@Vlad321
Sorry, but most of what you said about UIs, OS costs, Macs, the story of Internet, coding standards is simply false.
- Windows had the worst WIMP UI of its time: Mac OS classic had a lot of technical problems with its architecture, but the UI was where it shone. AmigaOS, OS/2, BeOS were all better interfaces than Windows in the 90s.
- Windows was not cheaper than the alternative OSs that were also licensed for any PC. The IBM OS/2 could even run windows application and in its Warp incarnations had a much better foundation than any non-NT-based Windows ever had.
- Apple chose to go Intel because it offered a better CPU roadmap than the Power architecture, but coding for the Mac didn't change at all. Basically all it took was recompiling the sources. It did not make coding for the Mac any more "viable" than when it was on the Power architecture.
- Why would Windows be the saviour from an expensive Apple monopoly? The alternative is not between a MS monopoly and an Apple one. Ever heard of Linux or BeOS? Any monopoly will stifle real innovation: even when it promotes standards, it places the control of those standards into the hands of a single entity. Then that entity will let that standard go stale or force update cycles depending on its commercial needs. Not all standards are born equal: whatusers really gain from are open standards, if they are smartly designed and updated.
- Internet was not "a mess", it was simply in its infancy. There was no more mess than today's technologies (Web pages, eMail, RSS, FTP, newsgroups, Flash...)
- Actually MS have held back most interesting web technologies for all they could because they didn't want the spotlight to move from local to web development, where they can't control the environment. They have been forced into having a rich web mail client and a web office infrastructure, but they have been dragged kicking and screaming by the like of Google.
The advances in Internet happened despite MS and IE, not thanks to them. Whatever MS could not control and "standardize" in their own way actually evolved at a blistering pace. Just look at Apache vs IIS, at Postgres and MySQL vs MS SQL Server, at Gmail and Google Maps and all the Google AJAX services, at PHP vs ASP... they are the backbone of the small-medium sites and services that make the Internet that we know.
I suggest you read a bit about all these subjects. I suspect that you have a restricted point of view because you haven't had a wide enough first-hand experience both in timespan and variety of tools.
