Who would have emerged as the leader? What would the smartphone market look like? Music? Education? Computers? Corporate governance?
So here's an alternative history: 1997,
Sony buys the "Macintosh/Mac" trademarks at the bankruptcy sale, and few years thereafter, their Vaio range of high-end laptops and SFF systems get rebranded as Macs although they're x86 machines running Sony's customised version of Windows with a few Mac-like flourishes and
maybe a rather slow MacOS Classic emulator. Then, a certain S. Jobs has an idea about how the newly emerging MP3 players could be improved and turned into the Next Big Thing and chooses Sony as the obvious target for his pitch... In 2004, Sony launch the new "MacWalkman" and use their position in the music biz to tie it to the "Mac Tunes" music service. A few years later, they integrate this into the new "PhoneMan"... 2016 rolls round and the world looks much like it does today, except the DRM is much worse and Tim Cook is CEO of the hugely successful "Apple Leather Goods" retail empire, having made a fortune selling bands for Sony WalkWatches.
(Historical note: Even in '97 with its desktop line going down the toilet, PowerBook hardware was nice. Sony are virtually out of the game today but, at the time, nothing said "I wanted a PowerBook but the boss said I had to have a PC" like a Sony Vaio. Of course, Sony and Apple collaborated on the original Powerbook which defined the design of the modern laptop. MacOS 9 was dying anyway - OS X owes more to Jobs' NeXTStep than it does to classic MacOS. )
More realistic overall prediction: probably on the same trajectory, but some years behind where we are now, and with MS in a much stronger monopoly position. Apple never pulled brand new ideas out of the raw firmament, but they were very, very good at spotting upcoming ideas, refining them and turning them into must-have mass market products.
Of far greater importance is how Apple revolutionised the music industry
++this. Bear in mind that a major
raison d'etre for the iPhone must have been as an iTunes platform (the non-Music App market was a bit serendipitous, though).
Even if they declared bankruptcy it doesn't always mean a company goes out of business.
See whimsy above. However, a breakup with some large PC maker buying the trademarks and MS buying the other IP is feasible.
MS was so hung up on the design and function of WinCE that they would have continued down the same path, i.e., not changing WinCE
...and there would have been a market for that, with MS & Blackberry fighting it out for the corporate market, probably ending with MS doing something anticompetitive to make WinCE the only option for corporate email.
I suspect that the success of the iMac, and later the iPhone and iPad did a lot to weaken the MS monopoly on Windows, Internet Explorer and Office. iMacs and iPhones were sexy, and suddenly executives who had been presiding over MS-only shops wanted to be able to read their email and open documents. The iPad did a lot to persuade people that there was life without Office.
Folks would still be using Windows XP today……
It could be worse. The most serious problem with Win XP isn't Win XP itself, its all the legacy software (and bad developer habits) left over from the DOS days that meant everything had to run with admin privileges.
Most folks many, but not me. I would be using AmigaOS or
BeOS.
No you wouldn't. You'd have been beaten into submission because - without huge numbers of Macs and iDevices creating a demand for device-independence - every website would require Internet Explorer, every file would need MS Office or Genuine Adobe Acrobat to open and every peripheral on the market would depend on proprietary drivers only available for Windows.
