Slashdot Mirror
What Would The World Be Like Without Microsoft?
CanadianMikey asks: "The debate with the business side of computing rages on about the validity of Open Source. Is it good or bad? What is the future of computing? Could it have been different, and where will the 21st century take us? Is Microsoft just the big nail that always gets hammered first and will someone step in to take their place when they are finally taken down?
If Microsoft were to close up shop, who do the readers of Slashdot think would be tomorrow's Microsoft? What about the forgotten windows?"
Why?
Apple is based on having decent and predictable hardware to run the OS.
OS X is great software -- I'm using it right now, but unless you are using the hardware along side it, its not the same. One of the problems with Windows is that there is WAY too much hardware to support relyably...thats not totally their fault either. The fact that you want to encourage folks to make hardware for your platform means that you have to make the code easy to program against -- which means you have folks vastly unqualified to write driver software writting it.
Apple raises the bar and makes it a bitch to program some drivers for this very reason. That probably means that having a dozen types of motherboards with different integrated parts would not work as relyably...or if Apple kept their standards - not at all. Witness every so often when they patch their systems to remove specific pieces of hardware that is known to be buggy -- I've been told some updates were there to simply KILL some hardware so that it wouldn't make the machine unstable. There was substandard RAM that was sold for a while on the G4s and Apple put out a patch that disabled all of this from being used and they pissed off a LOT of folks -- but Apple needed to do this to keep their standards up (otherwise folks were bitching about stability issues that had nothing to do with the OS or Apple branded hardware).
So would they move over to inexpensive x86s? They might. probably not...at least not from a supported perspective...
IBM needed an OS, and if MS wasn't there, CP/M was. So on that front we'd just have different person reaping the rewards there. Of course, Kildall was a business moron and blew his chance at that time.
Apple would have risen much more strongly, as well as console/PC makers like Atari and Commodore. We'd probably see computers with more advanced graphics systems, but with less memory and less hard disk space as most media would be self-contained cartridges. Which is an interesting idea, that we wouldn't have software available separate from a cartridge. We would have to have the physical cart to plug into the slot array on our PCs to enable software, but it would also be easier to move software from one machine to another as well as conserve primary disk space as documents could be saved directly onto the cartridge.
We wouldn't have the powerful CPUs that we have now, we'd probably be a couple generations behind as the hardware demands of the software would be much lower. Hard disks would be small, memory would be low, and video screens would be optimized to view on both TV and computer monitors. Digital TVs that could display computer video output at high resolutions would be the standard as the console/PCs would have merged the computer into a central position in the home entertainment cabinet.
Many companies would only just now be moving their businesses to computerized systems. Until now, computers would have been viewed as toys. Without Microsoft, the concept of a computer for business would be unthinkable except for large institutions, so many smaller accounting firms, warehouses, and mom'n'pop stores would still be doing their paperwork by hand.
In short, the computer as a personal entertainment device would be much more ingrained in our culture, but the computer as a business tool would only be catching on. The prices of "serious" personal computers useful for business purposes would still be astronomical and software would be expensive to purchase.
I have been pwned because my
I'll likely get flamed to hell and moded out of existance, but I believe every word of this:
Gary Kildale died in a plane crash and never got the chance to give CP/M to IBM. Without Microsoft getting DOS for IBM, Intel never would have gained the marketshare. Linus would not have been hacking on the 386 and needing badly to break the confines of what he had available. Therefor, the likelihood of Linux existing today would be significantly lower. It may not have happened. You might still be waiting for HURD (or, more likely, using BSD). Hell, Intel woulde never have gotten so popular. You all might all be on using Macintoshes right now like I am.
Microsoft's products might suck, but they made Intel hardware the comodoty that it is today in order that you can afford to tinker with Linux or whatever it is you want to do.
There's an old story oft repeated back home and taken as truth. It's about Comdex 1983. Microsoft were still a small company back then, still in Seattle, and had a minimal representation in Vegas with Gates himself behind the counter.
All of a sudden there was a bit of a stir, and Gates found out it was a demonstration of GEM. He wandered over and pulled one of his big poker bluffs.
Heckling the product demonstrators, he told everyone who he was, what company he represented, claimed his own company had a similar product in the works, far more developed than this beta of GEM, but his company, ethical as it was, would never dream of luring the public with a demonstration of a product what wasn't ready for market.
