In an alternate universe somewhere, « Yahoo » would dominate the search engine business, instead of Google.
In a sense, the history of consumer technology is a map of roads not taken. For all the emphasis placed on innovation and disruption in tech corporation culture, many of the digital realm’s « new ideas » only happened because of shortsighted decisions by dominant leading companies. As Business Insider rightly reports, the first major graphical operating system wasn’t Windows or Apple OS; it was Xerox Star. It was only after Xerox failed to capitalize, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both remixed its ideas and poached a few Xerox engineers, that Windows and Apple OS were born. IBM dominated the computer hardware industry until it dismissed personal computers as toys. By the time the company changed direction, Apple had already changed the world with the Apple II.
All that is history, however. Personal computing is now a diverse marketplace with multiple competing manufacturers. Windows and Apple still dominate the OS market, but Chrome OS and various Linux distros have cut themselves non-negligible pieces of the pie.
