Mac users _flocked_ to it (this would have been around 1986). Because it was _better_, not because MS had some monopolistic lock on the Mac market (they clearly did not).
Second, MS saw the future of user interfaces and began moving all of their applications toward this future. PowerPoint and Excel were initially standalone products for the _Mac_ (never forget this), using the Mac look and feel and commands universal acrosss apps. (As all successful Mac programs were doing...it was derided by some DOSheads at the time, but it was powerfully liberating to know that all apps opened files in the same way, saved them, enabled cut and paste between apps, etc. Don't forget how far advanced this was in 1986-88, say, over what DOS users were struggling with. (A friend of mine, Paul Engel, witnessed this ability to cut a graphic from a paint program, like MacPaint, and paste it into a word processor, like Word. And he witnessed windows seamlesslessly spanning my two monitors, color and black and white. He was impressed...even though he was, and is, a strong DOS and Windows advocate.)
Third, MS often introduced a product which was flawed in some way on the first rev. But rather than move on to some other program, or just introducting maintenance upgrades, they slogged on and didn't stop refining the product. The result was often that MS "got it right" while other companies were blaming others, or blaming MS.
Fourth, so by the time a usable Windows was available, Windows 3.0 and then especially 3.1, Microsoft and other Macintosh developers already had a powerful set of graphics-intensive apps which could use the Mac-like interface of Windows:
-- from Microsoft: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and database packages (not my special interest, so I won't try to remember names)
-- from Aldus: Pagemaker (developed for the Mac, of course). Though many of you may not remember Pagemaker, it was a tremendously important program in the mid-to-late 80s, defining the "desktop publishing" business (along with the Apple LaserWriter, a true Adobe PostScript printer when H-P and Canon were sellling "cartridge font" laser printers)
-- speaking of Adobe, it gots its start on the Mac: PostScript, PhotoShop, etc.
-- from others: Illustrator, Painter, QuarkExpress, and so on.
Fact is, many of the core programs that made the "real" Windows launch successful, circa 1990-91 (the earlier versions being toy products), had been developed and had been successful on the Mac. And Microsoft was no laggard.
Fifth, Microsoft kept to a coherent vision that was very Mac-like.
(Borland, by the way, was _not_ as coherent in their development, and had no common interface guidelines. Sidekick, Paradox, Prolog, their spreadsheet (whose names escapes me at the moment), all were not as uniformly designed as were the MS products. )
I'm certainly not saying that Apple and the Mac were necessary for Microsoft's success. Charles Simonyi, who led the Word team, had been at PARC and had worked on PARC's word processing system for the Alto. So he certainly knew where things were going.
But it helped MS a lot to have a platform like the Mac to actual develop real revenue products for, and then port them over to Windows.
(Now of course this is not the direction. But it certainly was in the first few years of Windows 3.x.)
These reasons all combine to explain the success of Microsoft in the _applications_ area, besides just the OS area.
--Tim May |