He then supposedly stalked back to his own exhibit, closed it down demonstratively, and proclaimed that he was leaving Comdex in protest. He traveled immediately back to Seattle.
Where he immediately convened the 'board' of MS and appointed Steve Ballmer manager of the phantom project. Ballmer started getting phone calls from the media who wanted to know what the product would be called (here Ballmer was impressively creative) and also wanted to know why it was taking so long: Gates intimated MS had been working on it for several years already in 1983.
When the 'product' finally surfaced in 1985, and looked (and performed) as poorly as it did, a few people understood: it hadn't taken that long at all.
You know what roll of paper tape I'm talking about .. that was the one containing the version of GW-Basic (yep, stood for Gee-Whiz) that Bill Gates and Paul Allen had hacked together. They were showing it in their hotel room in the late 70's or early 80's to a couple of (Comdex?) visitors and were talking about selling it when someone saw a copy of the tape and scarfed it.
.. what if he'd had good security and no one had been able to lift that reel of tape? Bill Gates and Richard Stallman might have peacefully co-existed.
They made a copy, and passed it on with the admonitiion to 'be fruitful, and multiply' -- make a copy and pass it on. Bill Gates wrote a scathing letter to the community (and no doubt, swore to wreak his own revenge).
So, it's 25 years later, and he's still battling the same people that stole his reel of paper tape from that hotel room. So consider this
Funny we just discussed yesterday the unfortunate effect Microsoft has on software.
.NET shit that is even slower and more complex than current implementations.
Maybe Microsoft did a lot of good. I am sure a lot of posts will show that.
Here I would like to stress what a mess Microsoft has made of web applications by meddling with Java and killing off it support in Windows.
I am a web programmer and I know the hurdles encountered when delivering a web application.
My experience says 80% of the development and maintenance efforts go to the presentation layer. Why? Because it is done through the ass. Excuse me, but HTML+JavaScript was not designed as a user interface layer. Implementing thin-clients in Javascript is suicide, a slow and painful one. Re-sending the form to the browser every time an action is made is assinine.
It is ludicruous, the things companies do right now to implement a web user interface. When 20 programmers and 15 designers spend all day explaining to each other what bits in the entangled mess of a page the designer should change to change the interface , it is not programming, it is extremely distorted masochistic masturbation.
Enter client-side java. Thin clients? Easy. Security+sandbox? Yep. Custom widgets? Yep. Direct graphics rendering? You bet. And it can be done in a few weeks by a programmer + UI designer. As a result, half the burden is off the server, the interface is natural and easy to use, maintenance costs are minimal.
Face it, Browser-embedded Java is the answer to all these freaking mammoth problems web development has drowned itself into. This technology is how many? 10 years old?? Why has not it been accepted???
Enter Microsoft.
Had Microsoft not interfered, client-side Java would be as ubiquitous on the desktop as are GNU tools on unix'es, due to its superior design and concept. But no, M$ had to distort it and obstruct it so it never made it to the users' desktops. Instead it promises
And this is just one example. Killing off good ideas is M$'s job. Not innovation, not better products, not open standards, not fair play. Microsoft has just killed everyone in the IT and scared the shit out of everyone else. It stands alone on a pile of skulls two stories high.
There are worse offenders in the compiler market than gcc. MS's Visual C++ is far more permissive than gcc when it comes to "standards". For example, vc uses the ancient c++ scoping rules (circa 1995-ish) and will gleefully compile the following:
void somefunc(void) {
for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++ ) {
}
i = 23;
}
What's worse is that you *have* to follow their archaic scoping rules... the following *will not* compile with vc:
void somefunc(void) {
for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++ ) {
}
for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++ ) {
}
}
VC claims that the variable 'i' is declared twice.
There are many more examples. Here's another code snippet that vc will compile, but is not standard:
enum MyEnum {
FOO,
BAR
};
void somefunc(void) {
whatever = MyEnum::FOO;
}
The problem is that the c++ standard states that enums place their contents in the scope level immediately above their own, *not* in a separate scope (this is a holdover from c). You can't reference the contents of an enum like you would any other name space, ie 'MyEnum::FOO' should be simply 'FOO'.
I'm sure there are many many more examples, but who cares? No one will ever read this comment anyway.