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!

I wish things had gone differently too, but a couple of nitpicks:

1.) It's already a miracle Xerox PARC escaped their parent company's management for as long as they did.

3.) IBM was playing catch-up on the supercomputer front since the CDC 6400 in 1964. Arguably, they did finally catch up in the mid-late 80's with the 3090.

AT&T sold Unix machines (actually a rebadged Olivetti for the hardware) and Microsoft has Xenix when windows wasn't a thing.

So many weird paths we could have gone down it's almost strange Microsoft won.

Yeah, I'm absolutely not saying it was the only path. It's just the path that happened. If not MS maybe it would have been Unix and something else. Either way most everyone today uses UX based on Xerox Parc's which was generously borrowed by, at this point, pretty much everyone.