Competition makes the world a better place

When I say competition is good, I am not talking about the kind of slandering that a lot of politicians get up to. I am talking about the effect that two or more companies competing in a single area has on the overall product the average consumer finds available for purchase.

Oh look a history lesson.

In the early 80's IBM began to market computers to the public. The Operating System they were using was called PC-DOS which was effectively MS-DOS with a few proprietary changes. IBM made a licensing deal with Microsoft to use MS-DOS rather than having to come up with their own OS.  And later versions of Microsoft's OS are now called Windows, but up until recently Windows has just been a graphical overlay run by a DOS shell.

The net result? Within a couple of decades PC's or PC clones are now in nearly every home in America. That deal has probably had the biggest impact on how Microsoft came to be the company that it is today. For decades Microsoft has destroyed Apple in overall sales because their OS is on more machines than that of any other company.

The irony there is that IBM came to Apple first and Apple refused the licensing deal. For a long time Microsoft was light years ahead of the competition. Even today most games and business applications intended for wide scale use come out for Windows first and then other platforms later, if at all.There were other options available but most of them were more expensive and not as widely used. For all intents and purposes Microsoft had a monopoly with no real competition.

As a result their product suffered. Whether consciously or not the programmers knew that how good their product was did not matter because Microsoft held such a large portion of the overall market share. New iterations of their software were often full of bugs and according to many, not an improvement over the software that was already on their computer.

People were more or less forced to use it anyways. How is this you say? Well you may or may not realize it but hardware manufacturers write the firmware for their products to work with the most up to date OS and often do not include any backwards compatibility. New hardware models are made on the average of once a year. After a couple of years you can no longer replace parts in your computer with the original parts. Eventually you are forced to upgrade to the new OS.

Also in most corporate type businesses, the employee is required to use a company computer with all the company approved software on it. Companies that write software, both business and gaming, want to write it for the OS that is going to get used the most.  That way they can be sure that the most copies of that software will be bought.

So for a very long time Microsoft was king of the hill even though a number of other companies made better software and even though Apple actually made better computers than most of the PC clones on the market. What happened to change all of that?

Well a number of factors really. Microsoft had earned itself a pretty bad reputation and some people were willing to go with any choice just to get away from using Windows. Some of those people turned to Apple and its MacOS. Others found out about Linux a free and open sourced OS, with much better security than either Windows or the MacOS. A number of programmers fed up with Microsoft began writing more software for Apple.

Has Microsoft been knocked off the hill? Nope not yet. But at least now there's a few others around to keep them honest. Now anytime they release a shoddy poorly put together product it hits them right in the wallet as they lose customers. If they want to keep their market share they have to work hard and put out the best product they can.

And that is good for every one of their customers, people like you and me.