[tzs]

Why are you blaming Microsoft for what IBM did? Microsoft's plan was for the world to run on Unix, with Microsoft selling Unix software--they wanted to be a tools and language company, and were tired of having every different manufacturer have its own operating system. Gates tried to get IBM to pick a processor for the IBM PC that would support Unix, but they weren't interested.

Your hypothetical 1% productivity increase has to be balanced against the productivity loss of dealing with a bunch of different Unix variants on a bunch of different processors. The dominance of Windows surely delayed innovation in operating systems, but arguably spurred innovation in applications.

[cwb]

Simply because I think they had the opportunity to create a great OS (whatever its relation to Unix) and chose not to. My point was that I think DOS/Windows hindered the innovation in applications -- not necessarily their complexity or size -- but their utility. I have the option to use big, feature-rich Windows applications, but mostly prefer smaller command-line based tools. I'm clearly in a minority here though, so maybe I am crazy.. :)