What if Apple and Microsoft worked together? Curiosity.

This is mainly an imagination thread about what would happen if Apple and Microsoft became best buddies and morphed Windows and OS X together. Wouldn't that be the best for all consumers!? It would be like a utopia for anyone who uses a computer... basically it helps the entire world?

I love the start menu and the toolbar of Windows 7 and I love the multitouch gestures (perfect scrolling, Dashboard, Mission Control, and Launchpad). There would be zero compatibility problems because there is now one unified popular (and monopoly) operating system. I would be able to use Photobooth!!! Microsoft lacks so much default software while OS X comes with iLife.

This is just a fun thread of happiness and bunnies. What would you think would happen?

 

pile of antitrust suits and monopoly investigations like what happened in the mid 90' when MS was faced with bailing out Apple or taking them over and spinning off some divisions. Regulators etc would not allow the 2 dominant consumer O/S's to go fully monopolistic, the competition is good for consumers.


fyi iLife is a separate app to OS-X, MS equivalent except garage band is a free download called Windows Live Essentials including messenger etc.

 

I think he wants you to forget about the monopolism going on here but rather look at the "bigger picture" as to what kind of laptops they would mass produce.

 

no... because everyone has their own likes and dislikes.

The only thing Windows has that OSX can benefit from is that tons of companies make software for it.

and for the record... I find the Start Menu and Toolbar, that you love so much, in Windows 7 horrible.

 

I like the window snapping feature of Win 7 and use it quite a bit on my widescreen displays. It is nice being able to easily just drag a couple of windows to have them sitting side-by-side. I know there are 3rd party tools for OS X that can do this but it is nice that MS implemented that as a built-in feature for Win 7. There are some other good things that Win 7 has accomplished.

Neither OS platform is perfect and, if the two would join together, you would probably have something where MS's Windows division joined with Apple's OS X group while Apple continued to manufacture the hardware. That is just in looking at computers and not DAPs, smartphones, or software.

In the end it would definitely do more harm than good. Both companies are set in their ways, neither would be willing to budge meaning that end products would be a series of compromises, and that would knock out competition from nearly everyone (especially since Apple would not let other companies pickup an OS it helped develop so you wouldn't see Windows OS X running on a Samsung, HP, Dell, etc.) making both companies lazy.

Competition breeds ingenuity from both MS and Apple. Without that, we would keep using the same thing over a long time. Their major OS would really only receive small updates over the years instead of them coming out with what they have now.

 

This is like saying the heavens will open with goldy 3G if T-mobile and AT&T merged together as planned. There is a reason that communism failed and capitalism survived.

 

uh oh.. don't tell the Occupy people that...

 

It would be terrible. Fierce competition is the ONLY way to ensure quality products for consumers.

 

Lazy you know whats can all jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Amen to that.

 

Of course, I need my own TARP !

 

Let's try to get this derailed thread back on track and avoid any purely-political content that will get the topic locked.

I don't think the OP was thinking along the lines of the corporations merging into one entity, rather that they somehow magically collaborated to combine the strengths of both their operating systems into one fairytale OS.

 

I think it would be nuts if MS and Apple worked together.

You'd have Office on OS X and OS X would talk natively to Exchange, and you know there is no way either of those things will ever happen.

 

That already exists....

 

It could and may happen one day! After all... Microsoft mainly makes software (Apart from the other stuff which negates my comment. Dammit)

 

It couldn't happen, because the strengths of the two OSes come in large part from an inherent difference. OSX is designed to be part of a closed ecosystem: one set of hardware it's supposed to run on, one set of drivers it's supposed to work with, and increasingly, one source for software that will be installed on it (the App Store). This closed system and lack of versatility allows it to be programmed to be extremely stable and refined.

Windows, on the other hand, is made to be versatile. It's supposed to run on hundreds of different machines with all sorts of hardware and drivers from a dozen different manufacturers. It's supposed to interact with all sorts of software from all over the world. But that in turn creates more "holes" in how it's programmed, which, particularly in the hands of the inexperienced, can make it less stable or at least less refined.

You can't combine an open and closed OS into one super-OS, because they're different for a reason.

And it doesn't matter whether we're talking about combining the companies, or the companies just working together on a super-OS. Either way, that's the death of improvement after that. It was people like me jumping from Vista to Leopard that made Microsoft sweat bullets and actually turn out a good product with Win 7. It's people like me jumping back from OSX to Win 7 because the "Apple tax" is not currently worth it to us that will make Apple redouble its efforts with its next-gen OS and hardware. The arms race between two different OS lines, each trying to capture "swing voters" like me, is what helps keep both OS lines great.