Re:What else has Microsoft meant to us... (Score 2, Insightful)

Those are valid knocks against MS, and I'm no big fan of Gates and Friends. However, it is a historical reality that without MS windows, desktop computing would still be a idiosyncratic little community typing out cryptic strings to a command line OS to do computing. Windows brought computing to the masses. Command line OSes were just too abstract for casual, low-tech users and MACs were (and are) prohibitively expensive.

Yes, MS has done some very evil things and some very incompetent things. But MS Windows gave rise to our industry's explosion, and they deserve a small amount of positive affirmation for that.

Just as it is impossible to quantify how much development hasn't occurred because of MS competition stifling, it is equally impossible to quantify how much of the last decade's content would not have been developed if MS hadn't developed an affordable GUI OS where any monkey could launch an app by clicking an icon. So maybe we are 5 development cycles behind where we would be if MS had published Windows in a perfect and altruistic world, but we are many development cycles ahead of where would be now if Windows hadn't been developed at all.