Standardizing on an established shared standard was never motivating for Microsoft. Early they profited by ensuring backwards compatibility for ridiculous perio

Standardizing on an established shared standard was never motivating for Microsoft. Early they profited by ensuring backwards compatibility for ridiculous periods of time. That was their pitch to customers. Buy your software and it will likely still work in 10 years. Even when shifting from dos pre NT windows you had an OS that allowed programs that thought they had sole control of the machine to continue to run by using some fairly sophisticated techniques and features introduced with the 386. Their model: get users, keep users, get recurring profit was their model. Standardizing on anything didn't really matter unless a significant user base wanted it. And not having open or shared standards was viewed as a feature to drive down competition. ATT started out UNIX with their hands tied. Hence BSD was birthed and then later ATT tried to put the genie back in the bottle. But it the economics were different. Hardware costs were the main driver. The OS was a given. Starting over sounds great. But if history repeats itself, which it usually does, then we are far more likely to see something take (copy) ideas from current OSes and evolve them rather than a radical sea change where we star over. Also now that Microsoft is shifting (shifted?) to a business model where selling OSws isn't really profitable will their behavior change?