资料内容：

Which Mass-Market Operating System Would Prevail?

With the increasing dominance of x86 established, there was now just a need to

determine which operating system would similarly dominate this horizontal stack.

There was also the question of who would dominate important aspects of the horizontal

platform more broadly such as the runtimes for applications, databases, and areas that

were just starting to become important like web servers. But those were less immediately

pressing concerns.

The answer wasn’t immediately obvious. Microsoft’s popular MS-DOS and initial

versions of Windows were designed for single-user PCs. They couldn’t support multiple

users like Unix could and therefore weren’t suitable for business users who needed

systems that would let them easily share data and other resources. Novell NetWare was

one multiuser alternative that was very good at what it did—sharing files and printers—

but it wasn’t a general-purpose operating system. (Novell’s various attempts to expand

NetWare’s capabilities mostly fizzled.) And, while there were Unix options for small

systems, they weren’t really mass market and suffered from the Unix fragmentation

described earlier.

Microsoft Swings for the Fences

Microsoft decided to build on its desktop PC domination to similarly dominate servers.

Microsoft’s initial foray into a next-generation operating system ended poorly. IBM

and Microsoft signed a “Joint Development Agreement” in August 1985 to develop what

would later become OS/2. However, especially after Windows 3.0 became a success on

desktop PCs in 1990, the two companies increasingly couldn’t square their technical

and cultural differences. For example, IBM was primarily focused on selling OS/2 to run

on its own systems—naming its high-profile PC lineup PS/2 may have been a clue—

whereas Microsoft wanted OS/2 to run on a wide range of hardware from many vendors