Back when AOL was a standalone company and Sun Microsystems existed at all, Netscape said that they wanted Windows to be a buggy collection of device drivers that people used to access the web, which would be the real platform.
It took long enough that Netscape no longer exists, but they won. I have three computers that I regularly use:
- my work Mac has one Mac-only, Mac-native app open during the day[*]. Everything else is on the web, or is cross-platform. It doesn’t particularly matter what _technology_ the cross-platform stuff is made out of because the fact that it’s cross-platform means the platform is irrelevant, and the technology is just a choice of how the vendors spend their money. I know that quite a bit of it is Electron, wrapped web, or Java.
- my home Windows PC has some emulators for playing (old) platform-specific games, and otherwise only runs cross-platform apps[*] and accesses the web.
- my home Linux laptop has the tools I need to write the native application I’m writing as a side project, and everything else is cross-platform or on the web.
[*] I’m ignoring the built-in file browsers, which are forced upon me but I don’t use.
I’ve been using various flavours of Unix for almost two decades now and, apart from the Solaris, IRIX and AIX system management tools, I don’t think anything I ran routinely was platform specific. The Mac builds upon this vast heritage of software that goes back to the 1970’s and beyond.
and now very few people use IRIX, AIX or Solaris because you can do whatever you want on Linux. As a vertically integrated supplier Apple’s platform is its advantage, and it seems like that is losing its value.