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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?"
And we'd be loving it!
Actually, I think IBM, the original scary tech monopoly, showed us the benefit of standards (abliet mostly hardware standards).
Microsoft just shows us how little we learn from historical mistakes, REGARDING standards. This is the one place where I wouldn't mind a little government intervention, toward an open and efficient standard. They could hardly screw it up worse than it is now.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
... we'd have no idea how bloody good Linux and Mac OSX really are.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
A lot less /. comments. With no microsoft to complain about, half the comments wouldn't have anything to rant about.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
As loathe as I am to say it now, Microsoft has actually show us the benefit of "standards".
That's true, but in the absence of a behemoth like Microsoft dictating what a "standard" is we would probably be working with true (ie open) standards rather than simply what Bill declares is Good For You(tm).
I'd like to think that absent a Microsoft-like controlling entity, the continuing mayhem of opposing formats and standards for data and documents would have become so untenable that developers would have been forced towards working together to come up with standards that actually worked. And that were actually supported and were actually standard. This would be simply to ensure that the multitude of word processors (for example) could reliably utilise each other's documents since none would have the market leverage to ignore the others.
This assumes, of course, that not only is there no Microsoft, but that there is no company in a similar position of power.
There is also an Easter Bunny, and I saw Santa yesterday at his summer job at the beach...
We'd all be running (and enjoying) AmigaOS 8.
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
There'd be no war, starvation, or crime, and every child would have a pony.
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.
If Windows were to disappear the world would be very, very dark inside.
Can we shut up about Microsoft already? Damn, every other story is some "anti-M$" drivel. Lets imagine life without these kinds of "discussions", just for one day.
I do not have any affiliation with MS, and have both Linux and MS machines at home.
I know someone will probably mod me down for this, but why does it appear that Slashdot has a tendency to continually bash MS.
I mean at the end of the day, if Windows was really as crap as some people make it out to be, no-one would use it, simple as that. I have used many OSes over the years, W95, WNT, W2K, WXP, W2K3, OS2, Linux, UNIX. I know that they all have their problems, but really, name an OS that doesn't have a problem in it.
Not only that, a computer is very much like a car, if it is not looked after, it will eventually die, be it Linux, Windows, UNIX or MAC OS.
I am not claiming that MS does no bad, but really there is not many large companies out there that have not done something bad at some stage. And there is not one company out there that would not defend themselves the same way that MS has, if they were under attack, be that a legitimate attack or not.
Now, I understand the concerns of the Open Source community, and Linux has come a hell of a long way in recent years (which is why it is starting to be used in the real world now), but do not think for a second that the tables would not be turned if Linux was in MS's position. I do not like SCO's tactics, but if they do prove that Linux has their source code, then you might as well put Linux in the same box as MS, as it would prove that not even the open source community is always the GOOD IT community member it claims to be.
So mod me down if you wish, but really, the MS bashing is starting to get boring.
But to answer you question, someone else would be in their position, with a different name, with it's own bugs, exploits and vulnerabilities (just as every program and OS does), and would probable cop the same bashing that MS does.
Third of Nine.
Well, um, yes.
Lets not forget that the internet was originally a government project founded on government standards.
Jeremy
Indeed. There would almost undoubtably be a widespread economic depression. People are stubborn. The masses would just stick with whatever the latest version of Windows was when Microsoft went down. Most people probably wouldn't buy a new computer until they had to, because like you mentioned, they don't want to have to learn how to use another one. Hell, most people barely know how to use Windows, as easy as it is. It would be years before people started buying personal computers again on a large scale. The PC gaming industry would likely never recover. But worst of all? I'd have to get a new email address.
Rufus Dark~~
Microsoft is an inevitability, just like Neo. Asking what the world be like without microsoft is like asking what the world would be like if WWII never happened.
To answer the question, the world would be exactly the same.. except the software company holding a monopoly on operating systems wouldn't be called "microsoft" it would be called g-soft.. and today you would be asking the question "what would the world be like without g-soft?"
a better question would be why is the microsoft-anomoly inevitable.. that one, I think, is because anything that makes up an integral part of our infrastructure (such as an OS) that isn't yet mandated by government will naturally fall into a monopoly simply because it's convenient.
bite my glorious golden ass.
I think if you really looked, you'd find that the PC's popularity had more to do with the fact that it wasn't locked to one particular manufacturer. Once Compaq clean-roomed their own BIOS and built the first PC compatibles, it wasn't long before half of Taiwain was making motherboards and selling components to white box computer builders. Remember how many computer manufacturers there were and how big Computer Shopper magazine was in the eighties and early nineties? Those guys weren't building computers for people to tinker with, they were building IBM compatibles because the parts were cheaply and easily available. If someone had reverse engineered the Apple MAC ROMs and not been pounded to dust by the Apple Legal Team, we might well all be using Macs today.
The ironic thing is that without two things that IBM would view as absolute disasters - the non-exclusive deal Bill Gates and Microsoft cut with IBM to supply DOS, and the arrival of the "clone" market, the IBM PC line might well have been a commercial failure. But once all the clone makers were pushing "IBM compatible" everywhere you turned, computer manufacturers who kept their designs proprietary simply couldn't get and keep the shelf space/mind share they needed to keep their platforms viable. (With the exception of Apple, of course - having a rabid fan base helps, but as the Amiga folks know, it's not a 100% guarantee of success)
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Microsoft has actually show us the benefit of "standards".
