“I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC,” the actors in a popular Apple ad proclaim. When the actor proclaims that he is a PC, there is no doubt in the viewer’s mind as to what operating system, or OS, he runs. However, Windows was not always inextricably tied to the PC as it is now.

In the PC market, OS/2 from IBM and Windows were the competing OSs for the personal computer. However, the release of Windows 3.0 marked a beginning of a turning point. Windows 3.0 was seen as a vast improvement over its past iterations with its user interface. It also had better graphics and enabled applications to easily use more memory capacity. It was also backwards compatible, which lowered the users’ cost of switching to Windows 3.0. These developer-friendly features caused this OS to acquire the support of many software developers. This began an information cascade where this developer migration encouraged more of their colleagues to move to the Windows 3.0 format since the general consensus was that it was better. And because more applications were now being developed for Windows 3.0, users moved to the new OS as well. This eventually culminated in the typical rich-get-richer network phenomenon where as more people adopt the new OS, more developers would develop for the OS, causing even more people to adopt it. It was extremely popular, selling millions of copies.

However, OS/2 was also compatible with a lot of the code written for Windows 3.0. This meant that people had less incentive to change over from their existing operating system. This was to change with Windows 95. Windows 95 was a significant change in that it was largely a 32-bit OS and utilized a new set of developer tools. IBM’s unwillingness to emulate the Windows development interface caused a lot of software to be no longer compatible with IBM’s OS. Therefore, it became optimal for IBM users to switch to Windows since most of the software they used were no longer supported on their operating system. This caused another cascade where businesses and people made the switch from IBM to Windows in order to mirror their colleagues and maintain compatible software.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1869780,00.asp