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Comment by just-tom | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue the opposite. All Microsoft did was understand what the world needed. Were they successful because of their great marketing or their flawless coding? No. Was Windows spread like a wildfire because it solved real world problems? Yes. Is it one of the most, if not the most, influencial software ever made? Yes, no matter how dull and incompetent people might say it is. For the accountants out there, school teachers and doctors, it was magic.

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it was the only thing they could get. No wonder it looked magic.

Macintosh, OS/2, WordPerfect, WordStar, Ami Pro, Quattro Pro.. to name just a few alternatives.

you don't believe accountants care about anything but the market leader, do you?

Microsoft wasn’t the clear market leader in the 70s and 80s. Look for example at the spreadsheet. Multiplan was loosing against Lotus 123. (123 being the VisiCalc killer itself) Microsoft first launched Multiplan as its spreadsheet software on Macintosh (1984), it was something like the 22th or 23rd port of Multiplan! Then in 1985 very first version of Excel (Macintosh only) It was an incredible step up from text-screen spreadsheet softwares, but only on Macintosh so Lotus didn’t cared. Then Excel 2.0 got released (1 year before windows, using the windows window manager underneath!) and as people who saw it at the time remember thinking: "lotus was toast"

I studied the spreadsheet applications design history to Create my class History of Tech Design [0] and got a totally new perspective on how good the excel team was at getting things right.

[0] https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7...

They were the market leader for PC operating systems since they entered the market with MS-Dos and managed to preserve that monopoly after the transition from TUI to GUI.

And later they expanded into applications as we know today and built monopolies for email, texts, presentations, spreadsheets and browsing the information superhighway. All prior art, indeed, near zero innovation.

The accountants love it.

Microsoft used their monopoly position to expand throughout the 80s and 90s. AARD code, Stacker, Ichitaro etc.

Out of curiosity, why did Macintosh fall behind in the late 80s?

Why didn't they charge ahead and achieve dominance in the 90s?

They didn't fall behind all that much, they were just too expensive. The PC platform used to be expensive too, but then became quite a bit cheaper in the 1990s.

Yep, that's the answer. But even in 1984 already, the year the Mac was released, there were PC-compatible machines like the Tandy 1000 for less than half: $1200. And the difference became bigger with time. The Mac was $2495 and AFAIK the lowest it got was around $1400 in the 80s. Plus, the Mac was not upgradeable.

Which is why we all use wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3

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