The question I present today is what if Microsoft stopped doing OS’s? So many companies and individuals rely on the Microsoft brand to do their day to day workings on the computer. Whether its to figure out finances or its to play an addicting game of World of Warcraft some PC user’s rely solely on the Microsoft market to survive in a thriving world of electronics and Internet Communications. What if one day support was dropped and windows was eventually phased out?
How do you think that we would react to the overwhelming need for another supported Operating System? would all of the Microsoft Windows users switch to Mac OSX? Would the situation of Windows being knocked of the rung create an environment that would allow a competitive distribution of Linux that caters to windows users to rise to power? These questions are yours to think about… I hand this off to you the people…
COMMENCE DISCUSSION THROUGH COMMENTS!
5 Comments
The world would be a better place…
If Microsoft stopped creating Operating Systems, then the company would fail as a whole. One could say, “But they do so many things; if they stopped producing Windows then their hardware, entertainment, and internet division would keep on prospering.” Unfortunately that is wrong, because the Zune, Xbox 360, Live.com, Microsoft Sync, and anything else they have profitably created, relies solely on their software as well, which is ultimately powered by Windows technologies.
Its really very simple, People and companies would just use another product like mac osx, linux, or a new os made my someone who saw an opportunity to make a lot of money. The world would move on.
A lot of people would panic and all of the companies that write third party software for Windows only would go under or would have to definitely rewrite thousands of lines of code. It would definitely cost a lot of money for a lot of people. However, it would also create many money making opportunities for those that would would be needed to migrate data. Companies would need to train most of their employees on the new operating system which would take a lot of time and money and productivity would drop a great deal for a while. There are plenty of other problems is would cause that I’m not gonna list.. basically, stupid people would suffer the most.
Now.. if Microsoft instead started developing for other operating systems such as Linux, and a much easier to use (aka a linux for complete retards) was developed that mimicked windows explorer to the “T”, the transition and issues would be minimal, expect again for companies that make their living developing for windows.
IE would fail and succumb to the competition for sure, when 90% of its users (those folks who thinks the “blue E icon = teh internetz”) no longer have it pre-installed. And so we’d have a more standards compliant and beautiful web at least.
PC hardware prices would surely go up since most Win users would surely be sucked up into the Mac fold.
Either way, I’m on Daniel’s (above) train.