[eschaton]

Don't forget that Microsoft did an awful lot of non-technical work to "facilitate" the porting of large workstation applications to Windows NT.

If you had a large-scale workstation application, Microsoft would assign you a relationship manager whose job was to convince you to port your software to Windows NT. In addition to wining & dining your execs, they would provide lots of engineering resources: Free Windows, developer tools, and documentation licenses; direct access to Windows engineering teams to help with issues you ran into doing your ports (for which they'd strongly push you to use native APIs); assistance with choosing and deploying hardware; and sometimes even free hardware and on-site "sales engineers" for a time to work through initial bring-up. This type of love-bombing never lasted forever, but for most vendors at the point where they started guiding a vendor towards a more "normal" relationship they had the revenue justification for that normalization.

Microsoft used the same strategy to get people to port their DOS and then Macintosh applications to Windows, to port their games to Microsoft's platforms (whether from DOS to Windows or from other consoles to Xbox and PC), to port their client/server applications and then web applications to Windows Server, and so on, and it has *always* been extremely effective.

[david38]

Wonder why other companies didn’t do the same.

I recall the snobbery of the other companies who thought you should go to them hat in hand for the pleasure of giving them gobs of money.