did microsoft even do that succesfully? like i know that was the strategy, and its become a meme in the OS community, but didn’t it ever actually work? is everyone using windows server software now, for instance?
No, it never worked. The examples are web browsers, email and java, all of which remain open standards. There’s a reason Google doesn’t try this shit even though they own a large portion of the email and browser market, because they know it’ll just piss people off and bring them in front of a judge for anti-competitive behavior and ultimately do nothing.
EEE worked for Microsoft in short term, but that kind of strategy never really works in long term and the open alternatives end up better than ever.
Windows was able to secure some of the server market for a time, but despite that they never managed to eat into Linux’s inevitable growth in the server market, and these days, Linux and BSD cheerfully exist in the Azure platform with full support from Microsoft.
Two other prominent examples of this are document formats and Java. Microsoft tried to introduce Office Open XML (.docx) as a competiting standard for OpenDocument (.odt), but they failed to even properly support the standard themselves, so now we have MSOffice-specific document format variants existing alongside OpenDocument.
Microsoft was pretty much forced to stay off of Java game for legal reasons, invented their own similar language (C#), then realised that keeping it closed was unsustainable and the open source implementation their research department was cooking up was the way forward. So nowadays C# is actually even more open platform than Java, and it’s Java that is playing the catch-up game.
did microsoft even do that succesfully? like i know that was the strategy, and its become a meme in the OS community, but didn’t it ever actually work? is everyone using windows server software now, for instance?
No, it never worked. The examples are web browsers, email and java, all of which remain open standards. There’s a reason Google doesn’t try this shit even though they own a large portion of the email and browser market, because they know it’ll just piss people off and bring them in front of a judge for anti-competitive behavior and ultimately do nothing.
EEE worked for Microsoft in short term, but that kind of strategy never really works in long term and the open alternatives end up better than ever.
Windows was able to secure some of the server market for a time, but despite that they never managed to eat into Linux’s inevitable growth in the server market, and these days, Linux and BSD cheerfully exist in the Azure platform with full support from Microsoft.
Two other prominent examples of this are document formats and Java. Microsoft tried to introduce Office Open XML (.docx) as a competiting standard for OpenDocument (.odt), but they failed to even properly support the standard themselves, so now we have MSOffice-specific document format variants existing alongside OpenDocument.
Microsoft was pretty much forced to stay off of Java game for legal reasons, invented their own similar language (C#), then realised that keeping it closed was unsustainable and the open source implementation their research department was cooking up was the way forward. So nowadays C# is actually even more open platform than Java, and it’s Java that is playing the catch-up game.