[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.