How Did We All End Up With Windows
Reg Reader Workshop It’s amazing how many people who have Microsoft Windows everywhere look flummoxed when asked whether Windows is their “standard” for desktop computing. The reason they are thrown by this question is typically because they haven’t thought about it that way before.
In all likelihood, they never actually made a proactive decision to select Windows, in the sense of looking at alternatives and making a conscious objective choice. So how did they end up with it? It’s an example of a phenomenon that we come across time and time again when looking at how people have arrived at the IT landscapes they have today, and if you explore it a little further, it becomes clear the key to a lot of Microsoft’s success is establishing as many of its products as possible as the “default” when it comes to decision making.
Just like the default value for a field on a form or a column in a database is the value used when you don’t specify anything else, so Microsoft Windows, Office, SharePoint and so on are the defaults used in the absence of any alternative being explicitly selected in their respective domains. A few conversations with “alternative” vendors who bump into Microsoft in various ways have highlighted the phenomenon to us recently.
One of these is a company called Recommind, which you may not have heard of unless you are in the legal profession, but has been very successful at delivering enterprise search solutions into big law firms and the legal departments of large pharmaceutical companies and the like.
In all likelihood, they never actually made a proactive decision to select Windows, in the sense of looking at alternatives and making a conscious objective choice. So how did they end up with it? It’s an example of a phenomenon that we come across time and time again when looking at how people have arrived at the IT landscapes they have today, and if you explore it a little further, it becomes clear the key to a lot of Microsoft’s success is establishing as many of its products as possible as the “default” when it comes to decision making.
Just like the default value for a field on a form or a column in a database is the value used when you don’t specify anything else, so Microsoft Windows, Office, SharePoint and so on are the defaults used in the absence of any alternative being explicitly selected in their respective domains. A few conversations with “alternative” vendors who bump into Microsoft in various ways have highlighted the phenomenon to us recently.
One of these is a company called Recommind, which you may not have heard of unless you are in the legal profession, but has been very successful at delivering enterprise search solutions into big law firms and the legal departments of large pharmaceutical companies and the like.
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