A company cannot disrupt itself. Sears, Kmart, and their colleagues who have perished became particularly good at making a profit through one specific channel. So every executive, every performance bonus, in fact every person on the payroll was focused on maximizing their specific method of turning a profit.

Unfortunately for them, the world changed and the leaders didn’t realize they were themselves being disrupted and therefore had no capacity to turn the titanic.

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.