But Ody, do you honestly think the world would be a better place if, rather than Microsoft being a monopoly, we had 3 or 4 big players. Both you and I know how bad things were back in the 90's with regards to standards, compatability and so on.Quote:
Originally Posted by odykas
I remember as a child in school we had machines running the BBC Acorn OS, DOS and other stuff I can't remember. Problem is that the skills you had from dealing with one OS didn't translate across to the other OS and at this point in time we didn't have the sheer number of people in the world to crank out the quality content for multiple OS's. Sure now there are millions of people in the world who can code and we have the internet so tOdy can code while parked in his Fazza @ Rascasse and send that code to someone in Australia in seconds so nowadays we can have a certain amount of fragmentation. But I would argue that if Microsoft hadn't done what they did that we'd be years and years behind and computing wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is now. If Apple had continued on as it did or if Linux had become the standard then we'd have arrived where we are now, but Microsoft was the standard and I think it's all worked out well.