If not for Microsoft's corruption of SLIP and PPP in 1994...
my very own TRIPLE Challenge Handshake Authentication
(CHA CHA CHA) would have ruled the dialup world instead!
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.
It doesn't sound like you do, either. You think buildings would be safer if every builder was allowed to "innovate" their own designs? Do you think the highways would work better if each one was a toll road, allowed to design to their own needs? Do you think it would be better or worse for communications if ATT and Verizon each designed and developed phone technology independently of each other, meaning interoperation didn't happen?
Actually, IINM, there is some historical precedent: the South had different guage of train tracks than the North, and it's part of what led to the cultural divide, which in turn led to the Civil War. Relaying tracks so that troops could be moved was a great burden--but once accomplished, and the standard set, notice how it's been preserved since.
Institutions that purport to operate on a national level, and become part of the national infrastructure, should be standarized so that there are no boundaries of information exchange. On this point I agree with Ashcroft, who said as much when Bush took office. However, I disagree that one company should be in control of that standard; instead, it should be controlled by an open forum. As was the early internet, and it's why it remains as strong as it is and grew to the popularity that it acquired.
Do you think that if Microsoft was in control of the early HTML specifications, or even TCP/IP for that matter, that we'd have the ubiquitious internet now?
--
$tar -xvf
Let's see. A world without Microsoft. What would I be complaining about right now. Oh, yeah, I would be talking about the evil empire Apple and how they have a hold on the market.
Seriously, though, I have to agree with you that the government is the last place you want programming standards to come out of. Shudder. The technology sector should develop its own standards in cooperation - sure, it leads to a BetaMax versus VHS situation sometimes, but in the end you get general interoperability.
Much as I hate to say it, I don't think that the computer industry would be as far along as it is today without games.
Games have driven the market and the platform of choice has been the PC. Why? Because it was there.
Apple became tied to its hardware/software model, expensive. (And excellent.) The IBM PC clone gained ubiquity by being cheap (And...cheap). Microsoft was in the right place at the right time and kept on the ball in crushing competition and playing bondage with PC manufacturers.
And here go my mod points and karma
I doubt that Linux would be where it is today without the domination of Microsoft.
I would be nice to have the government say something like "OK all you companies, decided on a format for word processor documents and stick to it untill the you issue a new standard after that", but for government to decide the standard its self probably wouldn't be good.
It's actually much simpler than that. The government doesn't need to dictate that a standard be agreed upon... what it can dictate is that "We will only purchase products that read and write open, pubically documented formats by default."
In this case, there doesn't need to be agreement between companies in the form of a standard. But, it brings all the benefits of a standard in that the "popular" products will be well-documented.
- Tony
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
You could list for days the software companies that went out of business as a result of Microsoft's dominance of the industry, but nothing is more substantive than the fact IMO that Microsoft single-handedly destroyed the entire computer product support industry.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, software companies offered toll-free tech support and were easily contacted to resolve problems. When Windows came along, there were so many incompatibility issues that most of us software publishers found the majority of our tech support resources were going towards fixing Microsoft problems that were inadvertently blamed on our own products. The unstable and chaotic Windows environment, where one il-behaved app or library could screw everything else up, made it a nightmare trying to support even the most simple applications.
Microsoft, single-handedly eradicated the entire product support market by forcing developers to hide or else become pawns in helping microsoft debug its own OS.
I abandoned the desktop market when Windows became dominant. It wasn't worth it trying to develop a useful product for consumers when every new release of an operating system would make your application malfunction and cause all your users to blame you for something that was outside your control.
Thanks Microsoft.
Sir, I have some bad news... the building collapsed and your family is dead.
The good news is: (handing card) Lionel Hutz, Attoney at Law! Sir, today is your lucky day!
Seriously, you'd be hard pressed to find a more unscrupulous group than building developers. Because of the incorporation techniques that they use, getting sued is essentially no problem. They hide behind the corporate veil and just declare bankruptcy for the shell corporation that built that 30 story condo building that now leaks like a sieve. That's if the company hasn't been wound down by the time the problem crops up.
Using tort is completely reactive. The burden on police, fire, hospitals and the legal system itself is only increased because the building has already burnt down. Standards are preventative.
> You think buildings would be safer if every builder was allowed to "innovate" their own designs?
...
:)
Reminds me of that quote off my giant poster on Murphy's Law about Computers
"If engineers built buildings the way programers write code,
the first time a woodpecker came along, it would destroy civilization."
And yes, I am a programmer.
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.
> > You think buildings would be safer if every builder was allowed
> > to "innovate" their own designs?
> Yes. Before building codes, people built buildings that stood and
> worked properly because if they didn't, they might die.
Bah.
The Great Chicago Fire.
The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.
Bam, Iran.
the Lisbon earthquake that stars in _Candide_
Left to their own devices, people continually, seemingly irrepressibly
build unsafe houses on beaches, cliffs, floodplains, earthquake faults, mudslide-prone hillsides -- and die in droves in consequence.
Without building codes, 10 X more fatalities in
the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California.
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
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.