IBM PC Compatible - Challenges To Wintel Domination

Challenges To Wintel Domination

By the late 1990s, the success of Microsoft Windows had driven rival commercial operating systems into near-extinction, and had ensured that the “IBM PC compatible” computer was the dominant computing platform. This meant that if a developer made their software only for the Wintel platform, they would still be able to reach the vast majority of computer users. By the late 1980s, the only major competitor to Windows with more than a few percentage points of market share was Apple Inc.'s Macintosh. The Mac started out billed as "the computer for the rest of us" but the Mac's high prices and closed architecture meant the DOS/Windows/Intel onslaught quickly drove the Macintosh into an education and desktop publishing niche, from which it has only recently begun to emerge. By the mid 1990s the Mac's market share had dwindled to around 5% and introducing a new rival operating system had become too risky a commercial venture. Experience had shown that even if an operating system was technically superior to Windows, it would be a failure in the market (BeOS and OS/2 for example). During 1989 Steve Jobs said of his new NeXT design, "It will either be the last new hardware platform to succeed, or the first to fail." During 1993 NeXT announced it was ending production of the NeXTcube and porting NeXTSTEP to Intel processors.

For hardware, Intel initially licensed their technology so that other manufacturers could make x86 Central processing units (CPUs). As the "Wintel" platform gained dominance Intel abandoned this practice. Companies such as AMD and Cyrix developed alternative CPUs that were functionally compatible with Intel's. Towards the end of the 1990s, AMD was taking an increasing share of the CPU market for PCs. AMD even ended up playing a significant role in directing the evolution of the x86 platform when its Athlon line of processors continued to develop the classic x86 architecture as Intel deviated with its "Netburst" architecture for the Pentium 4 CPUs and the IA-64 architecture for the Itanium set of server CPUs. AMD developed AMD64, the first major extension not created by Intel, which Intel later adopted. During 2006 Intel began abandoning Netburst with the release of their set of "Core" processors that represented an evolution of the earlier Pentium III.