Chalnoth said:
Today, if I want to play games at high performance with the latest technology, I have a lot of choices:
I can choose AMD or Intel.
I can choose nVidia or ATI.
I can choose a number of motherboard chipset manufacturers.
I can choose even more board vendors (video, sound, motherboard).
But when it comes to the OS, there's only one choice: Microsoft. This I absolutely and completely despise, and thus I want to avoid paying Microsoft any money whenever possible.
...
Talk about segmented thinking, it's contradictions like this which demonstrate the folly of compartmentalized perception...
The fact is that if not for the second paragraph above the first wouldn't be true; yet, amazingly, you don't see any linkage between them.
There's a
reason there's "only one choice" for a mainstream x86 OS. It's because
nobody else aside from Microsoft has ever invested more than a fraction of the total resources and development effort that Microsoft has put into supporting the x86 hardware paradigm as it has emerged in the last two decades. IBM with OS/2 was the closest historical competitor, but its investements and developer efforts with OS/2 were but a shadow of Microsoft's--so it's no wonder the effort failed and hardly a surprise that IBM
quit with OS/2 years ago.
Every other company which
might've competed with Microsoft 20 years ago in the emerging x86 markets--companies like SUN, Apple, and Commodore, to name a few--avoided x86 like the plague and instead spent all their money and time chasing their own custom hardware platforms and were quite content to leave x86 to Microsoft alone. In 1985 that strategy made a lot of sense, as "x86" then was fragmented from a hardware perspective and PC-DOS or MS-DOS software that would run fine on an IBM would not run on a Tandy, or HP, and vice-versa.
What happened was that all of the disparate x86 hardware OEMs discovered that their only hope of success was found in Microsoft, since Microsoft alone was willing to develop OS's supporting the x86 hardware they could legally sell (since obviously they couldn't clone Macs or Amigas or C64's, etc.)
So the major x86 OEMs steadily and progressively rallied around Microsoft and agreed upon set after set of x86 hardware standards which Microsoft in turn agreed to support for the benefit of all the x86 hardware OEMs. The result was that as the x86 hardware platform progressively standardized it opened up competitive possibilities for hundreds of new x86 hardware OEMs around the world that didn't exist before, which created a dynamic economic engine for competition among those OEMs, which in turn spurred a huge increase in the economies of scale relative to x86 hardware production such that x86 hardware production today easily dwarfs that of any other non-x86 platform or all other platforms combined. Microsoft's OS's have been the "glue" holding that huge x86 hardware market together.
So,
the reason you have so much choice today in terms of hardware is
because of the role Microsoft
elected to play over the last 20 years--a role no company aside from Microsoft elected to play. IE, without MS's efforts you most likely today would
not have the abundance of hardware choices you have, and the hardware you'd buy would likely cost much more than it does, and the software you could buy would likely be far less plentiful and cost much more--as was the case in 1985 when x86 was highly fragmented and so-called "IBM-PC compatible" boxes were incompatible with IBM PC's on a hardware basis, and each OEM's box required a different version of DOS to run. But today, "hardware choice" and "Microsoft" are literally indivisible in the context of your statement above.
As an anecdote--we can see that even though Apple has finally seen the light with respect to the x86 hardware paradigm (as Macs over the last ten years have been integrating off-the-shelf x86 tech progressively until now they are even going to be using x86 cpus exclusively), Apple's x86 version of OSX will be
tied exclusively to the upcoming MacTels and won't even run on a non-Apple manufactured x86 box. Yet, even Apple has elected to adopt the current x86 hardware standards to the degree that Windows will run on a MacTel without requiring any special or custom Mac environment. Apple is still locked into the "custom-OS" paradigm even though its upcoming 100% x86 Macs will run Windows natively ROOB. Even today companies such as Apple refuse to undertake the degree of x86 hardware support that Microsoft provides. IMO, this to me makes it very likely that future Macs running Windows will be more numerous than future Macs running x86 OSX--but that's just my opinion, of course...
I guess, Chalnoth, that what I'm saying here is that your comments above are akin to "biting the hand that feeds you," as it seems to me...
