A world without Apple Inc?

Now if you think about it, how would the world be without Apple. Until now it has been Apple's iPhone, and everything else, the iPod and everything else, the iPad and everything else. Back awhile ago it was the Macintosh OS and everything else. But if you think about it, would Microsoft have started the Windows OS if they didn't have an inspiration from Apple, Would Linux be even created as the open-source giant that it is? Would Ubuntu even exist? Would any of these exist at all? The way technology works is that people aren't going to create something unless they either see a need or purpose for it, they just want to be different and do something new, or they see inspiration from another company.


 For instance with Microsoft Windows, Microsoft created it to be an alternative or a "game-changer" to the otherwise Father of OS's Mac. But when they wanted to be different or think ahead they created the Windows CE platform for mobile phones, and that was sort of a big hit. But once they created that, they took that as a platform to build up on and created Windows Mobile in 2000. When Apple saw that, they took it as an inspiration to build the smart phone behemoth the IOS (iPhone OS) platform which was put into their iPhone and highly successful iPod Touch. When Apple built the iPod in 2000, Microsoft decided to create the Zune OS from which they build the Zune MP3 player, from which Microsoft used some of that to build the Windows Phone 7 OS which is the successor to Windows Mobile. Google then decided to compete and make Android. Which is an open-source alternative to IOS.

To this date, Android has taken the market by storm simply because it has sold more Android phones than iPhones, Blackberries, or any other phone this year. But the point of saying all this is that without Apple Inc, do you think companies like Microsoft, RIM (who made the Blackberry), Nokia (the creators of Symbian), or any other company that builds operating systems for consumer electronics or businesses would exist?