Realistically anyone who cared would be using something like Cygwin (and the original UNIX server market segment evaporated due to Linux and had zero interest in migrating to NT in that form--some did migrate due to application layer benefits like .NET but not for the same workloads.)
There is an alternative universe where Windows NT POSIX is really as it should have been in first place, and Linux never takes off as there is no need for it.
As there is another alternative one where Microsoft doesn't sell Xenix and keeps pushing for it, as Bill Gates was actually a big fan of.
Obviously we'll never know, but I seriously doubt that parallel universe would've had a chance to materialize. Not the least due to "free as in beer" aspect of Linux whilst web/Apache was growing at the pace it did. All proprietary unices are basically dead. Sun was likely the sole company that had the best attitude to live alongside open source, but they also proved it wasn't a good enough business post bubble burst. NT and Darwin remain alive due to their desktop use, not server.
IBM z/OS is officially a Unix-a very weird Unix which uses EBCDIC-but it passed the test suite (an old but still valid version, which makes it somewhat outdated) and IBM paid the fee to The Open Group, so officially it is a Unix. (Although somewhat outdated, they recently added a partial emulation of the Linux namespace syscalls-clone/unshare/etc-in order to port K8S to z/OS; but that’s not part of the Unix standard.)
If Microsoft had wanted, Windows could have officially been Unix too-they could have licensed the test suite, run it under their POSIX/SFU/SUA subsystem, fixed the failures, paid the fee-and then Windows would be a Unix. They never did-not (as far as I’m aware) for any technical reason, simply because as a matter of business strategy, they decided not to invest in this.
With Microsoft having either Windows NT with proper UNIX support, or real UNIX with Xenix, there would be no need for Linux, regardless of it being free beer.
Whatever computer people would be getting at the local shopping mall computer store already had UNIX support.
Lets also not forget that UNIX and C won over the competing on timesharing OSes, exactly because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it in first place, there was no Linux on those days, and had AT&T not sued BSD, hardly anyone would have paid attention to Linux, yet another what-if.
NT underlies the majority of M365 and many of the major Azure services. Most F500s in the US will have at the very least an Active Directory deployment, if not other ancillary services.
IIS and SQL Server (Win) boxes are fairly typical, still.
I am not suggesting NT is dead on servers at all. I am positing it would be dead had it not been for owning the majority of desktops. Those use cases are primarily driven as an ancillary service to Windows desktop[1], and where they have wider applicability, like .NET and SQL Server, have been progressively unleashed from Windows. The realm of standalone server products were bulldozed by Linux; NT wouldn't have stood a chance either.
[1]: In fact, Active Directory was specifically targeted by EU antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
For all large corps, users sit at 1990s-style desktop computers that run Win10/11 and use Microsoft Office, including Outlook that connects to an Exchange server running on Windows Server. I'm not here to defend Microsoft operating systems (I much prefer Linux), but they are so deeply embedded. It might be decades before that changes at large corps.
That was true once, but not true now. On-prem Exchange is rapidly being squashed by Microsoft in favor of 365. The direction of travel for the Outlook client is clearly towards web (I note anecdotally that the Mac client, always a poor relation to Windows, is so laughably clunky that the Mac users I know forgo it in favor of the web client.) If the service is in the 365 cloud and the client is a web browser, who needs Windows for this discussion? We might end up in a future of terminals again for the worker bees and 'real' computers only for the people who need Excel and Word and for whom the web versions dont cut it
I don't think it is fair to brush it off under "same bucket; doesn't count." The syscalls are still different and there's quite a bit of nuance. I mean the lines you're drawing are out of superficial convenience and quite arbitrary. In fact, I'd argue macOS/Darwin/XNU are really Mach at their core (virtual memory subsystem, process management and IPC) and BSD syscalls are simply an emulated service on Mach, which is quite different from traditional UNIX. The fact that as a user you think of macOS much more similar to Linux is not really reflective of what happens under the hood. Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
> Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.
Indeed countless companies went under investing in tech, on various iterations of the exact things that later became enormously successful, e.g. iPhone. Success is only guaranteed in retrospect.
It’s more than money - you need people making the right technology and product decisions. For smartphones that was clearly the case - not that apple just dumped in more money.
This is a good take. Also hints at why Peter Thiel's thesis on tech monopolies in a dynamic world is correct; i.e. that they aren't necessarily bad. A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value. To the extent that Google is doing anything nefarious as a monopoly with integration, any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome. They cannot pull this off on their own even though the open-source Chromium exists, because Google is actually better than them at maintaining a browser ecosystem. I am certain they will do a worse job at owning Chrome, especially considering Google has shown a good faith effort in shipping a browser and keeping the engine open source.
Ironically, this whole saga is happening at the same time the "Google search business is under attack" is at its peak in the news media.
Thiel speaks from the perspective of the monopolist, pithily condensed to 'competition is for losers'. Any product involves a set of trade-offs, and decisions. It is not a law of nature that the monopoly product makes trade-offs everyone, or even anyone, is happy with: people could identify ways the product could be improved. But under a monopoly they can't vote with their wallets. Consider Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. They were, realistically speaking, the only game in town. What efficiency did their monopoly help achieve, and why did it justify the stifling of choice? Maximizing efficiency is a more tenable argument when the product is undifferentiated, which is not the case in technology.
The point is precisely that being super fixated on Microsoft as a monopoly producing relatively trash-quality products is a static worldview. It is the case that Microsoft monopoly did not in any shape or form preclude a measly search startup and a beleaguered Cupertino company from surpassing it to the slightest (mind you, Windows is still the dominant desktop OS, which compared to what it meant in the 90s is immaterial; people rarely think about writing Windows apps anymore: they write web, iOS and Android apps.) This is the whole point of Thiel's thesis. The contemporary version of this world transition we are witnessing is from search to chatbot.
