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RE: Had Microsoft Never Been
If Microsoft hadn't come to be, one possible outcome would be that we'd simply have bowed to a different software master. Maybe OS/2?
I think the more likely outcome of a non-Microsoft world would be that computers would have become a lot more like cars.
I completely disagree with this conjecture. I believe that the converse is true. The industry has become a lot like your average car lot...lots of options , no real innovation. I think Apple's was the most successful architecture to rival the CISC processor of IBM...(RISC)
If there was no Microsoft the idea of "standardization" would be a much more fluid concept to the industry...the challenge Microsoft faces is that that their ability to innovate has been stifled by their need to meet their enormous overhead and remain backwards compatible...I don't believe that this should have been a problem the computer industry should have faced. I envision a market saturated with a variety of computer architectures and interfaces to chose from...not the way it is currently...hmmm...do I want an AMD or a Pentium...a mac or ummm maybe a PC...dual core or...yawn....quad core...sigh...whatever's cheapest...now for the OS...Windows 2000,ME(God forbid),XP,Vista...bah! all the same...oh well...whatever it comes with I'll use...what a boring life we have!
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Had Microsoft Never Been
I have to admit, it's an interesting thing to imagine what might have happened if Microsoft never came to be.
If Microsoft hadn't come to be, one possible outcome would be that we'd simply have bowed to a different software master. Maybe OS/2?
I think the more likely outcome of a non-Microsoft world would be that computers would have become a lot more like cars. We operate them all pretty much the same in that there are some basic controls and some basic features inherent to the product. The layout, the feedback and implementation of those controls tends to be different per car but generally the same effect to the user. I think without Microsoft, computers would have developed a niche use because nobody would want their computer to be more difficult to use than a competitor and in order to lure a user away, their interface must essentially be the same. As such, I think the software on those machines would have been much more commodity oriented without a lot of bells and whistles - because the addition of those extras would not be worth the manufacturing delay or extra cost. I suppose you could think of the computer as having gone the way of the cell phone - everyone knew how to use 'em, they all pretty much offered the same thing, but none of them did it awesomely due to short life cycles.
There would of course continued to be powerful machines with cool applications on them - but these would have been limited to people who actually cared like scientists or data processors. I think the video game console would have become much huger than it is now as well.
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