It's always hard to predict how things would have turned out given various alternate possibilities. The web could have been killed, or thrived anyway.
Perhaps a locked-down Microsoft store would have had all kinds of ancillary benefits such as freeing up all the money spent padding their bottom line and dealing with externalities (malware cleanup, etc) and redirecting it towards having competitive open-source/GPL products for regular users. Perhaps all the forgotten OSes that died out due to Microsoft's dominant position would have found their fanbases and survived (OS/2 Warp, AmigaOS, BeOS, etc.) and the web would have avoided the IE6 problem that was due to Microsoft's prevalence.
Microsoft may have brought computing to the masses in the 90's due to Windows prevalence in that era, but assuming the web wouldn't have happened without them is a bit much.
Perhaps a locked-down Microsoft store would have had all kinds of ancillary benefits such as freeing up all the money spent padding their bottom line and dealing with externalities (malware cleanup, etc) and redirecting it towards having competitive open-source/GPL products for regular users. Perhaps all the forgotten OSes that died out due to Microsoft's dominant position would have found their fanbases and survived (OS/2 Warp, AmigaOS, BeOS, etc.) and the web would have avoided the IE6 problem that was due to Microsoft's prevalence.
Microsoft may have brought computing to the masses in the 90's due to Windows prevalence in that era, but assuming the web wouldn't have happened without them is a bit much.