There is revisionist history, and then there is that statement. That statement ... is almost offensive.
... Why did the "golden age" end? Because Microsoft sucked in so so so so so so so many ways. That statement is a bald faced lie, a whitewashing attempt to forgive Microsoft from inflicting millions of man years in damage to the IT industry over three decades of anticompetitive practices to keep their substandard software in a position of market dominance.
But for anyone beyond the MCSE factory programmer (aka NOT the thought leaders of the industry) aside from those profiting handsomely from the Microsoft evil empire, did not like Microsoft.
In the days of DOS, you had DOS or UNIX. Which was better?
In the days of Windows in the 3.1 and even pretty much in the windows 95, you didn't have preemptive multitasking (something that non-windows had for 20 years at that point). It crashed CONSTANTLY, had no security, required restarts for practically anything that was installed.
Meanwhile the UNIX people would brag about machines not being rebooted for years. This was before the constant patch cycle was a thing.
Microsoft's apis were slapdash and disorganized, and frequently went out of favor.
During this time Microsoft would constantly crush and screw over competitors and engage in constant anticompetitive behavior. If you didn't suck on the teat of Microsoft, your platform was under unrelenting assault, not by pure technical achievement, but by the full smorgasborg of corporate dirty tricks, FUD, bribery/kickbacks, lobbying, lies, secret apis, golf schmoozing with nontechnical CIOs to close deals, no or undermined standards, etc.
The graveyard is long: Sybase, Lotus 123, Netscape, Novell.
The Microsoft times were a time of being stuck with one option: and OS that crashed constantly or is utterly porous to attackers. A browser that has incompatible web apis and a disbanded developer team (IE 6) that gets corporate mandated and is a thorn in your side in the entire IT stack for two decades. Databases stolen from companies (Sybase signed SUCH a bad deal, it astonishes me to this day) running on platforms that can't stay up. Office software with inaccessible file formats and byzantine and closed programmatic apis for accessing it. A substandard desktop UI.
If you used Microsoft software with an ounce of historical knowledge or awareness, you could see the prison. You had no practical choices. All the executives in your company were bought and paid for. Microsoft had sales forces that tracked non-Microsoft systems and targeted them within companies by any means necessary. Every new piece of software written in MIcrosoft had to pay the "sociopath management tax" and go through extensive reviews on how it could be used to further or maintain Microsoft's empire and control.
Their software was deliberately dumped in beta form onto the market to crowd out the competitors.
None of this is an "adolescent" attitude. I'll repeat myself: MILLIONS OF MAN HOURS OF DAMAGE. You know, probably billions. Decades x tens of millions of workers.
This isn't just IT programmer frustration. This is bad applications forced on non-programmer users. This is better companies, better software, better IT industry denied proper funding and profits. Instead, Microsoft took trillions of dollars in revenues from them. This is undermining a free market, free ideas, and freedom for Microsoft's profit.
• Until Linux, UNIX didn't even run on PCs at all, only expensive proprietary hardware. Windows ran on cheap machines made by a competitive market. Businesses wanted PCs for lots of reasons (e.g. Office).
• UNIX wasn't a single OS, it was many forks that were not compatible. You couldn't just write an app for UNIX, put it on CDs and sell it.
• Anything GUI related was terrible compared to Win32. Motif was the standard but cave man tech compared to what you could do on the client with Windows.
• UNIX was wildly more expensive.
• PCs had a thriving gaming culture. It meant people used the same tech at home as at work, creating a self-training workforce. UNIX vendors didn't care about games, they were too 'serious' for that. Their loss.
• Windows 95 did do pre-emptive multi-tasking, by the way. Only Win16 apps that hadn't been ported were cooperatively multi-tasked. Those apps didn't stick around very long because porting to Win32 was easy and Windows 95 was an absolute monster success. People queued up at midnight around the blocks of PC stores to buy it, it was so popular.
• Windows apps crashed a lot compared to UNIX apps because the average Windows machine ran way more apps than the average UNIX machine, ran on way lower quality hardware that was often flaky, had way more diversity of peripherals and configurations, and apps were deployed in places where it was hard to get crash logs (no networks).
• Windows machines didn't have uptimes of years because nobody cared. They were workstations. You turned them off at the end of the day when you went home because otherwise they'd burn their CRTs in and their lifetime was reduced. The culture of leaving non-server machines on all the time and never rebooting them only began once ACPI and other power management tech started to become common (something non-Apple UNIX struggles with to this day). And once it was useful to do so, Microsoft had a version of Windows that could have uptimes of months or years, no big deal.
Also, VMS and other OSes were the ones that ran for years without rebooting. Unix at the time was not so stable. Before Tcl, John Ousterhout wrote a log-structured file system for Unix because their Unix systems crashed often enough and took so long to boot that a possible loss of data but fast boot-up was deemed better than the lengthier downtimes with the existing file system.
So the PC market went with Microsoft and its encompassing environment, much to everyone's detriment. Fortunately, we've all moved on to the web and JavaScript and everything is now sunshine and roses. :-)
Not true. There was Xenix, SCO, and Coherent as 3 examples off the top of my head.
Here it is: https://archive.org/details/CoherentMan
Bad management, bad products, not willing to reduce prices.
You see it nowadays on the Linux Desktop, instead of uniting, everyone goes do their own little thing.
No wonder it doesn't work out.
Linux won on the server room, thanks to being a cheap UNIX clone, and now with cloud computing and managed language runtimes, it hardly matters if it is there, or they are running on top of a type-1 hypervisor.
And all things being equal you could still get OS/2 as low as $49,
> The suggested introductory price of OS/2 2.0 is $139. However, the cost falls to $99 for users upgrading from DOS, which includes just about anyone, and to $49 for users who are willing to turn in their Microsoft version of Windows.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/21/science/personal-computer...