• frezik@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    Nah, nobody cares about their monopoly anymore. They got outmaneuvered on mobile, and they’re stuck being a desktop OS while the rest of the market moves around them.

    Happens a lot with monopolies. IBM was the biggest name in mainframes, but their PC division made a standard that other companies would take and run.

    Microsoft wouldn’t have put as much effort into WSL if it was just performative.

    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOP
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      1 year ago

      Still, everything enterprise related or video/audio revolves around them (and Macs of course). That is one of their biggest assets now, as well as the “a perscription OS” spin they’re trying to pull on Windows. Also, their subscription services, people that do all sorts of businesses use them a lot.

      • Gnothi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Even enterprise stuff has largely moved away from Microsoft. They are still dominant in some areas like the business desktop space/office 365/active directory, but ‘enterprise’ apps running on Windows Server (and associated stuff like IIS) with tight Microsoft integrations are a thing of the past.

        • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOP
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, that’s what I meant by enterprise use, not IIS. And they’re still dominant on the audio/video production market. Basically, every aspect that is not just your everyday browsing or small office work.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Did IBM really invent the OSI model on their own? I thought the IEEE standardized that with help from programmers all over the industry?

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Hmm? I wasn’t talking about OSI.

        If you’re thinking BIOS, that was originally IBM proprietary stuff.

        OSI started from a lot of telecom companies, who inflicted their silly ideas of Presentation and Session layers on us all.

        • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOP
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          1 year ago

          Actually, it’s not that silly, TCP/IP is built on that model, so are many other protocols. Though yes, it can be done better.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            TCP/IP does not have a concept of Presentation or Session. Everything above it is just “Application”, which is more sensible. There isn’t much criticism to be had of layer 4 down, but when they got to layer 5 and 6, they were telecom people sticking their nose in software architecture. You can write networked applications with those layers if you like. I’ve seen it done, and it’s fine. There are also plenty of other ways to architect it that also work just fine.

        • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          No I’m definitely thinking of the OSI model lol

          What are you talking about, then? What IBM standard did everyone else adopt?

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            BIOS.

            They recognized that PCs were the next big thing and needed one of their own. Large companies don’t move fast, and IBM is certainly no exception, but they had to move fast now. So they took a bunch of off the shelf components that anyone else could have bought and called it their PC.

            Everything except the BIOS. It regulated how the OS interacts with the hardware. Almost to the point where you could argue DOS isn’t an OS at all, but just a thin command line layer over the BIOS, plus a simple minded file system.

            Anyway, some people at Compaq make a cleanroom implementation of the BIOS and release an “IBM PC compatible”. This quickly becomes the basis of everything we call a PC today. But IBM doesn’t get to profit off it in the long run. They sold off their PC division decades ago.

            The show “Halt and Catch Fire” has an excellent fictional example of the reverse engineering process.