Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.
In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.
Sigh.
I was acutely aware of the various 3D API issues during this time and this rings very true.
> By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention of delivering Low Level; although officially working on it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually producing code.
No kidding...
Also the CEO of SGI in the late 90s was an ex-Microsoft and bet heavily on weird technical choices (remember the SGI 320 / 540? I do) that played no small role in sinking the boat. Extremely similar to the infamous Nokia suicide in the 2010s under another Microsoft alumni. I think the similarity isn't due to chance.
Nokia would had killed itself either way, with Elop it still tried to flop.
Every Nokia fanboy cries about EEE, but blissfully forgets what a turd was 5800 Xpress Music, which came half a year later than iPhone 3G.
They made a -lot- of stupid decisions, both in sticking to 'what they knew' and bad decisions with cutting-edge tech (N900 comes to mind, you couldn't get one in the states with the right bands for 3G).
I will always love the Lumia cameras however, even their shit tier models had great image quality.
They should have continued maemo 5 and bet hard on it. The big rewrites for n9, and continued focus on symbian as a cash cow, hurt them.