Windows | Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

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The premise of this video is a little flawed. Windows 1.0 wasn't trying to compete against MacOS, even if that was a common comparison that journalists of the day made. Instead, Microsoft was desperately trying to compete against all the other GUIs that sat on top of DOS. It was a rapidly expanding market segment that arose in the wake of the Macintosh, and whoever one that race would gain a massive foothold and potentially de-throne Microsoft, replacing MS-DOS. We are talking about VisiCorp's Visi On, IBM's TopView, Digital Research's GEM and Lotus' Symphony. They all operated as regular programs running on top of DOS and had similar capabilities. Everyone has forgotten about these programs today, but that's because Microsoft's strategy with Windows worked.

When I was a kid I used to think the number "billion" was named after Bill Gates, because he was the first billionaire.

I'm almost at the end of the video now and I still haven't figured out why Windows was supposedly Microsoft's biggest mistake. I would argue that Windows in general, and version 3 in particular, was an absolute godsend for MS. With this operating system they were able to displace their competitors, establish themselves as a monopolist and eventually become one of the most valuable companies in the world. But what do I know? I'm not a wide-reaching YouTuber, I'm just someone who has been intensively involved and informed about these events as a hobby.

Windows and Mac were both products of bill and Steve seeing the xerox machines. Glad you brought them up. It’s a shame Xerox never really got into the game themselves. They stuck with their own corner of the market.

Then original macOS wasn’t exactly watered down xerox os. There’s an example of an software engineer that swears he saw overlapping windows on Xerox’s computer so he tried to recreate it and did successfully because he believed it to be possible just to find out later xerox had not figured out overlapping windows yet. He had just remembered wrong! I’m pretty sure it was in the Steve Jobs book by Walter you cited,

we need to remake Steve Ballmer Sells Dirty Windows with the little Gill Bates intro

So why was it Microsoft's biggest mistake?

Windows didn't really become popular until 3.0. 2.x was a little better than 1.0, but it still wasn't overly popular.

Windows 9x being called an MS-DOS program is a glaring error that almost every video gets wrong 9x just uses MS-DOS as a bootloader, and has its own kernel and includes MS-DOS virtualization its the same as the relation between GRUB and Linux

Calling Apple "punk" is like calling Kissinger a humanitarian.

Finally, a normal upload rather than a premiere

That lower energy delivery of Ballmer’s joke video is actually even funnier than the original. Well done

Windows was not an operating system until 1995 - it was just a windowing system overlay on msdos

How fitting that this video, about the very start of “Personal Computing” is uploaded the same day all the reviews of and the dawn of “Spatial Computing” are revealed. I think of the 4 waves like this: - Computing (IBM Mainframes, etc) 1940s-1970s - Personal Computing (The Commodore, The Mac, Windows PC, etc) 1970’s-2000’s - Mobile Computing (BlackBerry, The Sidekick, iPhone, Android, etc.) 2000’s-2020s - Spatial Computing (Vision Pro, ???, ???, etc) 2020s-20?? And my god, the sheer poetic irony that the very first GUI demo that inspired what became Windows and what people know as personal computing was called “VisiOn”? Wow

14:42 this is strictly untrue. Windows 95 and upward were full OS's, not operating environments on top of DOS. While there is an MS-DOS layer that starts the system, when the GUI starts, it unloads MS-DOS and reloads it as a 16-bit compatibility layer within dedicated virtual machines (VDMs). By the time you saw the Windows' logo, you were no longer in MS-DOS at all.

My first PC (a 286 white box system) in 1987 had an EGA card and monitor. A copy of Windows 1.x was included with the EGA card. I never installed it. It was simply an overlay on MS-DOS that I didn't need because I understood how to use MS-DOS commands.

Windows biggest problem was, is and remains forever the dependence from lazy corporations. That is why still today windows have 25 years old security MEGA HOLES! Corporations does not want to spend any time and money on their side and microsoft can not fix these errors thanks for that. That kind action should be criminal! Luckily there is LINUX, what runs trouble free. Entire internet runs on LINUX, not on crappy windows. Just windows servers are pointless...even microsoft use LINUX on azure servers

Who calls a command line ugly??? The command line is a beautiful interface

Yeah, this wasn't the title I had in mind... Damn, 36 seconds ago