Spif wrote:
so your point, basically, is that the public will settle for whatever it can get, and get easiest and cheapest, when it comes to software and operating systems in particular.
It always puzzles me that people on the net spend so much time griping about Microsoft when the net tends towards libertarianism. I would think libertarians would welcome Microsoft's dominance, as a validation of the free market in action. I'm not saying you are libertarian, of course. "Dos/Windows + applications available for Dos/Windows" are obviously blowing out "unix + applications available for unix". Normal people don't give a damn if source code is available for "power tools" like PERL, sed, grep, wc, bc, strip, yacc, lex, puke, barf, etc. They want to cut and paste their spreadsheet charts into the word processor they use, and email it to coworkers.
certainly a growing market for internet-capable systems
OS/2 is internet friendly, Windows 95 will be friendly, etc. Certainly unix will let you do more, but most people won't care about the value of the extras, as long as a web browser, news reader, and mail reader is available. Some people on this list swear they never have to drop to a command line with the cool tools they use with their SLIP accounts (except to change their password). If that's true, then any "advantage" unix has is washed away. How will the unix market grow (relative to other more popular OS's) if internet access tools run the same on Windows and OS/2 and Mac's as they do on unix?