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Return of the '70s Microsoft Weirdos
theodp writes "On the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1978, a famous photo was taken (in a shopping mall no less) of the original Microsoft team, looking mighty sharp in their '70s outfits. Almost 30 years later, as Bill Gates prepares to depart from Microsoft, the group (looking older, but better) reconvened for a retake."
If Microsoft hadn't been the ones, someone else, or more likely several someone elses, would have. And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.
In the early 80s there were plenty of smaller players in the marketplace all with interesting products and different ideas. A more natural outgrowth of that which maintained that balance would have been much healthier. And while that probably would have led to a period of incompatibility and lack of standards, the lack of strong defacto standards may well have created a push for more industry standards earlier. By now many of those things that are still needed (standards for document, and multimedia interchange) would have long been settled.
For all the advantages that computers confer on society, don't forget the huge losses in both time and money that the poor quality of Windows and its apps have caused.
True that, except in those years, DOS/Windows licenses could be moved between machines. Not so anymore, starting with XP activation and WGA later on. No more "one Windows license per company". This might hurt Windows sales in the long run. And besides, nothing can beat the $0 license tag of a Linux or BSD (plus optional donation). We all need money, but the exaggerated license fees for XP and Vista won't do anything good for their spreading. With WGA, pirating Windows is not really feasible anymore for those who would do that, but pirating played a major part in spreading Windows. Microsoft could have easily used dongles (or ISA/PCI cards with ROMs), for instance, but instead they put lame copy protection schemes (or none at all) in their older DOS/Windows variants.
I had 32bit Amiga 1200 back in 1992 or something. I turned it on, said "Wow it is fast", liked new workbench and there is that "32 bit" thing. Basically every program was already in 32bit.
Amiga crashed very bad financially so I moved to x86/PC in Win 3.1/95 Schizophrenia age (my worst mistake, should be Apple).
It was like surreal people were still in 16/32 bit age, being amazed to Windows 95. It is still same way to me, even running OS X Leopard. E.g. I had 64bit command line/linux back in 2003 with my first G5 1600 switched from PC at last, so it was 64bit processor, I could install 8 gig of RAM. Now imagine I switch back to Vista 64 bit and watch people saying how cool 64bit is after 5 years.
We shouldn't have Atari ST or Amiga so we could really get impressed by these things :) It is still effecting, e.g. after the magnificent Word Processing tools in Amiga, I can't get so much excited about the Apple Pages 08. I had much of the functionality back in Amiga 1200.
There was something else already, Windows and PC was the clone of it and it wasn't cheaper at all. Compare the original IBM to Apple prices. I think people can't think that the community chose that Text based horrible junk over Apple GUI and they think Apple came later to scene. It is the IBM who missed the personal computing revolution and dealt with MS in panic while MS didn't even have a single line of code in their hands.
IBM didn't heroically open their platform, they were forced to it. There are still some old school small computer shops advertising or requiring 100% IBM compatible. People should look at the reasoning of that percentage number.
Perhaps people shouldn't ignore the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and watch/read it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_silicon_valley