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20th Anniversary of Windows
UltimaGuy writes "When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide. Take a look at Window's past and present, and what lies ahead in the future, including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
I bet the discussion did not go like "if you port lotus 1-2-3 to our new graphical interface and help make it popular, in a few years time we will use our position to write a competing app and wipe you off the mat."
I bet the head of lotus wished he had negotiated a non-compete clause.
You are wrong there. Lotus was very slow in getting 1-2-3 to Windows. They concentrated on
OS/2. This gave Microsoft the chance to gain a lead in the Windows spreadsheet market
with Excel.
I'd much rather read Wikipedia's History of Windows[Wikipedia] entry instead.
Not really that correct, Fact is Lotus did not the needed info to make 123 work on Windows in time, while Microsoft relied on internal undocumented code to have Excel ready for Windows 3.0 (which was the cornerpoint where Microsoft took over the app market as well, before they were only niche players just being the market leader in dos and basic) All that stuff is documented very well in the book undocumented windows, at least it was in its first incarnation. And to my knowledge there was a lawsuit regarding this which just ended this year with a loss by Microsoft and a payment to Lotus.