While reading Nikolai Bezroukov’s comparison of Linux and Solaris, I came across this part:
“Microsoft indirectly subsidized all Unixes on Intel as the de-facto owner of PC standard: hardware that any Intel based Unix is running on is created by OEMs using the standards that Microsoft license for free to all PC manufactures and the cost of this hardware is mainly determined by the the size of the market created by Microsoft OSes. Plug and play hardware specification is a nice example here. Whether we like Microsoft or not, the simplest and reasonably precise definition of PC always was Microsoft compatible computer.”
I think I must agree with Nikolai… It’s thanks to Microsoft that PCs are now so inexpensive and, at the same time, so powerful.
As from now, each time I boot my PC (I’m using Kubuntu Linux), I’ll spend 1 second thinking of Bill Gates… ;-)
