How would the technology world have looked if Microsoft have never existed?
A crash course in technology history, imagination and analysis of past competition
Microsoft has a profound effect and involvement in modern life productivity tools present on most office, SOHO and home computers. Substantial market share has been achieved using combination of early market penetration and a significantly easy to use GUI interface.
But was it the only option? Can office productivity (and few other contributions) could have been made without the existence of Microsoft?
Full disclosure: the author of this blog is currently writing it on his Libre Office Writer application on his Ubuntu Linux distribution.
But can we objectively determine the effect of Microsoft development in the office productivity on how Libre Office Writer and Ubuntu looks today? Were there other alternatives to begin with? How would things have looked otherwise?
We have to be modest at this point. All that is written in this blog is the author own estimation. But we have to begin somewhere…
And as I prefer – let’s begin with history. I will go over main Microsoft product lines which lasted substantial amount of time and are known to most common office productivity tools users.
In favor of keeping the Blog’s length in the readable length, the list is not complete.
One of the first software packages which allowed Microsoft to gain commercial hold in the office and home software is the MSDOS operating system.
This operating system is mostly based on CP/M with a few Unix borrowed technical aspects.
Although the O/S was popular in its time, it quickly lost market share to its replacement, windows, due to non-existent user interface, lack of native multi-process, context switchable and limitation in access of memory above 640KB.
All in all, in history perspective, usage of MSDOS versus its CP/M predecessor bear little meaning in the long term. Long term usage of MSDOS restricted memory usage of applications and encouraged the usage of proprietary 32-bit DOS extenders made by Rational systems (DOS/4G, DOS/4GW) and Phar Lap software (386| and TNT) plus proprietary context switching solutions (DesqView) on top of MSDOS. The resulting combination of basic Microsoft MSDOS functionality coupled with third party proprietary add-ons bore little kin to the original MSDOS solution.
Another well known collection of software packages, Microsoft Office, contains Word and Excel.
Both Ousted existing mature competitors (WordPerfect for Word, Lotus and Visi-calc for Excel) from the market, probably because of a GUI gap, which I believe could have been bridged in the long term.
The ultimate synonym of Microsoft is windows. Although providing innovating GUI experience at the time, the initial Windows O/S itself was built on top of MSDOS, due to backward compatibility issues, which provided poor stability and multi-tasking functionality.
The GUI experience combined with MSDOS support were enough, however, to oust competing , superior solutions such as IBM OS/2 .
Microsoft developed windows NT in parallel which was built from scratch for server performance but contained GUI which was too complicated to operate for the average office/home user.
Only Windows 2000 combined both technologies into a working and market-wide accessible product.
The author of the Blog, while admittingly biased towards Linux solutions, has around 25+ years of experience using various Windows versions (from 3.1 to Windows 10) as code development platforms, and still feels, that although stability has improved over the years, that performance and stability are still subpar compared to Unix based operating systems such as X-Windows based Linux (Ubuntu) and Apple’s OS/X (Darwin/X based).
The big popularity today of Apple based solutions proves that Unix based solution can provide both good user interface, stability and performance. Microsoft own Windows implementation is highly influenced by Apple Macintosh GUI (the companies settled outside of court).
The market selection of windows meant almost ten years delay in adopting a stable, multi-tasking operating system in favor of MSDOS compatibility. All in all, the difference is whether we would have Windows as the mainstream O/S for modern time office and home users or OS/X. As OS/X is constantly gaining ground, at least in the premium market, the historic influence is notable but would not have made significant influence if things have been gone otherwise.
Internet Explorer – at the time of its introduction, it quickly gained ground by its inclusion with the windows operating system, gaining better popularity than Netscape, but eventually was dropped as users preferred Google’s Chrome. Clearly this shows the main product merrit was its inclusion with the windows opeating system.
Windows CE – This Compact, device edition (Embedded devices) never had a good market share to begin with. Only embedded systems requiing extensive GUI support at the time chose this solution of market RTOS leaders such as Vxworks and pSOS+. Once Android and light QT based Linux GUI solution were available they quickly replaced Windows CE where full blown GUI was needed in embedded systems.
X-Box – this Microsoft gaming platform gained steady ground versus Sony PlayStation, but did not revolutionalize the gaming market.
.NET/C# – this mainly competed with JAVA, with market share mainly limited to windows solution, which limited the market expandability of the solution with the release of the Android O/S for mobile phones.
Silverlight – meant as a competition to Adobe Flash, both technologies reached End of Line in favour of the more portable HTML5.
Windows Phone – a completely failed attempt by Microsoft to penetrate the growing mobile O/S market.
Azure – probably one of the biggest financial drivers of Microsoft today. While not innovative, and having complex network architecture, this solution has better networking performance compared to Google’s GCP, and even slightly better than AWS. Most of this technology is built upon third party hardware vendor solutions, which means it could have been done by somebody else…
Bottom line – although Microsoft is interlinked with a lot of modern day technology solution used by the home and office users, although things could have been different, looked and felt different, technologically wise they would not have been profoundly different or less advanced without Microsoft. Microsoft has been repeatedly hailed for being a marketing Prodigy, and for a good reason so…
Disclaimer: The blog expresses the author own private experiences and in no way express the opinion of his employers, past, present or future, or any companies or parties associated in a business fashion with him. Author own experiences might differ or vary from experiences, lab results, measured metrics, proven or documented behavior experienced by other people, industry experts, companies mentioned or inolvled in the market, and cannot be used as indicators for future product selection or de-selection, making business decisions with mentioned or involved companies or advertisement of performance or properties of the mentioned products or companies.