At the request of my good friend Justin from UNL I will write about Microsoft being one of the world’s most evil companies. It is debatable if Oracle or MS is number one and we won’t get into that today. So Microsoft got started trying to port DEC’s least powerful OS to PCs. DEC had an OS called CP/M. The original PC in the 80s was too constrained to run CP/M. So MS-DOS came out. But at the time and into the early 90s there were other OSes. Versions of SYS V Unix, other OSes namely PC-DOS and DR-DOS. At first PC-DOS was way ahead of MS-DOS but here we see the first use of the triple E strategy (EEE), otherwise known as Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Microsoft started deploying their MS-DOS with more PCs by making good deals with the PC manufactures. Basically they would take a slight loss money wise and give the product to the manufactures in bulk. Sounds like a good thing right? Well they had one stipulation, you couldn’t ship other OS choices. So after this they developed the early versions of 80286 and 80386 windows. By the time Windows 3.1 comes out and maybe even with their earlier editions in the 80s they had proprietary bits in MS-DOS which was the base OS for Windows which was more of a graphical shell on top of DOS that wouldn’t work with other versions of DOS like DR-DOS and PC-DOS. You had to have Genuine MS-DOS to install. Then Windows 95 came out forming the paradigm we use to operate computers to this day some special cases like tiling window managers in Unix-likes no withstanding. They also with the B release offered a tightly coupled web browser known as Internet Explorer with Windows 95B. Before we had good browsers like Mosaic and Netscape. In Windows 3.x land. Around this time IBM was working on a fantastic OS named OS/2 for PCs that it is a real shame didn’t take off. It could emulate all DOS programs, Windows 3.x programs, and OS/2 programs of course. MS decided to pull the plug on it and sank it with Windows NT and Windows 95. What is truly baffling is that Microsoft had a Unix OS called Xenix that according to reports on internal communications in MS was supposed to replace MS-DOS but they never pushed it, if they had the world would be so much different today it would be unrecognizable. With Internet Explorer tightly coupled with Windows the other browsers fell away and the triple E strategy came back. They introduced proprietary extensions to IE to make it where websites wouldn’t load in other browsers up through IE 6 or 7. The Windows 1998 era was more of the same. Proprietary products galore. Products you know today like powerpoint ,word, office, etc got their start here. You know kinda like we know what kleenex is when we should say tissue, or band aid when we should say bandage? These office programs became ubiquitous- with custom file formats too. Fun fact Microsoft didn’t even invent PowerPoint, they bought the company that did! They also did “partnerships” with other companies both software and hardware wise that are still felt and done to this day. Some examples include having Adobe license its products at the time with just Windows (Later somehow MAC was able to secure this too, I don’t know how though). Software wise we had what were called wintel modems on PCs. A wintel modem had the bare minimum of hardware installed on it and almost entirely relied upon software in windows to work. Unbenounced to many in the late 90s we had other OSes than Windows. Several commercial Unixen were still going strong like Solaris, AIX, DEC Unix. Along with *BSD Unixen such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Along with a fledgling OS known as Linux. MS’s CEO saw the writing on the wall for Windows with Unix and Linux, smart readers will remember we said MS had their own Unix called Xenix right? The Windows NT (for businesses) and Windows 9x (for personal use) were merged into one OS with Windows XP in 2001. This was a great OS but was security wise one of the worst to ever exist. Several malware products came out and antivirus software became commonplace. In I want to say 2003 MS came out with their own firewall and while FAR from perfect it slowly destroyed all commercial for consumer firewalls by the 2010s. IE Was still strongly entrenched in Windows but two things helped change that: the European Union, and Firefox. Lets start with the latter one, firefox. MS once they achieved dominance in the late 90s basically stopped developing IE. The occasional bug fix or new product feature to tie people to the product but nothing new came out. Then along comes firefox with TABS! Yes, when XP first came out there were no such things as browser tags!.Firefox would later get eclipsed by Google Chrome which tried to do the Embrace, extend, and extinguish process once again. And later by Edge which is not starting EEE again. The EU is to think though for helping these other browsers gain control. See there is a process in Windows called explorer.exe if I remember correctly that ran the GUI shell in Windows that was so coupled to the OS core it couldn’t be easily separated. The EU forced them to decouple IE and Windows Media Player in a landmark case in the early to mid 2000s. This allowed people to install say firefox or chrome but the uninstallation of IE wouldn’t come for decades later, with Windows 11 being the first version to not come with IE. Around this time in the late 90s or early 20s gaming on PC became popular. And sure enough we see MS in the cookie jar with their triple E strategy! I the early days of PC gaming, there was a technology used by all OSes called OpenGL, note the open nature like it would run on BSD, LInux, Windows, etc, etc. Well