| Tuesday, August 10, 2004 |
13:32 - It's better this way anyway
http://daringfireball.net/2004/08/parlay
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Daring Fireball's John Gruber has put together a characteristically good essay on why the Mac has such a small market share, and why it's fallacious to bemoan Apple's failure to "license the Mac OS" back in the day. (Upshot: It's unclear that that would have made Apple into Microsoft; but if it had, it would have sucked.)
And so what “analysts” are really saying Apple should have done is not have made the Macintosh at all — but rather to have written a GUI-based operating system compatible with the existing PCs of 1984. This is a big enough “what if” that it certainly could have significantly changed the course of computing history — but make no mistake that such an operating system would have borne very little resemblance indeed to the actual Macintosh we knew and loved.
Excellent reading, as always.
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Brian Tiemann
