If IBM, and not Microsoft, had controlled MS-DOS, Windows, and so on, the computing world would now be a different environment.
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iMHO probably a much worse world. Microsoft might have been the "evil empire" but ibm was the original.
There was no Resource Workshop for designing dialog boxes visually. You had to write all the statements in a text editor, and wouldn't see the appearance until compiling and running the program. This slowed down development.
While debugging, I recall trying to step into the GUI part of the application code. This locked up the computer so bad we had to re-install OS/2, a tedious process requiring 22 diskettes.
The IBM documentation was so inscrutable that even for ver. 2 of OS/2, we had to refer to Microsoft's ver. 1 manuals. IBM's support gave an interesting insight into OS/2's downfall. My client had an expensive OS/2 support contract with IBM. The client's contacts were two guys in the PC support section. When I required technical support to answer some obscure and specialized questions about OS/2, it didn't make sense to get the client guys involved, even though they were supposed to be the only official go-between with IBM. So I called IBM with the client's authorization, and impersonated one of the support techs. After a few calls I slipped and used my name. The IBM guy was livid and tore a strip of me, saying that as an independent contractor, I had no business blah blah. Here I was just trying to get a customer up & running.
Authors of their own misfortune.
IBM also tried their luck to have a Smalltalk like IDE for C++, but it was too heavy for the typical hardware configurations on those days.
It was the fourth version of Visual Age for C++ OS/2.
It's interesting to compare this to another article linked here about the downfall of the TI home computers. Apparently TI understood the value of software to the point where they threatened to sue unlicensed software vendors, which pretty much guaranteed that those vendors chose to write software for other platforms. Perhaps they would have had a better chance if they had opened up their platform?
Had IBM done that, we would be in a similar position regarding PCs.
On the other hand, maybe thanks to that single event, Atari ST or Amiga variants would still exist.
However, the industry seems to be turning back to those days.
Even FOSS won't help here, because each OEM just packages their own OS and SDK flavour and locks down the hardware.
Apple (Mac) was never open enough.
None of the UNIX companies would have ever made anything cheap enough to hit the mass-market until after Windows 95 came out.
Without Microsoft we could have ended up with some weird IBM world running OS/2. They might have even switched to Motorola eventually.
But Microsoft and Compaq made things open and cheap enough to get us to where we are today.
None of them would get a piece big enough of the pie.
The PC only happened due to the way OEM market was created, originating a race to the bottom regarding computer components.
My other point being that given the current state of computer market with iDevices, Android, Chromebooks, IoT, hybrid tablets (aka netbooks), TVs, Watches,..., those OEMs are now trying to turn the remaining of the market into that vision.
So besides their proprietary OSes, we get customised versions of their own forks from open source OSes (e.g. Huawei Linux, LG BSD, put your flavour here) in locked down hardware like those computer systems with their OSes written in ROMs.
Microsoft is still here, but the day they actually do loose the PC market, don't expect the "Year of Linux/BSD" to happen.
In this alternative world, only IBM would be producing PCs just like Atari and Comodore produced their own products, there wouldn't be OEMs driving costs down and creating comodoty computers.
Having the ability to temporarily suspend protected mode while running older software allowed a smoother transition on the x86 path.