Sometimes I like to imagine a world where Commodore and Atari saw the writing on the wall. Instead of competing each other to death, while the IBM PC open architecture took off, they collaborate to create a joint open architecture of their own.
How different might the IT world look today if we had had a deluge of Amiga/ST clones.
I wish Commodore had had a quarter of Apple's marketing skills. More powerful, cheaper hardware with a significantly more capable and extensible OS could have made the Mac a footnote if executed properly and would have supplied some interesting competitive pressure to the wider market.
Not sure. While the ST was an awesome home computer when released in the mid eighties, there was little, if anything truly innovative about it. It's rather true to its marketing slogan "power without the prize". W/o competition between Atari and Commodore, prizes would surely be higher, but then, what would be left?
I think about that as well although I like to imagine that both Atari and Commodore survived as did BeOS, RadioShack/Tandy, OS/2, and all the machines I've only heard about but never used (esp. the European machines).
Although I suspect that even if all that stuff survived well into the internet era, the rise of web-based UIs would have lost everything interesting about each platform and rounded every corner to deliver the boring, ugly cross-platform software that is so popular today.
I think only Evernote did a good job of cross-platform where they wrote a platform specific UI layer onto a common foundation that did all the work and communicated with the servers. Even that didn't last because eventually they also bought into Electron which is basically the gray goo of software.
How different might the IT world look today if we had had a deluge of Amiga/ST clones.