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Let's say that for whatever reason, Microsoft failed to achieve dominance of the home computer OS market. What would the state of computer gaming be like? Would it be as successful without the dominance of Windows? More so? Less so?

Far less so. Split platforms would lead to developers wasting more time being compatible with all the systems, witness the 'dozens of drivers' when there was no clear 3D standard.

DirectX atleast cleared that up.

MS-DOS dies, leaving the market to Atari and Commodore 64. Commodore 64 crushes Atari. GEOS takes over.

Commodore 64 games had superior sound and graphics to their IBM-PC counterparts. So the game market would not die, but I am not sure about DirectX. Maybe something else would pop up later, maybe not. DirectX came far after MS-DOS became the dominant operating system so I'm not sure if bringing it up is fair.

Given the degree of influence Microsoft has had on the entire home computer industry, it's absense is going to have equally large consequences. I would have thought there would be a good chance for OpenGL to become the defacto 3D standard for real-time 3D rendering, however I am unsure if we would be seeing quite the cutting edge graphics from OpenGL as we are from the newest iterations of DirectX.

It's possible we might have seen stagnation on the part of OpenGL or we might have seen renewed vigor as a result of it becoming cutting edge, or some totally random new contender might have risen up to take DirectX's place.

I can't really envision how that would have happened, so let's just create an alt-history scenario where it might have been the case: suppose IBM had paid attention to the home user market with OS/2 rather than ignoring it, thus making OS/2 far more successful and neutering the growth of Windows.

Darth Wong wrote:I can't really envision how that would have happened, so let's just create an alt-history scenario where it might have been the case: suppose IBM had paid attention to the home user market with OS/2 rather than ignoring it, thus making OS/2 far more successful and neutering the growth of Windows.

Can we assume that the clone market remained strong? That will be the primary factor driving down costs, especially if IBM works with the PC clonemakers to ensure OS/2 works (rather than trying to keep a monopoly with the PS/2 + MCA platform).

OTOH, even when IBM pays attention, I'm not sure if they'll do it "right" - it took Microsoft not a few tries to standardize things. WinG was an abject failure and it also took several revisions of DirectX to become useful. OS/2 will need to have similarly radical changes to support games well.

Slightly off-topic, we might see Microsoft instead simply dominating the office-suite market instead of both that and the OS market. Apple might get into some serious trouble as well if IBM starts paying attention to ease-of-use as OS/2 was a rather more sophisticated OS than classic MacOS.

Darth Wong wrote:I can't really envision how that would have happened, so let's just create an alt-history scenario where it might have been the case: suppose IBM had paid attention to the home user market with OS/2 rather than ignoring it, thus making OS/2 far more successful and neutering the growth of Windows.

Microsoft & IBM developed OS/2 together. Microsoft only ditched OS/2 development after it was clear Windows was a winner and they still retained the rights to develop the OS/2 v3 line where IBM maintained v1.x & v2(I guess they ditched that at some point after MS gave IBM the finger).

Infact, OS/2 v3.0 (a major overhaul of OS/2 v2.0) ended up being coming into the now Windows NT line at Microsoft and IBM developing it's own fork (under the OS/2 name).

phongn wrote:Apple might get into some serious trouble as well if IBM starts paying attention to ease-of-use as OS/2 was a rather more sophisticated OS than classic MacOS.

Win9x was a more sophisticated OS than classic MacOS. And Microsoft did outsell copies of Win9x compared to MacOS.

Well, it would probably have been harder for some propertary standards like Glide to die, and, if you eliminate directx and don't replace it with something equally dominating you might end up with different properaty standards from nvidia and ati, or among different operating systems, as i don't see them all sticking to pure OpenGL.

Discussing this is difficult. Not to mention, it will interesting if the Mac was ever marketed as a gaming machine, compared to the present situation.

With anyluck I would be using an Amiga 9000, instead of a mac.