In part one, I described how Apple turned its failure to develop a modern OS into a great success. The purchase of NeXT gave Apple a buzzword-compliant OS with a healthy ecosystem of high-quality third-party applications. Meanwhile, Microsoft was lumbering along with Windows XP. Although technically sound, it was shot through with the decisions made more than a decade earlier for 16-bit Windows. In 2001, when XP was released, this was not such a big deal. The first two or three versions of Mac OS X were troublesome, to say the least. Performance was weak, there were stability issues, and version 10.0 arguably wasn't even feature complete. It wasn't until early 2002 that Apple even made Mac OS X the default OS on new Macs; for the first few months of its life, XP was up against "Classic" Mac OS 9.
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