Black Dream

Deb writes: Being a Mac user myself, I've never understood the popularity of Windows, either. . . So someone explain it to me, too!

Elizabeth writes: I think MS products originally became popular because they were bundled in with new computers. When you bought a new computer, it always had microsoft windows operating system, MS word. That was how MS managed to corner the market on computer software, because they had deals with most of the computer manufacturers to use their software. Also in early times, different products did not work together. So if I wanted to use Wordperfect for writing documents and I emailed that document to someone using MS Word, the other person could not read my document. In my office years ago, everyone converted to MS Word because that was what our new coomputers came loaded with, and that was what the managers learned to use.

My guess it's that Microsoft, a little bit more than a software factory, it's a marketing bussiness. We all know that most of this world works around marketing; at every level, even the guy in the small town who speaks to a friend, telling him that the shop around the left corner it's better or cheaper than the one in the right corner. We are a crude capitalist society, in which the one with more advertisement, wins the market war. That way microsoft has decided to advertise its products by selling them at very low prices (even free) at universities and learning centres. Of course, this creates a dependency between the big triad: Windows - Other Microsoft Products - SQL Server, and so, when some of this students, trained in college to use Microsoft software, are presented with new challenges, they prefer to stick to what they know rather than learning something.

"Will you learn Python"
"What for? I already know how to program in Visual Basic, and it's much easier. I didn't waste my time learning that just to begin another way to do the same."

For Windows, Microsoft used another approach. As DOS was not as easy as Gates would like, the GUI idea of Apple seemed nice enough, but of course the ideals were others and Microsoft wanted just a machine with very simple commands (Remember the 3-click rule? Every program should be accessible with no more than 3 click), taking off a lot of other stuff necessary, for the sake of simplicity. And now take that to the marketing side... have you read the installation screens of windows? "The easiest Windows ever", "Integrates all the multimedia features", "Full of accesories".

The same goes to Microsoft Office, which... OF COURSE, depends on Windows to work... hahaha... and also, of course, has features that ONLY work with windows... like Internet Explorer... like SQL server... and the list goes on and on...