You wrote:
>Windows is a pain - but it won because >it stressed backwards compatability
>above all else - which is of
>course one of the reasons its such a >pain. The best OS for most people is
>the one that runs the application
>they need.
Backward compatibility or not in MS products, Apple screwed up in at least two ways. It had a host of Japanese companies who wanted to turn out generic MACs, but it backed out of this. It screwed over Pioneer. It also turned out a lot of products in the 90s where the hardware was crap.
You may not like Linux much, but Linux is getting up there in applications, even for desktops. Using a Linux OS on my Seiko Epson PC, it's just amazing how much better graphics and colors appear.
In Japan, long before the DOS/V WINDOZE pc became dominant, people used word processors, which didn't crash and did most of the things people tried to use a pc for. However, the makers of these were slow to adapt them for e-mail and rudimentary web browsing--but you have to remember that the Internet was first a US phenomenon. Also, since the nature of web browsing changed so quickly over a few years, users of later Japanese word processors ended up with things like an internet-capable word processor that couldn't log in to yahoomail.
I still have an NEC wordprocessor which never crashes and is great for doing all sorts of documents with graphics. It can do e-mail and exchange text and rtf documents over the world wide web (but can't accept cookies, so a world of crap web services are denied it). For hand drawing pictures with a stylus, it beats any computer I've ever tried. I design all my electronic greeting cards this way. It is also a far better word processor of Japanese than any application I've ever used on a pc (which is quite a bit more complicated than a western alphabet, being a mix of roman letters, arabic numerals, Chinese characters, and two syllabaries).
>In all honesty I doubt that the business >version of his OS would have
>succeeded even without (typical US)
>protectionism. The last 20 years are >littered with better products which
>failed due to poor marketing,
>bad luck, or just failing to meet a need.
Well it was often about marketing not to the minority who were already there and knew the most, but the mass who hadn't yet experienced pcs and then connected computing.
It's also about developing the chips to go with the software, and developing the software to go with the chips. That is why Tron was to be an open project of software developers and hardware manufacturers.
Again, Tron has suceeded. It's still here (it's everywhere), including a version you can install on generic pcs. I would argue that the WINTEL pc is already a relic, but I certainly don't know what will replace it.
Charles Jannuzi
PS: my resolution this spring vacation is to get all my pcs (except my NEC multimedia notebook) going on NON-MS products and to make my daily computing NON-MS.