You do realize that 3 is actually a direct result of 2: people were sick and tired of dozens of different and incompatible types of computer and OS, so they pushed for a single standard. Intel and Microsoft just happened to suck less than anyone else so they became it.
Actually, I grew up during that time myself, and saw everything unfold first hand. Intel and Microsoft were world-renowned for their total suckage -- so much so that Microsoft had to resort to:
(1)
four major (and somewhat mutually incompatible) revisions of Windows before they got something
usable (Windows 1, Windows 2, Windows 2/386, and Windows 3.0 were all pretty much the laughing stock of the industry at the time),
(2) contractual agreements with PC vendors that guaranteed fiscal income to Microsoft
even when Windows was not desired by a customer, thus providing financial motivation to pre-equip PCs with Windows against customer will (OS/2 was kicking its ass at the time),
(3) a litany of corporate technology purchases which ensured competing OSes lacked appealing applications. Bars & Pipes for the AmigaOS platform comes readily to mind, and of course, and,
(4) software embedded in Microsoft's code which actively sought out competitor's software and refused to work with them (e.g., Windows 3.1 bootstrap code which sought out DR-DOS code signatures, and failed the boot process when found).
In
every case, Microsoft has been shown to manipulate the market. Their hegemony has not been earned, it was strong-armed.
Please don't insult the hundreds of millions of doctors, architects, etc who don't want to have to learn how to use their computer all over again
Honestly, they didn't have a problem before, and they still won't have a problem today. I wrote software for several platforms back then, and frankly, customers just didn't give a $#!+ which platform the code ran on, and were quite willing to work with multiple systems. If the computer had a keyboard, a mouse, and a graphical interface, they were just peachy keen.
The superficial differences between GEM, AmigaOS, Windows, and MacOS are so small that it has not
one bit affected the productivity of our industrial or medical sectors. In fact, one could argue that this era was our
most productive in terms of economic output. Amigas found home in nuclear reactors and movie studios alike for their real-time capabilities, PCs on the shop floor for its ISA bus, and Macintoshes in the publishing industry. These systems all got along, thanks to established communications standards at the time, ranging from RS-432-based interconnects to 10-base-2 Ethernet.
You speak of hundreds of millions of people crying out in pain as though they felt the demolition of Alderan through the force. Having reviewed the technical literature available at the time, I don't seem to recall this ever being mentioned with sufficient frequency to justify your claims. In fact, the only time I
ever heard any complaint from one of my customers was when dealing with a
single platform: interoperability between Novell versus LANTastic, for example, primarily because neither Commodore nor Atari
ever had a strong impact on the PC industry
what-so-ever. At the time, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or Microsoft.
Knowing that the over 90% of the IT infrastructure at the time was IBM or compatible, all running primarily MS-DOS-based systems, I really find it utterly disingenuous for you to call me out on this matter, using platform diversity as an excuse.
Furthermore,
none of this is relevant anyway -- Windows, Linux, BSD, QNX, and numerous other OSes have POSIX APIs now. It is possible to develop software, even in C, which runs on a wide diversity of OSes thanks to POSIX and similar API standards. Even ignoring those, you also have widget libraries like wxWindows which allows you to support native GUI interfaces on whichever environment wxWindows has been ported to. So, even if this weren't possible 20 years ago,
it is possible today, and I find the business case for
not using such toolkits, frankly, quite unconvincing.