[citation][nom]jabliese[/nom]Yeah, without MS we might be running Gnome or KDE on top of DR-DOS, with real security at the OS level. And yeah, the world would suck if we had to rely on OpenGL for gaming. Take 2 history lessons and call me in the morning. It is closer to the truth to say that without Apple and other tech companies actually innovating, we would be stuck running Windows 3.1. Obviously not true, but closer than your spew.And, to bring your sad little topic closer to what the article discussed, we all know how the world panics when Bing is down. As in, "Oh noes, the internet is down!" "Huh?" "I can't access Google!"[/citation]
KDE does a pretty good job of emulating the Windows 95 look & feel. It's branched out a bit nowadays but KDE 3 and before, it was pretty close, and worked well for those jumping from Windows to Linux.
You do know that the Windows team is constantly working. They're already working on Windows 8 and 7 just came out. Microsoft loves pushing out new OSes. They wouldn't give up the opportunity to sell us more software, so why would they want us to continue using Windows 3.1? They do push lots of new technology too, and innovate. They were the first to implement native touchscreen and handwriting recognition into a consumer operating system (at the time, it was basically what you could only otherwise get in Windows and Palm PDAs. Now they're the first with multitouch built in. In fact, Microsoft Surface has been around at least as long as the iPhone has (Apple's first multitouch device) so saying that Microsoft isn't at the front of innovation is false.
That, and DirectX is so popular because it's surpassed OpenGL. Years ago, in the DirectX 5 and earlier days, OpenGL was much better. DirectX was hard to code for and didn't have much of an attractive feature set. Now we have DirectX 11 with native tesselation support, compute shaders, and other things that OpenGL has been promising for years but fails to deliver on. The reason DirectX is a popular API for games these days is simply because right now, it's better than OpenGL.
We cannot know to what extent each company has influenced each other (aside from tracing money trails). Fact is that Apple couldn't survive without Microsoft, and Microsoft wouldn't be what it is today without Apple. Looking at the history of the development of the OS GUI, Microsoft clearly took some hints from Linux with the new command prompts, but Linux and Mac have clearly taken influence from Microsoft (the easiest way to tell is look at the window layout and concept of the start button/applications menu and taskbar; Mac took the close/max&restore/minimize buttons from Windows 9x when they introduced OS X, as well as the concept of minimizing programs to a taskbar, which greatly improved window management. Without Windows, heck, we'd probably still be using CDE or the like. Except for the more obscure X window managers, most emulate a lot of the look and feel first introduced in Windows 95.
There's a lot of give and take, but all companies have provided value, and it's fallacious to just throw Microsoft out the window because "durr, they're a stoopid money grabbing corporation". Popularity and monetary success usually indicates that they did something right. It doesn't mean they do everything right, but they do enough.
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