Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 11th Oct 2005 15:43 UTC, submitted by sean batten
This humorous article depicts the computing world without Microsoft-- Apple has the biggest marketshare (15%), HP bought Commodore, IBM thinks text-based interfaces are the best thing for customers, and hardware-accelerated 3D is a no-go because all the various parties cannot agree on a standard. And Microsoft? Aren't they selling BASIC?
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I think it's totally ridiculous to suggest that there would be less progress and more cost if there wasn't a dominant computer. Just look at the massive progress of software and hardware in the 80s, before the IBM PC and Windows became so dominant. As for the price of hardware and software, I think that competition between more companies would actually lower prices.
There was always budget software and low cost hardware even back in the days of dozens of different 8bit computers made by small companies. Even taking inflation into account I think I spent a lot less on GEOS and various apps for my C64 than I spent on MS Windows and Office. When I bought an Acorn Archemedies in the late 80s it was significantly cheaper than a similar IBM clone, despite the Archie being a far superior computer.
There were tools available to read disks formatted on other computers and document converters to read files. I happily shared work done on my Acorn with Mac and Windows users. I think it's inevitable that standards for things like 3D graphics would have developed even with different competing OSes.