Meanwhile Microsoft by pushing the "trash" products actually served the industry at large well in other ways: it provided a consistent standard base to widely deploy PCs and applications.
Aside: the "competition is for losers" tagline is not from Thiel himself: apparently the publisher came up with a punchy line, and I think that refers to his broader ideology. What I brought up is a very specific observation in his thesis that high margin monopolies are actually good from the perspective of society in a dynamic world where it does not merely translate rent-seeking long-term.
Apple and Google succeeded not by beating Microsoft at its game, but by playing a different game, which happened due to technological revolutions they capitalized on. Apple has a fair claim to partially engendering some of the revolutions; esp. mobile computing. As you said, Window is still the dominant desktop operating system. Who knows what better operating systems people could have been using all this time?
> A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value.
Some of the most impactful large-scale tech that exist today isn't centralized or monopolized. The internet, for example, or email. There's been a long history of "email killers", but no company has been able to replace email yet. One can achieve integration with standardization, and scale through federation.
In fact, I'd say federation scales better than centralization. In spite of appearances, mom and pop shops scale fantastically. Having thousands of independent actors servicing a market makes an industry much more dynamic and resilient. It's why the biggest restaurants are franchises, for example.
I'd add that the period of greatest innovation in the web wasn't 2004 when IE had 95% of the market, or today when Chrome has 65%. Id argue it was that 2008-2018 decade; an era that also saw the most browser variety we've seen recently.
> any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome
Chrome could well be an independent company, like Mozilla is. There's plenty of money to be made in being the middle-man for search engines.
"Also hints at why Peter Thiel's thesis on tech monopolies in a dynamic world is correct; i.e. that they aren't necessarily bad. A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value".
Isn't this broadly speaking true about everything, or maybe any luxury service? I guess I would say, that I disagree, I'm not saying you're explicitly wrong, but I think a model where one system or service dominates is a tradeoff. Sure it's more efficient, and maybe you can say "we solved the phone/browser/Operating System/etc" but you lose the world where we had all sorts of weird innovative products.
I’d say the point is more subtle than that: it is not mere efficiency that comes with such scale. Rather, such scale is necessary to enable certain technological investments and long-term risks and behavior. For example, if you were a non-monopoly company in a competitive environment you would not be able to steer Chrome and shape it the way it is. You’d be burdened by day to day business needs to keep the margin from eroding below zero at any given corner.
Under this theory it follows that if you actively kill any business with a monopoly market share like the EU, you’ll guarantee failure for the society in achieving certain technological breakthroughs. The only way to avoid it would be government sanctioned corporations (CCP style) or US style pre-Lina Khan relatively free market approach to scale.
What I've heard is that the extrapolation of compute needed so many additional CPU servers to keep running the existing workload types that it obviously justified dedicated hardware. Same for video encoding accelerators[1].
yes, that was one of the externally shared narratives. The other part is that google didn't want to be beholden to nvidia GPUs, since they have an associated profit margin that is higher than TPUs, as well as resource constraints (total amount of GPUs shipping at any given time).
Another part that was left out was that Google did not make truly high speed (low-latency) networking and so many of their CPU jobs had to be engineered around slow networks to maintain high utilization and training speed. Google basically ended up internally relearning the lessons that HPC and supercomputing communities had already established over decades.
Google has done stuff primarily for negotiation purposes (e.g. POWER9 chips) but TPU ain't one. It's not a backup option or presumed "inferior solution" to NVIDIA. Their entire ecosystem is TPU-first.
Pretty sure the answer is yes. I have no direct knowledge of the matter for Gemini 2.5, but in general TPUs were widely used for training at Google. Even Apple used them to train their Apple Intelligence models. It’s not some esoteric thing to train on TPU; I would consider using GPU for that inside Google esoteric.
P.S. I found an on-the-record statement re Gemini 1.0 on TPU:
"We trained Gemini 1.0 at scale on our AI-optimized infrastructure using Google’s in-house designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) v4 and v5e. And we designed it to be our most reliable and scalable model to train, and our most efficient to serve."
You can’t be serious. Lots of businesses easily have that much just in cost of goods or marketing spend. $100M is not such a crazy amount especially considering the cost of hiring technical people.
Also note that the benchmark of “efficiency” should be a function of growth, not some absolute standard.
I think we are saying slightly different things. COGS are composed of many smaller capital allocations. According to this untested, pet thesis, putting on a report that $250M was spent on capex is just fine; but if you go to a single vendor and sign a $250M contract, you have wasted money by not being more careful about how that capital is allocated. $100M is _a lot_ of capital, and I think it’s easy to lose sight of how much stuff you can do with that much money when applied to industries that don’t pay tech salaries for speculative growth. As examples: how many pounds of food could you grow for 100M? How many doctors could we train for 100M?
I think the thesis is thought provoking. Not sure yet if it’s worth anything, but it also doesn’t preclude businesses from having massive cashflow.
I mean, it is obvious that you cannot sustain efficiency as you scale (Amdahl's law) but (1) $100M is not that crazy to be able to keep track of in your head, even for a single individual (I can imagine a successful real estate developer with a handful of ongoing projects and various other personal investments), and (2) in a high growth situation, it makes financial sense to sacrifice some economic gain for scale. In your original example, sure an investor would be better off, if they could actually find 10 good investments with zero cost, to spread their money, but very likely they'd be better off taking the big one and spend their energy raising more money.
