I think it would be pretty hard to argue against that point of view, at least thus far. If DOS/Windows hadn't become the dominant OS someone would have, and a whole generation of engineers cut their teeth on their parents' windows PCs.
There are some pretty zany alternative realities in the Multiverses I’ve visited. Xerox Parc never went under and developed computing as a much more accessible commodity. Another, Bell labs invented a whole category of analog computers that’s supplanted our universe’s digital computing era. There’s one where IBM goes directly to super computers in the 80s. While undoubtedly Microsoft did deliver for many of us, I am a hesitant to say that that was the only path. Hell, Steve Jobs existed in the background for a long while there!
I wish things had gone differently too, but a couple of nitpicks:
1.) It's already a miracle Xerox PARC escaped their parent company's management for as long as they did.
3.) IBM was playing catch-up on the supercomputer front since the CDC 6400 in 1964. Arguably, they did finally catch up in the mid-late 80's with the 3090.
Yeah, I'm absolutely not saying it was the only path. It's just the path that happened. If not MS maybe it would have been Unix and something else. Either way most everyone today uses UX based on Xerox Parc's which was generously borrowed by, at this point, pretty much everyone.
If Microsoft hadn't tried to actively kill all its competition then there's a good chance that we'd have a much better internet. Microsoft is bigger than just an operating system, they're a whole corporation.
Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now.
I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They didn't invent the operating system, there were lots of operating systems that came out in the 80's and 90's, many of which were better than Windows, that didn't have the horrible anticompetitive baggage attached to them.
Alternatively: had MS Embraced and Extended harder instead of trying to extinguish ASAP we’d have a much better internet owned to a much higher degree by MS.
A few decades back Microsoft were first to the prize with asynchronous JavaScript, Silverlight really was flash done better and still missed, a proper extension of their VB6/MFC client & dev experience out to the web would have gobbled up a generation of SaaS offerings, and they had a first in class data analysis framework with integrated REPL that nailed the central demands of distributed/cloud-first systems and systems configuration (F#). That on top of near perfect control of the document and consumer desktop ecosystems and some nutty visualization & storage capabilities.
Plug a few of their demos from 2002 - 2007 together and you’ve got a stack and customer experience we’re still hurting for.
Silverlight is only “Flash Done Better” if we had the dystopia of Windows being the only desktop operating system. Silverlight never worked on Linux, and IIRC it didn’t work terribly well on macOS (though I could be misremembering).
In fact all of your points are only true if we accept that Windows would be the only operating system.
Microsoft half-asses most things. If they had taken over the internet, we would likely have the entirety of the internet be even more half-asses than it already is.
What’s funny is that we were some bad timing away from IBM giving the DOS money to Gary Kildall and we’d all be working with CP/M derivatives!
Gary was on a flight when IBM called up the Digital Research looking for an OS for the IBM-PC. Gary’s wife, Dorothy, wouldn’t sign an NDA without it going through Gary, and supposedly they never got negotiations back on track.
I'm not sure I understand this logic. You're saying that the gap would have been filled even if their product didn't exist, which means that the net benefit isn't that the product exists. How are you concluding that whatever we might have gotten instead would have been worse?
And how does it follow that microsoft is the good guy in a future where we did it with some other operating system? You could argue that their system was so terrible that its displacement of other options harmed us all with the same level of evidence.
I'm not convinced of your first point. Just because something seems difficult to avoid given the current context does not mean it was the only path available.
Your second point is a little disingenuous. Yes, Microsoft and Windows have been wildly successful from a cultural adoption standpoint. But that's not the point I was trying to argue.
My first comment is simply pointing out that there's always a #1 in anything you can rank. Windows happened to be what won. And I learned how to use a computer on Windows. Do I use it now? No. But I learned on it as did most people whose parents wanted a computer.
The comment you were replying to was about Microsoft.
Even if Windows weren't a dogshit product, which it is, Microsoft is a lot more than just an operating system. In the 90's they actively tried to sabotage any competition in the web space, and held web standards back by refusing to make Internet Explorer actually work.
