IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics.
Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator.
Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them.
BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable.
For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.
But I didn't
>Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them.
Are we really going to rehash 15 years old arguments? It's a lot easier to give a smooth hardware support experience to the user when you do it for them, if you had to install windows from scratch back then it would have been different.
Windows XP was successful for the same reasons Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95 were successful, backwards compatibility and you got it preinstalled on every computer.
..by means of not having packaging file formats available at all, in true spirit of Microsoft. Hell people couldn't open zip archives on out-of-the-box XP.
Windows was plain not ready for desktop in 2001, but you use what you have to use.
it wasn't but...
>Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus
Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately.
>IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won
No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95.
>Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day.
I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM.
What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.