This nightmarish scenario for Microsoft actually happened. This is Android OS.
What Microsoft avoided was this happening in PCs.
What Microsoft avoided was this happening in PCs.
That's kind of missing the point. What you don't see is all the areas where MS could have 'won' had the world not moved in a more platform agnostic direction. Remember all of the little miniature laptops in the 90s? Practically all of them ran some version of windows even if it was laughably impractical for such a device. MS completely missed the 'mobile' train and could have dominated if they were paying attention.
Remember all of the enterprise systems running some version of windows server? Imagine a world where java didn't exist and the .net runtime was dominant. That's a cash cow without end.
As it is, MS missed out on both mobile and most of the enterprise infra pie. If they had managed to capture both they'd be an absolute behemoth.
In the 90s? Laptops barely existed, definitely not "little minature" ones. I remember e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC launched in 2007, and many follow-ons after that.
Eight years earlier, in 1983, the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 [2] was remarkable: 4 line x 40 char display, 8kB RAM, powered by 4 AA batteries, all for $799.
Incidentally, the May 1983 issue of Byte magazine in [2] was themed "The Electronic Office" and is full of ads for Apple, Microsoft and IBM products, amongst others. Back then, a 20MB hard drive was $3300, equivalent to $9000 in today's money.
[1] http://hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=202
[2] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-05/page/n15/m...
In 1999, I believed it was impossible for anyone to use anything that was not MSN messenger.
MSN was HUGE.
Today, it is a lot less nightmarish.