"One Bullet is never enough" Paper

[Kragen Sitaker]

"James J. Besemer" <jb at cascade-sys.com> writes:
> The Unix platform vendors had plenty of opportunities to unite and
> forge inter operability and other standards.  But IIRC each and
> every time a group rose up to form an industry standard for GUI or
> whatever, it wasn't long before a second competing group rose up in
> direct opposition.  Motif vs. Open look, PowerOpen, POE, COSE,
> X/Open, POSIX, etc.  I don't recall all the names and battles but
> for someone like myself who was rooting since the 70's for Unix to
> take over the world, this SNAFU was a tragedy of unspeakable
> proportions.  And MS had nothing to do with it.

Yep, that's exactly right.  Unix was on a path to take over the world
until about 1985, when AT&T decided to try to make money off of it and
made source licenses expensive and hard to get, where before they had
been available at nominal cost.

>From about 1985 until about 1993, Unix made essentially no
technological progress.  And then Linux happened.

> Why ISN'T there a killer office product on any Unix platform?

For the 1980s and early 1990s, offices generally didn't have Unix
platforms; Unix ran on proprietary hardware that was therefore several
times as expensive as PCs.  Even Macs were much cheaper than Unix
workstations, despite being built on the same CPU for much of that
time.

Unix was available for PCs, of course.  I suspect it didn't catch on
because the software available for it was very limited.

> Really, Microsoft was handed their market dominance position on a
> platter; they didn't have to cheat to get it.  And the reason their
> APPs dominate is because they've worked on continually refining and
> improving them for almost 20 years.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson produced a 70-page document describing,
in detail and with extensive sources, how Microsoft cheated to get
their present position of market dominance, and why their apps
dominate; you should read it.