I think it would be pretty hard to argue against that point of view, at least thus far. If DOS/Windows hadn't become the dominant OS someone would have, and a whole generation of engineers cut their teeth on their parents' windows PCs.

If Microsoft hadn't tried to actively kill all its competition then there's a good chance that we'd have a much better internet. Microsoft is bigger than just an operating system, they're a whole corporation.

Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now.

I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They didn't invent the operating system, there were lots of operating systems that came out in the 80's and 90's, many of which were better than Windows, that didn't have the horrible anticompetitive baggage attached to them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

There are some pretty zany alternative realities in the Multiverses I’ve visited. Xerox Parc never went under and developed computing as a much more accessible commodity. Another, Bell labs invented a whole category of analog computers that’s supplanted our universe’s digital computing era. There’s one where IBM goes directly to super computers in the 80s. While undoubtedly Microsoft did deliver for many of us, I am a hesitant to say that that was the only path. Hell, Steve Jobs existed in the background for a long while there!

DOS and Windows kept computing behind for a VERY long time, not sure what you're trying to argue here?

What’s funny is that we were some bad timing away from IBM giving the DOS money to Gary Kildall and we’d all be working with CP/M derivatives!

Gary was on a flight when IBM called up the Digital Research looking for an OS for the IBM-PC. Gary’s wife, Dorothy, wouldn’t sign an NDA without it going through Gary, and supposedly they never got negotiations back on track.

What if that alternate someone had been better than DOS/Windows and then engineers cut their teeth on that instead?

I'm not convinced of your first point. Just because something seems difficult to avoid given the current context does not mean it was the only path available.

Your second point is a little disingenuous. Yes, Microsoft and Windows have been wildly successful from a cultural adoption standpoint. But that's not the point I was trying to argue.

And how does it follow that microsoft is the good guy in a future where we did it with some other operating system? You could argue that their system was so terrible that its displacement of other options harmed us all with the same level of evidence.