If the IBM PC hardware (and PC/MS-DOS) was locked down, it would have lost its advantage and would have had equal footing with the alternatives, the Apple Macin

If the IBM PC hardware (and PC/MS-DOS) was locked down, it would have lost its advantage and would have had equal footing with the alternatives, the Apple Macintosh, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga and the Acorn Archimedes, all of which were also locked down. CP/M (or MP/M) and GEM could run on hardware that wasn't locked down so perhaps some 16-bit version of that could have replaced the 8-bit versions of CP/M and that hardware could have become an open standard.