who here thinks an open standard is gonna stand with Microsoft? The answer? They developed Direct X and used EEE to all but wipe out OpenGL gaming. If you were a “PC GAMER” you had but one choice up till just a few years ago: run windows. Subsequent versions of windows came and went from vista to 7 to 8 to 10 to 11. All used proprietary technologies from MS to all but eliminate the other OSes. But when things seemed the darkest there arose a white horse from nowhere: Linux. Linux had been in existence since the early 90s but because of crap mentioned above like office, IE, filesystems, gaming, oh and hardware drivers (remember wintel modems above?) didn’t catch on on the desktop. In fact even today the “Year of the Linux Desktop” always seems n+1 years away. By this time though around 2009 or so we have firefox- an open source browser with high enough market share where most pages will load, we had wrappers for Adobe Flash to get videos to work and soon after HTML 5 videos that work without flash, we had openoffice then libreoffice, Internet was switching to network interface cards called NICs that were based on server products a few years old so Internet was working on Linux. Linux and to a lesser extend killed all the proprietary Unix OSs, and stiffered the *BSDs growth. In fact in 2023 the only commercial Unix left is AIX and Solaris and both are in maintenance mode with just security updates coming out for the next couple of years then they will be dead it is presumed. Microsoft did everything they could to stop Linux. Their CEO Steve Balmer even said that Linux would be a treat and should be extinguished. If you think MS would ever abandon EEE you would be WRONG! WIndows 11 came along requiring support of a TPM 2.0 module that was only found on super new AMD processors and Intel processors going back to Gen 9 or newer Core processors. With Windows 12 this year they intend to require 16GB of RAM minimum to be able to call it an AI PC. The rise of the Public Clouds: Starting after I started college(2010) we saw AWS, then Azure, then Google cloud come about. MS soon got a hard lesson taught to them- their nemesis Linux was king on servers. MS had always had a server OS since the mid 90s and it was indeed popular, but not as popular as Linux. Azure was QUICKLY augmented to allow Linux VMs, at first they didn’t have anything but Windows VMs. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Above this line everything is largely fact or the interpretation of fact, but below this line we have stuff that hasn’t played out yet, with facts, but also some projections by me. Embrace, extend, and extinguish applied to Linux? Possibly… Ok, so with the rise of the public Linux cloud Linux goes from a hobbyist project to big corporations who now shape it, including oddly enough Microsoft who in the 2010s released a statement saying they love Linux. Systemd came out which is outside of scope for this but is a fancy complex init system for Linux, Red Hat did quite a bit of evil, Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and started pouring money into Linux. We saw the release of WSL which stands for Windows subsystem for Linux, a way to prevent reverse EEE on Windows by Linux. Basically it allows most Linux Programs to run on Windows under a hypervisor. So the question remains: why did MS invest in Linux? I personally don’t think it was benevolence. What is MS’s long term plan with Linux? I don’t think anyone truly knows but if we look at their track record it can’t be good. Nowadays MS doesn't even make much money off of Windows anymore, they make the bulk of their money from the Azure cloud. Where they nickel and dime you for everything. In fact they have switched largely to software as a service (SaS). Case in point they don’t want anyone running local stuff in VMWare or on Bare metal. They want everything ran either in the Azure cloud or the Azure Stack. They have made updates more difficult so you have to pay them to update your servers and clients. What can be done? First of all, minimize your use of cloud computing and Windows use. I have gotten away from both on a personal level but not corporatly. Also, #RUNBSD. Why? It is the last true by the people for the people OS chain out there. There are four main flavors that are all different from one another listed in order of popularity they would be: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD( not mentioned earlier because it didn’t come out till 2005). They are the best hope forward. Linux has gotten great for gaming thanks to Steam’s owner Valve so Linux is always an option if you need something the wounded BSDs can’ provide. You see, when Linux was coming out AT&T sued the BSD Unix systems for copyright infringement due to what would take a whole multi page paper to explain the differences and similarities between System V Unix and BSD Unix. The short and sweet was that Sys V Unix was commercial and for companies and BSD Unix was for academics (its name literally stands for Berkeley Standard DIstribution-- because it was developed at UC Berkeley). BSD and lInux were neck and neck till about the mid 2000s when Linux started getting big corporate donors and the BSDs never recovered and in fact have to share some code with Linux for a good desktop expereince. So in conclusion, the next few years look dark with Microsoft’s Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) strategy they have been using for 40+ years. Linux might be our hope, but could easily just be a poisoned apple now that Microsoft is waiting to use EEE on. I personally run OpenBSD when I can, Linux when I can’t, and Windows only as the last possible resort.