Microsoft also used to have 90% market share. It's less impressive now that Mac is a viable competitor and iOS and Android are good enough for 80% of common tasks.
By viable competitor, do you mean OS that I can’t possibly use for work or for proper gaming? Mac isn’t any more viable than Ubuntu, which is why I have an Ubuntu laptop (But a windows desktop, by utter necessity)
(Edit: Actually, when it comes to gaming, Linux is getting better and better)
80% of common tasks isn’t enough when part of the remaining 20% is absolutely necessary for work
Can you elaborate? I never had a Mac device before this year, but it can do all the document processing (M$ Office) I need for work/school, almost all audio-related stuff (DAWs and VSTs), and video/photo (ugh I know but Adobe) that I need it to, even though its a brand new chip architecture. It can't do games but I have a M$ desktop just for that and for some rendering stuff
Windows advertising features were bugging me, so I tried to install MacOS on my computer, but Apple told me that I would have to purchase different hardware from them directly if I wanted to run their software.
Seems like MacOS does not run on hardware that is not sold by Apple.
It does; just not out of the box. They only include drivers for their hardware; You have to compile your own kexts. The EULA, however, does “prevent” you from doing such a thing, but unless you’re selling “Hackintoshes”, Apple isn’t going to care.
I work with numerous companies as a part of my job and get to see a lot of their browser windows via screenshare.
Many are MS-only shops, but a large and growing section are hybrid or in some cases Mac-only.
The rise of cloud (ie, OS-independent) solutions has had it's impact: Windows isn't required for the vast populace (MS still takes it's tax via Office365) of business workers.
The next frontier is Chrome as the overlord of the browser realm.
I'm curious what the difference is between a free text editor is and a free browser included with the OS. Neither are functions of the operating system. Both have other companies providing such functionality.
1) the text editor shipped with the OS is extremely basic. It is not competing to be the world's favourite text editor, and is probably required to have a usable OS out of the box.
2) the web browser was essentially a competing platform to the OS itself for many user tasks. To leverage your monopoly on one platform to control another is against anti trust.
1. EDLIN wasn't much different from the text editor I used on the PDP-10 just a few years earlier. Lots of people used EDLIN and saw no need for another. Also, Netscape was an extremely buggy browser - it crashed all the time. Explorer was far more reliable. It was better.
2. If it was doing essential OS tasks, then it was part of the operating system.
Maybe IE was better for a while. But for a long time it wasn't, and it wasn't allowed to stand by itself. That was the problem. It was the de facto standard, not by being good, but by being pushed via Windows.
I hope we can agree a text editor is different that a browser, word processor, or an IDE (at least nowadays). Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable. Hell, they shipped Nodepad and Wordpad, and neither dented Word's market share.
Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks. Apple/iOS is obviously much worse in this regard. But for better or worse, iOS devices are a minority in the EU.
> "Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks."
The Start Menu in Windows 10/11 is HTML/CSS. It's not a matter of "finding ways" to make it do things, HTML was pushed as being the document description / display technology, why wouldn't Microsoft use it for Explorer folder views and Active Desktop? Why shouldn't they be allowed to? You could embed web pages in the Win98 desktop background, that's the kind of embedded document thing people were researching and crowing about in the 60s and 70s in alternative OS's. It's the kind of thing users wanted with rainmeter and SysInternals' bginfo. IIRC you could edit the CSS and change the theme of Explorer folder views, give them new colours and background images.
> "Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable."
Nobody complains that Microsoft shipped the best CSharp compiler csc.exe (before .Net span off into its own thing), and didn't ship or encourage Mono or Xamarin compilers. Or PowerShell and not Perl. Why don't those things attract the interests of the courts? And now they can ship Edge, and that's apparently fine now?
What's unbelievable is Microsoft being charged with a crime for giving away free stuff that was significantly better than any other implementation out there.
As if giving consumers free tools was harming them. As if Microsoft ever prevented any other browser from being installed.
Never mind that today nearly every OS comes with a free browser. Even my Kindle comes with one.
