And that brings us to Ed's point: "This of course ignores the fact that the graphics interface Microsoft was telling its competitors to use was OS/2, long after it had committed to Windows."

But if you give Gates the benefit of the doubt, what he actually seems to be referring to was not OS/2, but the original Apple Mac OS. There's this famous memo that Bill Gates wrote in 1985 to Bill Sculley at Apple, suggesting that they open up the OS to other OEMs to make it an industry standard. Apple, of course, decided to stick with its "One true computer company to rule them all" paradigm, and the rest is history.

In 1985, Windows 1.0 was floundering (came out a year late -- so what else is new), and Microsoft was really ramping up its Mac development efforts. Remember that Word and Excel were originally Mac products, and didn't get ported to Windows until after Windows 2.0. Bill Gates is right -- history could've been totally different.

If Apple had listened to him back in 1985, then Microsoft would be a pure-applications company today, with negligible OS market share. And Apple would have 95% of the market for OSes, with negligible hardware sales. Motorola would rule the roost with all the PowerPC Mac clones, and Intel would be a niche chip company. And Slashdotters would be saying things like "Apple suxx0r! Leopard sucks compared to Linux!" because it'd be crashing all the time as it attempted to cope with hundreds of OEMs and gazillions of hardware conflicts and poor drivers. Makes you think about these pivotal moments in history, doesn't it?