Parlay
John Gruber (at Daring Fireball) has written an excellent discussion on why licensing the Mac OS would not have let Apple get where Microsoft is now. Go, read it. In a nutshell, the Mac lost on market share because it was new and different. MS-DOS was a success due to luck (and compatibility) and Windows is a success because it was treated as an evolutionary step from DOS. Had Apple built compatibility for DOS into the Mac, for example, by adding an Apple II compatible mode, then it would have had a much better chance of success. However, he also points out, the Mac-with-Apple-II-compatibility would not have been the Mac we are familiar with. And, it is likely, would have been a much less useable — or, to put it another way, less ‘good’ — computer.
He also links to an oldie-but-goodie from Matthew Thomas entitled ‘When good interfaces go crufty’, which itself is worth a read.
