I’ve been reading an interesting article on the PC World website titled "What Would Life Be like Without Windows". I’ll admit, I’m a fan of Microsoft. Don’t jump to conclusions though, I think there are plenty of areas for them to work harder and deliver a better product to their users.
Of course there’s the initial knee-jerk reaction that life would be fantastic without this giant monolithic software elephant in the room. After all, everything they make is crap and they strong-arm competition and their business partners to do what they want. Right?
It’s not that easy, the article discusses these potential impacts to the industry around us and our everyday lives changing because of that change to the industry.
Unexpected results with client applications: Except for the fairly recent changes in the Office user interface, most Windows applications share a familiar if not very similar interface with other Windows applications. With the failure of Microsoft, people would need to start learning a much wider variety of user-interfaces.
Stay tuned and read my follow-up to this post with some more impacts of a world without Windows.