First of all, the economics on Unix systems is very different. It would cost a lot more to provide these applications under UNIX than under MSFT OSes.
Moreover, the Unix versions of these products is often not as good as the MSFT versions, and is often much more out-of-date. The products are developed for MSFT, then later, it *might* be ported to UNIX or some other OS. Also, don't tell me that you have nearly as much choice of applications on any other OS as you do with MSFT. That is the draw of MSFT - the availability of applications.
Developers develop first for MSFT because this is where most of the sales can be made. Most develop *only* for MSFT, due to the uncertainty of whether they can make any profit on other platforms. Morever, with the decline Apple's marketshare, you can be sure that there will be fewer applications ported to it. People buy MSFT OSes because this is the platform with the most application choices are. Thus, a vicious self-sustaining circle of dominancy of MSFT is maintained.
Another issue I did not address is support costs. Companies are trying to standardize on one platform to cut down on IT costs and training. Only MSFT has a platform that will provide all the applications that an organization needs. Other solutions would require a mixed-platform environment, which is much more expensive to maintain.
So, given the economics, application-availability, and safety of choosing MSFT, almost no-one would choose anything else. Yes, they do have a choice, but by making other choices, one has to sacrifice a lot. Thus, MSFT has lots of leeway to screw people before they will make any other choice. Indeed MSFT dominates every market except in special cases, such as high-end scalable applications (likely to change as NT becomes more scalable), high-end graphics (also changing with more capable PC hardware), and desktop publishing (also changing as a result of Mac's decline as the premiere vendor), and religious end-users (usually of the Apple kind).
Also note that most of the advantages that MSFT has over others is not a result of MSFT's own doing (e.g. creating great products), but more having to do with their monopoly status, which they have enjoyed for most of the time they have been in business. Sure, they could have lost this monopoly without sound executive decisions, but monopolies are pretty hard to lose. You have to screw up big-time. Look at how many failures occurred within MSFT, but they still succeeded. |
