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A comment on Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming? by cestith on Friday May 19, 2017 @08:34PM (#14380341)
It didn't do that by being Windows. It did that by being nearly ubiquitous so that software could be written to a known thing. That could have turned out to be OS/2, but Microsoft played unfairly there. It could have been one of the Unix platforms, but AT&T, Microsoft, and others played unfairly there.

It's really the IBM PC platform, IBM's willingness to sign a non-exclusive contract for the OS, and the success of the early clones (Compaq, AST, etc) making DOS so common that raised productivity so much. Whatever OS had shipped on them would have grabbed the market share DOS and Windows did.

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Re:Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming? by Jabanga on Saturday May 20, 2017 @01:57AM (#14381234)
Windows was also much more usable than what was common before it, ubiquity aside. The Office productivity suite was also very good for the time, and represented a major advancement in the state of the art. It's easy to take what Microsoft provided the PC world for granted and assume another company would have provided it if it never existed, but I don't think it's fair.
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