[beagle3]

The sentiment of "the better product will win" is understandable, but wrong as you present it.

Microsoft managed to gain a monopoly (legally or illegally - doesn't matter) and has used it to illegally keep others out, and network effects now (and for the past 20 years) have been that "goodness" measure - technical mediocrity had been sufficient (although recently they have been doing a lot of excellent technical work since the horrible 2000's)

In every single field Microsoft has not been able to leverage their monopoly (e.g. Phones) they are not in a dominant position, even though in some they maintain a competitive one (Xbox one, c#, SQL server)

[csydas]

This is very true, since the idea of meritocracy doesn't do a lot to overcome business inertia of being in a Microsoft Environment.

If there is a Linux solution that in every way exceeds a Microsoft Solution from a technical and price standpoint, you still need to weigh in the transition costs, employee costs, and the long term effect of changing. It's not always as simple as "X is better than Microsoft's Y, people will use it." There are far more things that get considered, and you can get tied down pretty heavily when your entire workflow and operations rely on a single product or vendor.

The longer you've been using a product, the harder it is to get away from it. It's not that Linux isn't good or making a lot of cool progress in all realms, it's that Microsoft does "good enough" and the transition isn't seamless enough for many use cases.

[averagewall]

Part of why they succeeded was by being first. Linux was certainly much worse than Windows in the early days when people still used DOS together with Windows. Being first means it was massively better for those people at that time.

Plan9 lost out to Linux, perhaps partly by being too late. Do we blame Linux for being horrible?

[beagle3]

As a user of both circa 1994 - no, Linux was definitely not worse. It was about a thousand times more stable, though it lacked e.g. A word processor.

When Microsoft produced win 2 and 3, they unfairly (and likely illegally) used their DOS and then Windows monopoly to stop competitors (DR DOS, BeOS, a few lesser known ones); they later used the Windows monopoly to embed IE and kill Netscape. It didn't matter that IE was, in fact, a better browser - everyone wanted Netscape, and it was only with the IE4 merge into the OS that Microsoft took the internet.

I was involved with one of the smaller and less famous Microsoft victims at the time, and I can assure you that regardless of technical merits, MS made very significant progress by playing dirty.

They paid billions in court for it, but economically it was worth it to them.