The history of personal computing is often told in terms of operating systems: the dramatic battle between IBM’s DOS PC vs Apple’s Macintosh; the emergence of fiefdoms of promising independents such as Amiga OS, NeXTSTEP and BeOS; and ultimately the crushing destruction of any PC OS competition under the homogenous, global and permanent rule of Microsoft’s Windows platform. But these stories often resulted in inaccurate conclusions, because the OS platform wasn’t the only important factor in picking winners and losers.

Source:: Apple Insider