Where would the Computing World be right now had Microsoft never had existed ? How would things be right now ?

Question

Where would the Computing World be right now had Microsoft never had existed ? How would things be right now ?

Answer 1

Free Software would be better since it would get more attention! and more drivers support, gaming support..etc for Linux (um, and mac) !! life would be better! and Free software would be MUCH MORE powerful than it's now, openoffice.org would be great if Microsoft didnt exist

Answer 2

Nowhere near as good aw where we are now... oh god I hate to think what it'd be like! I Thought similar - when Bill Gates was in school, what was tech like?? mmm...

and lizzy's answer is c**p. iMac wouldn't be cool, Mac is bad compared to Windows!!

Answer 3

I don't think that we would be as far in technology as we are now if Microsoft never existed.  For one thing, the hate for Microsoft and it's idiotic registry file is what has driven people to making Linux/Unix/Ubuntu/Kubuntu/etc. so great!

Yay for Microsoft! The hate for you and your registry file drives us to do better!

Answer 4

We would be in the world of iMac right now.  Life would be good!  

Answer 5

MS did what no one else could do. Create a real business model, then create a need. Something would have filled the void by the non-existence of MS. MS's biggest contribution was to make computing available to the general masses. No they didn't create the wheel, but they did make a wheel that connected you to a neighbor then on to the world. Don't forget their productivity products. Maybe we would have gotten the version of Alien 3.1 that area 52 has....  

Answer 6

Odds are that computers would have never reached mainstream and computers would be only for people who have lots of money to run Unix-based systems or apple's OS. And plus, apple never really got any popularity until OSX, when it because more user-friendly.

Because of Microsoft, we have standards in computing, Linux never would have evolved, because it would have evolved in a similar patternt to the Apple OS, and apple would have no need to evolve, so it would have made, small, unnoticable leaps between versions. Thanks to Microsoft we have many features that are standard to computers and have made computing a staple in today's society, without Microsoft, computers would probably only exist in a few very specific places such as government offices and large corporations.

Answer 7

I think this would largely have depended on Richard Stallman.  I suspect that he would have taken a similar course to that which he has, in a world without Microsoft.  There were the models of Apple and IBM to rebel against.

Perhaps the GNU system would have become the de facto standard.  Perhaps the Hurd would now be complete.  Perhaps we would have a more freely computing world.

There is no telling what might have filled the niches that were taken up by such now-ubiquitous software as Office.  It is possible we would have something very similar.  It is at least as possible that we would have either inferior or superior solutions.  We can hardly guess what programmers would have taken on what challenges in such an alternative world.

However, I have little doubt that computers would still have had the kind of global presence on our desktops that they do.  Before Microsoft got going computers were already making inroads into normal life with systems like the Commodore 64.

Answer 8

Very difficult question to answer as it presupposes that Windows as an OS would never exist.  It probably would exist in some form under some other name,  Other systems like cm/p might still be around or we might still be processing using cobalt, Fortran or some other archaic language.  What Microsoft has managed to do is force standardization where very little existed.  In the early days there were multiple word processors that were not fully compatible with each other so that a document created in WordPerfect may not have been readable in Perfect Writer unless you knew to save it in a generic format.  The same can be said for all the other programs like spreadsheets and databases that are heavily used.