[Grishnakh]

I'll also add that it's not that much different for MS. If they suddenly winked out of existence, it'd be a pain, but "massive negative impact", not that much. There are alternatives, and it'd force everyone to have to explore those alternatives finally. It'd be a much bigger problem than Apple winking out of existence, however, because of MS's strong position in business software.

Of course, part of this depends on whether MS's software also winks out of existence, or if only the corporation itself gets swallowed up in a space-time continuum rift. If the software stays, it wouldn't be much of a problem at all: people would just continue using MS-ware as they currently do. A lot of people use illegitimate MS software anyway, so no change for them. Corporations would have less hassle with licensing. The main problem would be security updates, but that's been screwed up lately anyway because MS has been using that to force unwanted updates and ad-ware and spyware.