[InclinedPlane]

I think your hatred of MS is misplaced. The world is almost certainly a better place because of them. Maybe not as better a place as possible, but certainly better. The "MS is evil" meme always struck me as an immature response to MS's imperfections, few companies have done as much to put computing power into the hands of people, and that has had an amazing impact on the world.

As far as google, they'll lose more and more of the fire from their early days as they get bigger and older, but they still have a fairly strong ethical core for any company their size and I think that will help as they age.

[lsd5you]

I don't think you are giving enough credit to the companies and services that never were (because of Microsoft). Infact an uncharitable reading of what you've written would be that you assume no microsoft means some kind of industry void.

It is certainly pretty disputable that computing adoption was in anyway accelerated by the exsistence of Microsoft since they have essentially been rent collecting and pushing up prices for everyone to join in.

[InclinedPlane]

Sure, it would have been different, but in how many of those parallel universes would it have been better without MS? Keep in mind that the biggest competition for MS in those early days was Apple and IBM. Apple of that era coming out on top would have resulted in far fewer people gaining access to computers and far, far slower rate of innovation, especially in hardware. The same would have been true for IBM coming out on top as well.

Microsoft was one of the few companies which pursued an open platform for computing hardware and a licensed OS. That very much accelerated innovation in ways that most of MS's competitors did not.

[michaelchisari]

OS/2 was an open platform, and would have had more or less the same effect as Microsoft's dominance.

[InclinedPlane]

You have to draw a distinction between what IBM did as a response to competition in our actual history and what IBM would have done had Microsoft never existed. IBM would have almost certainly continued what it had done before and what virtually every other company was doing at the time: offering bundled hardware/software solutions, using customer lock-in and FUD like weapons, and pushing incredibly high profit markups on everything. It's certainly the same thing Apple did. And it's the same road that smartphones have for the most part taken up until very recently. It's easy to skip past the fact that Microsoft had a pretty significant impact on the structure of the entire computing industry and some of that impact was very positive. Granted, they certainly have their fair share of sins to atone for but in my judgment any of their likely replacements from the early era of personal computing would have had as many or more.

[michaelchisari]

the companies and services that never were

BeOS. Sweet lord, what BeOS could have been...

[protomyth]

Although I love BeOS, do look at who was running the company and what that same individual did to Apple. The amazingly bad moves made by Microsoft's competitors sure helped a lot. Much like Microsoft's bad moves are helping their competitors now.

[InclinedPlane]

BeOS seemed like a very cool experiment but from what I've heard it was sunk by its own faults, most especially from being nearly impossible to develop for.

[michaelchisari]

Hardly. I was a part of the developer program, and for the time, it was a dream to develop for. Because of the pervasive multithreading, development was a little bit more complicated, but the BeAPI was lovely, and very forward-thinking. And the benefits of the multithreaded architecture were immediately apparent to anyone who did even elementary development.

What killed BeOS was Microsoft strong-arming PC manufacturers to not allow BeOS as an option. Be had Hitachi and Compaq lined up for dual booting and an internet appliance, respectively. Microsoft used their OEM program to get them to go back on the deals.

BeOS alone is one reason I will never forgive the anti-competitive, monopolistic tactics of 90's Microsoft.

[mburns]

Be (the company) offered to give BeOS away for free to any OEM, but none would touch it... because the contracts with Microsoft at the time meant they had to pay a Windows license for every machine sold, even if BeOS and (not Windows) was installed on it.

It wasn't a good time to compete with Microsoft.

[protomyth]

That, not the whole Internet Explorer tangent, was the thing that ticked me off the most. The thought that any money for the Intel box I bought to run NeXTSTEP went to Microsoft was unbelievable. If the gov had put a stop to that one practice earlier, it would have been a different game.

[patrickgzill]

MS was evil, at least earlier in the company's lifetime. The theft of IP from Gary Kildall, the Stac case, the Wang lawsuit, the way IBM got shafted over OS/2, etc.

[tomelders]

For my money, the single greatest evil Microsoft has ever perpetuated is Internet Explorer. And they show no signs of giving up the ghost on that one. The World Wide Web would get my vote as mankind's single greatest achievement, and I think we're still right at the very beginning of it's chapter in history.

Sadly, my view is that we're 10 years behind where we should be because progress is anchored to Internet Explorer, and will be for another 10 years at least.

I will happily call IE evil because Microsoft have used it as a weapon in numerous attempts to seize control of something they didn't create, don't understand and above all have no right to mess with.

[loup-vaillant]

> The World Wide Web would get my vote as mankind's single greatest achievement,[…]

I'd place the Internet before the world wide web. The www makes great use of many-to-many communication, but the Internet enabled it (which was its entire point, I think).

[tomelders]

It's true, there's no WWW without the Internet, but I don't think the Internet would be what it is today without the World Wide Web. Perhaps something else (something better?) may have come along in it's place, but it didn't.

I think the success of the web is it's ease of use, which has enabled anyone with an internet connection to contribute, and it's these contributions, both large and small, technical and non technical that make it mankinds greatest achievement.