From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear: Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer pr

From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear: Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to. Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work. Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.