Their software is in a majority of PCs not due to pure market forces but because of active efforts in the 90's, through OEM contracts, to prevent operating systems other than Windows to be generally available to the public through non-technical channels.

This is such a tired argument. It's been 20 years. You don't think other OS's have had the opportunity?

The fact is, Windows is still king today because of backwards-compatibility and nothing else. No other OS has taken this as seriously. Certainly not Apple. And not Linux either.

You can still run DOS programs on Windows today. And companies do. I personally know of software originally written in the 80's and with many legacy components from that time still running on modern versions of Windows Server.

Companies don't take backwards-compatibility seriously. And if you're constantly breaking things, people are not going to trust your product for serious use to be relied on. It's really not that complicated.

Not to mention the developer tools are second to none. You may not like .Net, or you may have some problem with how Microsoft did business 20 years ago (get over it). But Visual Studio is hands down, without question, the best IDE on the market. And Visual Studio Code is the best text editor. And now, with their open source efforts, it just keeps getting better.

(Yes, I know that's not Apple's intended market, you don't have to tell me. The point still stands. Windows is popular today because of a herculean effort by Microsoft over the years to ensure backwards-compatibility. And yes, I know it's not perfect. You don't have to tell me that either. It's always the same tired arguments. And at the end of the day, the point still stands and no other OS has risen up to take Windows crown. And no, this year is not finally going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Next year either. Or the year after that. It's not going to happen. Get over it.)

> You don't think other OS's have had the opportunity?

For most non-technical people that didn't separate the concept of OS and hardware, there was no opportunity. Even if you were one of those technical people who bought a PC, wiped the hard drive and installed Linux, you still paid the Microsoft tax, which the OEM had to pass on to you in order to sell Windows at all.

It's not a tired argument because the ramifications of that action are still relevant today.

> Windows is still king today because of backwards-compatibility and nothing else.

IE11 is a perfect example of why this is a bad thing.

The fact that people were able to use Office at home and at work, and Office became a strong defacto standard for documents due to the substrate of Windows being ubiquitous, also had a lot to do with it.

> the point still stands and no other OS has risen up to take Windows crown.

The Windows crown is irrelevant in a mostly-mobile-and-server world. Why did Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 try so desperately to force mobile UI on a desktop experience? Why does Windows 10X look more like a Google Chrome UI than anything else?

i'm not saying they do it intentionally. i am saying that they should deal with the consequences and not let taxpayers take the downside while they take the upside

That’s really up to us as taxpayers though isn’t it? ( to push for legislation )

funny... so about those 1billion android devices that are no longer offered security updates.

I guess Google should be taking responsibility there as well?

yes, exactly! you get it.

yes they should.. but that is meaningless. If everyone do what they 'should' be doing, then we don't need law enforcement, do we ?

Does the same apply to actual engineers who stamp structural engineering projects, as opposed to self labelled “engineers”? Asking for a friend.

Terrible analogy. You don't die if your OS crashes. If a bridge or a building collapses, it's very likely to kill people.

Well, as it turns out - if software is controlling your airplane - you do infact die if it crashes.

Airplanes' don't typically use Windows for flight control though, do they?

Windows CE has seen some very unexpected use cases. I couldn't confirm. And bugs are not a windows only feature.

Yes, it does. Otherwise professional liability insurance wouldn't be a thing.