.. and thereby gave away the server, and scientific computing, and embedded applications including cell phones and tablets, and... If the film effects industry had waiting a few years to jump ship from SGI, and so had linux as a viable platform rather than getting stuck with NT, Microsoft's ecosystem wouldn't have any interesting applications at all. So, yeah, thanks Microsoft, if you hadn't been more short sighted you might not be completely below my radar today. And that would be terrible.But, instead of choosing to go for pushing the industry forward and embracing innovation, MS went with entrenching and creating a decade worth of utterly shit OSes.
Can you imagine the juggernaut Microsoft could have been if they had embraced the change, and the internet? Of course, it's all wild-eyed speculation on par with "What if the nazi's had won WWII?", but it's still amazing to think of what they could have been if they hadn't gone the fear-filled and entrenched route, and instead opened up and empowered people.