Warning - nerdy computer content.
What if... Microsoft stopped thinking like, well, Microsoft, and started thinking like Apple?
There are a number of hints that's been happening for some time: the requirement coming that computers running windows will have to have similar hardware restrictions to those already present in Apple computers (UEFI) the restrictions of Windows on ARM based mobile devices and the desire to produce their own hardware like Surface and the ever closer linking of Microsoft to Nokia Phones.
It seems other people are thinking along similar lines although not exactly phrasing it quite so plainly.
To me, it looks like both Apple and Microsoft are losing their way a bit. Both are desperate to create and occupy the new mobile computing market, and Apple have done it very successfully so far. But they both seem to be forgetting that the real place of computing is still the desktop with a mouse/trackpad and keyboard (that includes all laptops) in their eagerness to cater for the touchscreen device. In some ways this has done some good, causing interfaces to be cleaned up a little, yet at the same time it has seemed a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, actively hampering desktop functionality in order to bridge touchpad and desktop interfaces. Surely it would be such a stretch of the imagination to see that desktop and touchpad interfaces could share visual cues and references, yet actually run on different frameworks?
But this raises another question too, which the linked article touches on.
Time was the only non-nerd friendly OSs were from either Microsoft or Apple. I had a friend in IT who ran OS2 Warp for a while, but Wil was a little unusual. However in the last couple of years many very viable open source alternatives have sprung up, much thanks though not entirely to the Ubuntu initiative, and now it's possible to download gratis an OS that will work every bit as well as Windows or OSX, in some cases without even much of a learning curve. For many users though, the limitation was that games were hit & miss - mostly miss - even if they could work under emulation software. However if Valve were to start porting their games to run native in Linux (whichever flavour, probably Ubuntu) then the last compelling reason everyone HAD to have windows would be removed.
So what if other OSs became viable for home computers?
Well, for one thing it would not change corporate computing, at least not for a long time, since there was both a financial and personnel investment in what ever systems were presently in use. At the moment many firms don't even plan to move from Windows XP and IE 6, let alone change to some new-fangled open source, incmpatible software that does everything differently. But in homes I could very much imagine teenage boys asking their parents if they could have a new higher-spec. computer without Windows (because it would be cheaper) and then run the paid for games on a (free, downloaded) OS that they had installed. One could imagine OSs being optimised for game play too, since Linux is mostly a hobbyist-driven way of computing, running games faster under lighter weight environments or even (as Mechwarrior II used to be) from a command line.
What would this do for Microsoft and Apple? Well Apple buyers would be little affected, because the Apple market isn't driven by cost or particularly game playing, and the majority of households don't use Apple devices for desktop computing. But I could see that Microsoft might well lose significant market share, increasingly so as they tried to build walls around their garden like Apple has. Their devices have always been masterpieces of poor design, even when they have been functionally excellent. It will be interesting to see whether the role they played with Apple were reversed, and the 'fruity firm' have to come in and 'assist' them the way Microsoft did Apple a couple of decades ago.