![]() Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac-that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.Īll that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers-Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations-to the dominant Microsoft LANs. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.Īnd for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.īut as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance. ![]() That's a tall order.Īdversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. Before there was Big Tech, there was " adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.
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