Re: What if Microsoft never existed?
- From: Yousuf Khan <bbbl67@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:55:59 -0400
HenryNettles wrote:
Interesting, but not very likely. If Microsoft had not taken over the PC
world (at least in Operating Systems), there would be a lot more diversity,
true. But I think Linux would have at least a 50% market share, more
likely 70 or 80%. Text based operating systems would have been left in the
dust almost as quickly as they were by Windows. The difference, of course,
would have been X-Windows instead of Windows.
I don't think we'd be any different if Microsoft didn't exist. Remember that at the time IBM went shopping for an OS, they originally went to Gary Kildall and Digital Research, before settling on Bill Gates and Microsoft. They would've simply settled on DR if Microsoft didn't exist. And we'd still have a unified DOS operating system, this time DR-DOS rather than MS-DOS, which would've begat a Windows of some sort. Lord knows how predatory DR would've been if they'd been given the chance. DR was already known for some arrogance at that time, and it was already much larger than MS was at the time. DR, with arrogance already flowing through its blood, and starting out already bigger than MS might have been an even more serious threat to software producers than MS turned out to be.
No, if you wanted to never experience any company like Microsoft in history, then you'd have to go back further and eliminate CP/M from ever being created. CP/M begat DOS, which begat Windows. At that point in time, I have no idea what would've emerged in place of CP/M: Unix, VMS? I somehow doubt it would be either of those two as they were too high-end, you need something much simpler to emerge. Perhaps it would've been an OS with an embedded Basic interpreter as its command shell, like Commodore Basic.
There is some potential truth in the writers observations about cost. Without a common OS, the PC would not have penetrated into the home market as quickly and as completely. However, it would still have penetrated into the corporate/business market on a massive scale, and this would have driven costs sharply downward. Prices probably would not be as low as they are today, but they would be closer to today's reality than to what the writer was imagining.
The hardware costs came down as a result of IBM's original open hardware design, not because of Microsoft's software. However, Microsoft did unite the IBM PC with its clones under one software umbrella, which allowed the cost reductions to escalate. However, as I said, if it wasn't Microsoft somebody else would've come out with a DOS regardless.
Yousuf Khan .
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