Comments by "Traveller" (@traveller23e) on "Low Level"
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@simplehealthyliving4681 Well, Microsoft got a foothold when they got their CP/M clone shipped with every IBM PC, and from there they were able to grow and create a plan with IBM to work together to make a graphical operating system. That plan fell apart, but Microsoft was able to ship windows and importantly within a few versions it got good enough for companies to choose it as it was cheaper than alternatives. There were far better OSs around at the time, many of which had their roots predating Microsoft (consider things based on Unix for instance).
Microsoft has also long a policy of largely refusing to standardise, for example the wikipedia page on POSIX has a long list of things you can do to have limited POSIX environment within windows, and that's just a very basic standard pretty much every other major OS in the last twenty years conforms to. Even Linux which is not even standard with itself is usually approximately POSIX compliant. Another example is .NET, a Java competitor designed and heavily promoted by Microsoft since the early 2000s. Until recently .NET programs (so pretty much anything written in C#, F# or Visual Basic) could not be run in other operating systems. I think there were some independent projects to try to make it possible earlier, but my memory fails me on the details. Recently some versions of .NET have been made cross-platform, however none of the Microsoft graphics frameworks have (note to C# devs out there: if you need this feature, check out Avalonia).
Particularly in the 90s, Microsoft was vicious. They did things like sabotage other vendor's application suites by adding new (faster) APIs for use in Microsoft products but not telling anyone else about it so 3rd party programs would all feel slower when run on a Windows machine.
Largely due to the combination of Windows pcs being everywhere and incompatibility, many programs for commercial use were written for Microsoft with no attempt at rendering them cross-platform; in my industry (as a mostly C# dev), an important example is Microsoft's own Visual Studio which their attempt at porting consisted of creating a fancy text editor and selling it as an IDE. Now if you do find yourself in such a situation Wine will let you run Windows programs on Linux however it only works with decently "normal" programs. Things that use more specialised Windows APIs typically don't work (so, good for most games or simple tools but if you have drawing software like Paint.Net or Photoshop it won't work. Visual Studio is another example of something that doesn't work with Wine). Add to this the fact companies typically like to simplify things by requiring everyone to use the same OS and you end up with a high level of lock-in.
And yes, I absolutely agree that more programs should be built in a cross-platform way. There are plenty of technologies that let you do that without too much pain, however it's a slow process especially when a tool only makes sense in its surrounding environment. You really have to convince the people at top that relying on Microsoft is a certifiably bad idea.
Btw if you're interested in the history check out Retrobytes, he has a ton of delightfully nerdy stuff.
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