[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

“I will admit, quite frankly, that I think Windows, today, is probably four years, behind — three years behind, where it would have been had we not danced with IBM for so long.” [Steve Ballmer]

Jeez...give me a break....how long ago was that?

Making excuses as they always do!

[Star Traveler]

You said — Making excuses as they always do!

—

One major thing, also, that a lot of people don’t talk too much about today — Microsoft *missed the Internet* completely and had to play a big catchup game there... LOL...

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"I will admit, quite frankly, that I think Windows, today, is probably four years, behind — three years behind, where it would have been had we not danced with IBM for so long.” [Steve Ballmer]

A comment on another thread a day or two ago reminded me of something: in 1979, well prior to MS's link-up with IBM in which they parlayed Tim Paterson's QDOS to IBM as MS-DOS (without telling Paterson what they were up to), Microsoft was plugging a version of Unix called Xenix. Bill Gates himself called MS-DOS 2.0 "the bridge to Xenix," clearly signaling a belief that the future of personal computing rested on this flavor of Unix [cf. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/01/31/ms_sells_stake_in_sco/]. Somehow that vision jumped the rails. Perhaps IBM drove that... hard to say, and a bit ironic in view of that company's reliance on Linux today. But it could be that the era Ballmer refers to was the turbulent circa-OS|2 era, in which Windows took its current vector. (Agreed, that was still pretty long ago.) Given that Windows is now the only surviving personal computer OS not based on Unix, the point of Microsoft's deflection from Gates' Xenix-centered vision would be interesting to know.