A world without Windows

[daynah]

Microsoft windows, silly.

What if one day (now work with me, this is very much "never going to happen") some judge or something goes, "Dude, microsoft, you are messed up, stop doing business! I order you to stop everything! You must stop selling windows and stop supporting windows. In fact, windows itself is illegal because it is anti-american and weakens our nation and anyone who uses it is anti-american. No one is allowed to offer support for or use Windows. Microsoft, you are not allowed to sell any of your other products as you, again, are no longer a company, but your other products do not undermine the nation's security so they still can be used."

Yeah, I know, my writing is awful. I can't set up scenes worth a

But what if that happened?

I think it would be very Y2K like. Everybody freakin' out and stocking up. You know, 'cause people are dumb and think that all computers wont work and computers are evil. Ithink a lot of people would use windows anyway. I don't think people would learn linux fast enough. I think the stock market would go way down.

What do you think would happen if windows, such a vital part of our system, just dissapeared?

[Brunellus]

if it were due to a sudden, major exploit hitting all networked Windows machines? it'd plunge us right back to 1989: computers everywhere, but not networked.

[justin whitaker]

if it were due to a sudden, major exploit hitting all networked Windows machines? it'd plunge us right back to 1989: computers everywhere, but not networked.

Except for BSD, Solaris, and Linux machines.

[Rinzwind]

Software you have to pay for will always loose if there's an alternative that costs nothing and that can do the same. It just takes time to convince anyone.

I don't think alot will change: people will stick to the Windows they are working with and when the time is really there to switch to another OS they will.
It's not that the software will stop working when MS is gone.

[Brunellus]

Except for BSD, Solaris, and Linux machines.

which is how it was back in the day. The consequences would be pretty profound.

[justin whitaker]

which is how it was back in the day. The consequences would be pretty profound.

I don't think it would be that bad. How many of the major web and e commerce sites run BSD? I would be a major step back, but I do not think that it will be a plunge back to the dark ages of bulletin boards and baud rate modems. People are alot more savvy now.

[hotbrainz]

the four horsemen of Apocalypse will then bring peace and stabilty in the world - Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu , Edubuntu

[syrleb]

i would laugh my *** of at bill gates, then come on ubuntu and play frozen bubble..

[Brunellus]

I don't think it would be that bad. How many of the major web and e commerce sites run BSD? I would be a major step back, but I do not think that it will be a plunge back to the dark ages of bulletin boards and baud rate modems. People are alot more savvy now.

I don't think the mass of users are any more savvy than they were back in the day. The servers might still be up, but there'd be nobody to surf to them: all the windows hosts are down. ISPs who drank the Windows Kool-Aid would be knocked out, ditto educational institutions (my grad school was an all-Windows shop, from the library computers through the Exchange server).

[Sluipvoet]

A world without Windows...
That would be very good news for Apple.

other OS(Linux, BSD,...) would remain very small.