“[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution,” said Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. “It’s hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn’t standardized the OS . . . I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn’t have happened.” ^
People love to hate whoever’s on top. At first it was Microsoft, now it’s Google, and soon it will be Apple.
Each generation has a series of platforms that allow people to be creative with technology without re-inventing the wheel. For the 1970s, this was UNIX. For the 1980s, it was DOS and Novell. For the 1990s, it was Windows.
These platforms don’t have to be perfect, and can’t be, because they are designed to accomodate roles and not be optimized for perfect performance. It’s possible they could get better, but so far indications are that desktop machines and server operating systems are different animals.
Without Windows/DOS we might all still be carrying around disks full of converter programs so we could share files.
Windows/DOS standardized the consumer interface to the internet and is as much a part of it as UNIX and HTTP. It’s hard for people to see that, because they hate the big guy.